Years ago, while I was a chiropractor, I studied nutrition from the cutting edge research being conducted largely at universities and hospitals in Europe. America had yet to place any emphasis on the importance of nutrition.

Medical physicians and leading “authorities” in the US scoffed at the notion that your diet could affect your well being. Those that had some belief in the importance of nutrition often still hadn’t the slightest notion of what constituted a healthy diet.

Back in those days, we were talking about the importance of eating lots of vegetables, lean meat, essential oils from fish and flax seed, drinking lots of water, and leaning more heavily on whole grains than white flour; but even minimizing the consumption of any dense carbs.

Sound familiar? That’s probably what your doctor and every major health magazine is saying now. Not then! At first, there was nothing. Then, there was the low fat craze. Then the high protein craze. Then the “eat LOTS of grains” phase.

Anyway, the point is that I was part of a community which knew thirty years ago what was common knowledge now. We knew it because we followed the research and didn’t wait for the FDA to tell us we were right. We knew it because we used the principles on our patients and they benefited. We knew it because we were open minded enough to study the truth.

Now that it’s common knowledge, do those of us who knew it years ago get any credit? No. In fact, the authorities simply frame this as a new discovery that they’ve made.

Now let’s look at mindfulness. Although there’s been a growing body of evidence for the value of mindfulness and meditation developing over the last couple millenia, we here in the smart, research based western world have either ignored or denigrated it for decades.

When I first decided to make mindfulness the topic of my presentations ten years ago, I was told by almost every major speaker in the industry that it was “too soft a topic” or that it “had no tangible benefit” or that it was too general and couldn’t be applied.

Now, we see mindfulness coming into its own. It’s front and center in the media, and researchers here in the US are proudly proclaiming that they’ve discovered the latest new thing. For those of us who have been practicing, teaching and advocating this for decades, it’s simultaneously irritating and gratifying.

It’s gratifying that something as important as mindfulness has finally come into its own. It’s irritating because, rather than acknowledging the closed mindedness that prevented those authorities from valuing what we’ve been saying all along, they steadfastly ignore the existence of the very community that created the groundswell which ultimately led to them being forced to look at this.

OK, now that I’ve acknowledged my irritation, I have the benefit of knowing how to witness myself, accept the feelings, breath into the sensations, and let it go. I’m so grateful that I have the good fortune to have been introduced to a tool and a lifestyle that helps me move through feelings of frustration, even when that frustration is related to my connection to mindfulness!

I find it interesting that even those of us on a path of self-discovery can be entrapped by our egoic minds, often by the very things that we use to try to get free. We can grow righteous about what we know, and we can be defensive about the validity of our path. We can become spiritually materialistic, as Trungpa Rinpoche said.

We must always endeavor to witness ourselves and rise above our egoic tendency to have to be right. Even where mindfulness is concerned, we must remain humble and grateful. We must use our irritation as what Ram Dass would call grist for the mill. Every frustration, every irritation, every indignation is proof that our egoic minds have taken charge, an invitation to go back into the witnessing mind.

So, I for one, plan to cherish the process by which the status quo takes its time about embracing an obviously good idea and then ignores the source of its discovery. Because that process inherently aggravates me….and that is a welcome wake up call for me to continue doing my work!

 

I had an interesting conversation with a woman in network marketing yesterday about her aversion to “closing the sale.” Nothing new. Lots of us have the issue. But something she said made a light go on in my head. I suddenly understood why so many people fear closing, and what they’re telling themselves that’s JUST PLAIN WRONG! If you get this distinction, you’ll be on the road to the cure for your close-o-phobia…so check this out now!

Word count: 717