Just Be it….your best

A life well-lived is about removing obstacles and going deeper.  Simply put, it’s about ‘doing our best by being our best’.  Lasting quality and happiness come from the ground of our being, not from acquiring the good approval of others.  Yet, our culture seems to place great value to ‘best’ in relation to the defeat of others.  To the extent we can overcome another, defeat another, or somehow win at another’s expense, we place our values of excellence.  Yet, when we look deeper, it’s really a matter of ‘full presence’.  It’s about removing obstacles to meeting the present moment in full attention to the arising moment and our interconnection with it.  Within this realm of experience, we must first ‘show up’, ‘pay attention’, ‘do/be our best, and let go our expectations of outcome without abandoning our confidence and gratitude for the opportunity to participate.

Showing up means deep listening to what our heart draws us to.  It’s waking up from the cultural sleep induced from TV, spectator sports, drugs, alcohol, and other addictions that remove us from ‘presence’.  It’s about quieting the mental chatter to deepen that to which we’re drawn.  It’s about aiming to maintain attention in our actions and non-actions.  It’s about touching just past the edge of performance, deepening to our ‘best’ rather than regressing or settling for a plateau.

Our ‘best’ is not an ego driven action.  It’s entry into the field of universal energy where we fully embrace the moment’s continuous arising moment, 100% here and now, obstacles of thought and emotion removed, entering the realm of Big Hope.  Doing our best requires full attention, no multitasking, no mind wandering, and tremendous dedication of mindfulness practice.

A dedicated meditation practice is generally requisite to consistent ‘best’ performance.  It’s the training we need to fully arrive to the arising moment.  The mind wants to put us in thoughts of comparative performance, of past and future, of better or worse, beginning and ending, enough and not enough, etc.  Yet, the quality of ‘best’ transcends this to the unknown, beyond thought and the verbal.