The secret of my hard-won mindfulness? A bargain bag of beauty

I’ve found inner peace contemplating everything from my mate’s Ford Escort to the skies above. But enlightenment has come from a most unusual sourceI knew that mindfulness, like green tea and sauerkraut, would be good for me, but I always found it a struggle. It would all start promisingly enough, with the honeyed tones of the guy on the tape telling me to concentrate on nothing at all, or my breathing, or both, or something. He would then tell me to forgive myself if my mind wandered and, without self-recrimination, to merely escort my thoughts back to my breathing.That was such a sweet way of expressing it, and I would feel great peace as I reflected on the cleverness of his use of the word “escort”. I would turn the word over in my mind and remember my friend Lee’s Ford Escort XR2 and the time we drove to a pub in Chaddesley Corbett, and Jim said something funny, and one of us was sick, and so on. But then I would realise what I was doing and, without recrimination, escort this thought about an Escort back to my breathing. Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/15/the-secret-of-my-hard-won-mindfulness-a-bargain-bag-of-beauty #mindfulness #life_and_style #health_&_wellbeing #mental_health