The Gift Of Beginner's Mind

It's important to be able to trust yourself. Because if you don't, you spend so much time and waste so much precious energy questioning your every move, which you could be using instead to enjoy doing whatever you're doing (mostly thinking, if you think about it – so far better to be thinking enjoyably rather than agitating yourself for nothing).

And in respect of enjoying yourself as you go along, whatever you're doing, thinking or dealing with, as well as developing self-trust, it’s also vital to train yourself increasingly to notice and appreciate what’s around you as if you’re a small child seeing it all for the first time – practicing ‘beginner’s mind’, as they call it in Zen practice. Otherwise you'll be using all your familiar, habitual, mind-numbed descriptions of reality to filter out the gift of fully appreciating the miracle of existence.

Beginner's mind, because if you train yourself to see and experience everything fresh as if seeing and experiencing it for the first time, notwithstanding with your growing skill-set at handling things, it vitalizes your consciousness and energy, the two main composites of experience.

Decide with yourself to let every sight, smell, sound and touch fill you with childlike gleeful wonder as if you’ve never experienced anything like it – because in reality you haven’t, however much you think you may have – then trust yourself to have an unprecedented adventure full of the most magnificent surprises, this very day and/or night, and that's exactly what you'll.

Yours is the gift of the supreme freshness of beginner’s mind.