attention to your breath. By practicing this skill of noticing what you’re paying attention to, you are teaching yourself to be in control of your brain, so that your brain is not in control of you.
This regular two-minute practice will gradually result in periodic moments throughout the day when you notice what you’re paying attention to and then decide if that’s what you want to pay attention to right now, or if you want to pay attention to something else. What you pay attention to matters less than how you pay attention.
This is a sideways strategy for weeding trauma out of your garden. It’s a way of simply noticing a weed and then deciding if you want to water it or not, pull it or not, fertilize it or not. The weed of trauma will gradually disappear as long as at least half the time you choose not to nurture it. And the more you choose to withdraw your protection from the trauma, the faster it will wither and die.
Mindfulness is good for everyone and everything. It is to your mind what exercise and green vegetables are to your body. If you change only one thing in your life as a result of reading this book, make it this daily two- minute practice. The practice grants the opportunity to “cultivate deep respect for emotions,” differentiating their causes from their effects and 15granting you choice over how you manage them.
origin of love Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium—and for those of you who very understandably just fell asleep, replace that with the song “The Origin of Love” from John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch—offers this parable about why humans love: Human beings used to be round, with two faces, four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals. Some of us were two men, some were two women, and some were a man and a woman. But the gods wanted to have more control over us, so Zeus cut us in half with a bolt of lightning, and from that moment, we were susceptible to a suffering that slices, as Hedwig sings it, 16“a straight line/down through the heart.”
Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half. And when two halves find each other, as Aristophanes says, “the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.”