Close to OM by Andrea Marcum

Author:Andrea Marcum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin̵s Griffin
Published: 2017-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

You will look at their responses next to yours as a remarkable window into Val-you and Truth. These insights are going to help you transform your Stuckat List into a passport to Close to OM.

10

Choices

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

In this chapter you see that pausing to respond instead of react is imperative to transform mindless into mindful so you can make choices that lead you Close to OM.

Nosara is a tiny town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. It’s a utopia for ex-pats, especially those from the U.S. and Canada. On retreat there one year the importance of taking an introspective moment before we take action became dramatically apparent.

While I slept, some in my group decided it sounded like fun to go to the bullfight at the local rodeo. There they discovered a Nosara tradition wherein people (other than experienced matadors) enter the bullring and stay there even after the agitated bull has been released. Mind you, this isn’t something the locals feel compelled to do. It’s reserved mostly for the idiot drunken tourists. So, fitting the profile, the men in my group were the first in the ring.

A widely viewed You Tube video entitled “NOSARA BULLFIGHT GRINGO LOSES” is a record of what happened next. As the angry bull careens around the ring, you can see some of my terrified idiots running for their lives, beer bottles still in hand. Then someone is violently gored by the bull … repeatedly. The rag doll of a man is dragged out of the ring seemingly lifeless. By some miracle, it was not one of my tribe, but the rumors of the gored man’s condition followed us throughout our retreat week. For about three days the reports had him dead … and then alive again. Months later we would see pictures of him on the Nosara Facebook page with enormous stitched-up scars where he’d been skewered navel to neck—a smile on his face and cocktail in hand. (In case you’re concerned, the bulls are not harmed at Nosara bullfights … just the tourists.)

In order to make mindful vs. mindless choices, we need to pause, get clear, and find viveka (discriminative discernment—aka, the antithesis of impulsive, intoxicated bozos in a bullring). Viveka lands for me viscerally if I think of it as Go to the Rodeo but Don’t Get Into the Bullring. After all, bullrings come in myriad forms: taking a breath before we fire off that F-you e-mail to our boss or coworker in the heat of the moment, down that whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s, fling ourselves into our deepest backbend without a warm-up, or head to the bar instead of the cardio barre class we meant to go to—any number of negligent knee jerks we end up regretting that could have been avoided with a little thoughtful stopover. Skillful awareness around the choices we make creates a shift from reaction to response.

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