MBSR, The Attitude of a Beginners Mind by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Beginners Mind

is a lovely orientation to bring to the present moment.

This

moment is always fresh,

always new.

We've never been in this one before,

and yet we bring so many ideas and attitudes

and

desires to every moment

that

we can't actually allow ourselves much of the time

to see things as if for the first time.

Imagine

bringing awareness to your children with Beginners

Minds so that you actually see them

not through your lenses of ideas and opinions about

your children, but fresh—the miracle of them,

the amazing nature of them.

So,

this

is something that we we could bring to any moment.

It has the virtue of...

Sometimes we're so expert that our minds are just full of, you know,

our

expertise,

but it leaves

us

without any realm for novelty or new possibilities.

In the mind of the expert, they say, there are very few possibilities.

But in the Beginners Mind,

there are

infinite possibilities because we come to it fresh.

So, it's

kind of a discipline to try to bring Beginners Mind to every

aspect of your life and not be so stuck in our ideas and opinions about

how much we like this or don't like that or what the outcome of a particular situation

might be.

And when we come to things with this freshness,

it actually

again has tremendous transformative

qualities associated with it

and when you bring it to other people and

you're open and spacious with them and don't

insist that they be the way they were half an hour ago or two years ago or whatever it is,

they feel seen and recognized and met in a way that

they might not otherwise

experience.

That benefits

them

and it also benefits us.