How to Start Over

Practicing meditation teaches you how to start over in critical moments of your life. Every moment presents an opportunity for you to notice whether you are distracted, and when you remember to do so, you can ease back into witnessing whatever is arising in consciousness with clarity. Witness your feelings as patterns of energy in your body or hear the sounds in your environment. Observe your next thoughts arise and then watch them disappear on their own.

This habit of witnessing trains your mind through a repeated effort to return to the present moment, free from the disappointment, contraction, and judgment of the past. And this return to freedom is possible in every subsequent moment.

Imagine you are having a tough conversation with a loved one or within yourself, and you observe you are distracted and feeling self-judgment. You feel annoyed or anxious. You are supposed to be connecting with the person with whom you're talking, but you say things you don't mean and interpret what you hear from the other person in ways that make you feel even worse.

But you can break this trance and negative momentum by starting over. At any point, even now, mid-conversation. Just notice self-judgment, annoyance, discomfort, and frustration as appearances. These emotions and thoughts that arise are as good as your breath or anything else you can notice in meditation because you notice them in the same space of consciousness that you notice everything else arise. And this noticing will reveal the openness, freedom, and selflessness of your conscious experience.

Truly, any negative state of mind that makes you feel you are contracting like a clenched fist is just as good as the breath or a sound if you can remember to drop back and witness what consciousness is like in that moment.

And this ability also allows you to forgive. The path to forgiveness for yourself or another person is to restart the clock in real time. And this way of thinking gives you a kind of resilience that can be surprisingly elusive otherwise.

The great news is that you have dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities each day to practice this. You might notice your next conversation with a family member or a colleague isn't going well, or you've been distracted by social media despite having work to do for the last hour, or you're trying to exercise, but you haven't been making much of an effort. The moment you notice this, just start over.

And then fully commit by relinquishing the past. Is there any real reason the next 10 minutes of this conversation can't be among the best you've had with your partner? You can actually save this conversation that's almost over by saying something useful.

The practice here is to stop buying into the story about what is happening and to connect with your experience in this moment. You can almost always do this. Just notice this present fear, reaction, judgment, doubt, or desire to be somewhere else as just another appearance in consciousness and then start over right now.