Doing and Being - How noisy is my ego?

Doing:
     If you see someone you dislike drop a load of groceries, if you help at all it might take a while to convince yourself to do so, and you may be regretting it while doing it – lots of negative self-talk. Similarly, if you’re unskilled at performing an activity, you may feel some resistance performing it, with a lot of negative self-talk – “internal friction”. When children take part in a race in front of their parents or other adults, they sometimes try to show how much effort they’re putting into running by exaggerating bodily movements and facial expressions. Don’t we still at times put on a show of great effort for others and even ourselves, magnifying internal friction? Carrying out tasks with this attitude - when the ego (“me, myself & I”) dominates the picture - "feels like work" - unnatural, wrong, like hard labor that seems to take forever.
 
Non-doing:
      You see a loved one drop a load of groceries, immediately you help them pick up, and the whole matter is over and forgotten – effortless, timeless, completely natural and right. Similarly, if you’re highly trained and skilled to perform an activity, doing it will likely feel – effortless, timeless, completely natural and right – remember Flo-Jo running at top speed with effortless grace, face completely relaxed? In an emergency, a mother has been known to lift a car off her child. Following truly heroic acts, the “hero” is typically quite unaware that s/he’s done anything special. The sense of “me, myself & I” is minimal. The doer, and time, seem to ‘disappear’ while the action is fully embraced. This level of “non-doing” is within all of us, awaiting cultivation – our brains remain neuroplastic for life – we truly are life-long learners!

     Mindfulness training helps one to reside, with increasing stability, in non-doing ie living hypoegoically. We can intentionally sculpt our brain to rewire from egoic reactivity (brain-stem-dominance) towards progressively more appropriate harmonious civilized behavior (pre-frontal-cortex-dominance).

     “Do not confuse motion and progress.  
     A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.”                 Alfred A. Montapert

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