Everyday Buddhism 9 - Right Action is not REaction

When you consciously try to build mindfulness into your day, what you notice is that sometimes NOT speaking and NOT acting is the best possible action … the RIGHT Action. Our culture, we are hard-wired to respond to everything that happens to us, or around us, with either activity or speech. It is nearly impossible to deprogram ourselves from that. Even in situations where there is absolutely nothing we can do, we still impulsively try to do or say something. But sometimes non-action is the smartest action. Certainly mindfulness is. As my social media promotion for this podcast expressed for Lao Tzu: "Do you have the patience to wait...till your mud settles and the water is clear?" We don’t have to act immediately, just because we have an internal reaction. We can pause, not act, breathe. We can watch this urge to act irrationally arise, then let it go away. Sometimes that takes a few seconds, other times it means we should remove ourselves politely from the situation and let ourselves cool down before we respond.