Neither am I able to handle the captivating words nor do I intend to add more to all this conviviality. Willingness is an essential component of awareness. Making an active commitment to willingness means that you keep yourself open to new ideas, new insights, and new possibilities; it means that you are willing to learn new things about yourself and your relationships. We have to practice the willingness to become fully conscious, accept what we are learning about ourselves, and try out our new awareness-based skills. The seed of love is deeply embedded in your heart and mine.  Slow down and really pay attention to what is going on inside of you. Pay attention to the root of being alive: your breathing. Notice how your body is feeling and what is happening with your thoughts that circle around in your mind. Focus on bringing yourself into a state of being centered, calm, and alert. Be fully conscious so that all levels of your being are fully awake. Once one has gained friendship, hardship and agony will decrease and mirth and happiness will increase many times. By a good and strong root, your graces hold firm to the fabric of reality. Do not worry if it was difficult to do this mindfulness practice for the very first time. Everyone has trouble at first. It is not a normal activity for most of us living in a busy, loud, goal-driven World to do this kind of growth, without experiencing some difficulty.

As you gradually learn to be more fully conscious in many aspects of your life—your breathing, your thoughts, your body—you will become increasingly good at noticing what is going on when you are engaged in interactions with others. A rare bird upon the Earth, and very like a black swan, you will be able to observe yourself, noticing what kind of messages your mind may be giving you, or noticing how the other person responds to what you are doing or saying. By increasing your overall level of awareness through mindfulness practices, you will begin to feel much more capable of thinking and acting in new ways, in difficult areas of your life, especially in your intimate relationships. Love, the only way of travelling by which any knowledge is to be acquired. Dale had spent to long dreading the weekends. On weekdays, he was quite content with his life and his relationship. He went to work, had occasional dinners out with friends, went to his weekly computer classes, and went for long walks in the park with his dad, three times a week. He also enjoyed his phone conversations with his mother, who lived three hours away in Tennessee. Dale, and his dad, Matthew, spent almost every weekend together. They loved going for drives in the country, swimming, hiking, and watching movies. Matthew would cook, while Dale read a book, and then the two would spend hours, over dinner, talking about the material in the books, except the sex.

Dale was tortured by his discomfort with the topic of the sex that would sometimes appear in the books. Dale was celibate and his dad expected him to stay sexually shut down. Dale had never made love, as his dad told him the body is the temple of God and you cannot just share it at will. It has to be with the right person, and you are not mature enough to know what is right for you right now. As a result, people noticed that Dale seemed to not really be there. He felt numb physically, his mind went off to more comfortable places, and his emotions would get so bottled up that sometimes he would become irritable and a little blue. Dale would work on staying virtuous in his religion classes. He knew the root of this problem related to being sexually abused and having his spine fractured by someone old enough to be his grandfather, and he was not able to talk about this in the privacy of the therapist’s office. Dale kept his dad, Matthew, in the dark about this, both literally and figuratively. He was afraid to tell him, because these kinds of things just do not happen to young men, even though he knew that his father knew. For Dale, spending time with his father really made a change in his life. His father, Matthew suggested that they walk through the park and take pictures of the castle, trees, flowers, statues, and grass, and then go home and write a journal and include the pictures. This was a daily assignment. To Dale’s delight, he started to get happier, and stay more present.

Once Dale was able to stay in his mind and body—a little bit at a time—he became able to allow himself to feel more pleasure in life. It was a huge breakthrough for him when he became capable of staying aware of who he was and understanding that he was loved. However, when Matthew would leave the country, for business, Dale was haunted by violent ghost from his traumatic past. We are all experts on ourselves, but sometimes our parents know us better than we know ourselves. We know how we perceive the World, but you have to understand, they have been here longer. Life for a youth is a lot like coming in 30 minutes after Secrets and Lies aired that evening, but your parents have already been watching for hours, so they are aware of things you may have missed out on, and have a more complete view of what is really going on. Although mindfulness practice does not magically transform all the places where people may feel helpless or hopeless, it is a tool that can gradually open many doors. One can begin incorporating mindfulness in once a day for five minutes. Daily practice will help one calm and center oneself. What is impossible to undo might be easily prevented.