You wake up, you stretch, 5:30AM, ready for your morning routine. Ahead of you there are about 14 hours of continuous forced tasks and you have only 45 minutes to prepare (work and courses). Mindfulness is the answer. You work in a high stress environment and when your finish, then you study, up until dinner time, half an hour before bed. Every day. Weekends too, as you find some substitute for all of that. You actually crave being busy to this level, so you can justify doing meditation. Mindfulness is your best ally, a rocket that will send you flying over everything else in this historic day that will shatter all expectations humbly placed on regular human beings, and you are not one of them, no, you belong to some other group. Don’t mix with the others. They will pass a virus on you.

You close your eyes and start focusing on your breadth for several long seconds. The air flows through your throat, your chest pushes rhythmically, and your mouth gets slightly dry each time you exhale. You cover all these sensations with a blanket of awareness, you are now aware, you can identify that these are sensations, and that you are aware of them. You do the same with the sounds coming from the street, a car, an ambulance, or the blackness of your visual field, still there, even with the eyes closed. Everything is inside a vessel, called consciousness, being examined, being looked at by you, the meditator.

Every thought is there too. Your anxiety, your greed, the contempt you feel for others, every single thought is there in that vessel flowing in and out like a train, of, well, thoughts. You think about some stupid cooking recipe, and the thought appears in the vessel next to the sensation of breathing and the awful street noises. You can look at that thought, that undesired thought, and it will vanish. Because you are focusing on your breadth, you want to live in the present, and thinking about a cooking recipe is not living in the present, so you delete that thought. Mindfulness will teach you a model about how thoughts work in the mind, and will only use that model to show how can you delete emotions.

To control your mind they say. To avoid being distracted. Distracted by what? by dispair? by sadness? because whatever you are doing is more important than feeling sadness? This, in a vacuum, is not a bad idea. The ability of focusing on the present, and keeping overwhelming emotions in check can be useful and even good, but, done in the context of a “high productivity environment”, as a part of a 5:30AM routine, to endure the extreme emotional stress that you’re about to get subjected to, it IS a bad idea. Because it is a tool for oppression. Now I can disable the feelings of being oppressed, the stress, the sadness, the anger, all of it. And also, do it as a part of a package that people call “high achiever” or “highly productive person” or just “doer”. Now I can have that badge, signaling companies that they get a discount deal with me.

Culturally speaking, you’re at the top. Who’s gonna tell you? No one will make you realize. Everyone will respect that you have no time for birthdays, some beers with friends, going to the cinema etc, because people usually admire your types. And you’ll feel great about it. Admired, by both your friends and family, and your bosses. Empowered, since you can carry yourself so easily through the day. And any bad feeling, you have your trusty ol friend Mindfulness to deal with it. Be mindful, be present, close your eyes, focus on your breadth, do it every time you change spaces, nothing is bad anymore, nothing sucks, everything is great, and you are the center of it all. The vessel where all happens, in your mind, your mind itself, you, your consciousness, everything, is mindful of itself. You are happy.