Awareness is like Conditioner

I have light brown curly or wavy hair. Depending on the weather, I can look very different. I have my Kate Beckinsale days, and I can also have days when I look like Elmo’s brown cousin, Shmelmo. Since I was a child, I have always had knots in my baby fine hair, and combing it used to be an ordeal until the magnificent day I discovered, drum roll please…, Conditioner!
All of a sudden, tangles became a thing of the past, as I could now actually run my comb through my hair without cringing.
Now, I’m not sure exactly how it works: I just know it has something to do with the hair's cuticle and miraculous botanical extracts and formulas closely guarded by Mr. Garnier & Mr. Sassoon. But even though I don't know exactly how it all comes together, the conditioner still works to dissolve & untangle all the little knots on my head.

But what about the jumbles and messes inside the head, you know, under all the hair? Well, awareness, the non-judgmental and non-preferential seeing of something, is just like conditioner for those messes!

Simply seeing what is without judging it or wishing it were different, is enough to dissolve our mechanical behaviors, no matter how long they have been previously stuck. So we have the choice to simply look at a behavior and say “oh. I did that” without tacking on the rest of the sentence which is usually, “I’m so _________.” (Which, let's admit, we usually fill in with an unflattering word, like ‘stupid’, ‘dumb’, ‘pathetic’, ‘lazy’ … And if you notice that you tacked something on, then just don’t continue the cycle. Just like you don’t have to read or forward a chain email telling you Bill Gates is going to give you a penny for every fwd you send, you can just hit ‘delete’ instead and get rid of the Spam in your thoughts. You can even make a game of it.