Tips 31-32: Congestion and Word Doohickeys

MEDITATION PRACTICE FOR MOMS AND DADS, Tip #30: Sometimes, like today in my case, you catch a really nasty bugger of a cold from your son who caught it last week from some coughing, stuffed-up kid he was playing with in school. If you're really rocking, your daughter catches it too and she gets uncharacteristically cranky and whiny, which, since you are sick too, is enough to drive you bananas. To top it all off, just as the worst of the cold is barraging you with its whole gloppy, merciless effect, your son, who started it all, is almost completely better and only wants to be as totally wild as he can possibly be to make up for all the other days he was lying around. A sit-down meditation is totally out of the question, since your nose alone won't allow you to sit for more than two seconds without requiring a tissue, and your son is trying to climb up on your shoulders ("to be as tall as a Transformer Bot!") at the same time, and your head is so congested and swirly that you can't even make sense of your thoughts, no less watch them or let them go. You want to go into major "do something about it" mode: pull out the echinacea, vitamin C, neti pots, garlic, manuka honey, neem, ginger, astragalus, loquat syrup, green tea, and legal or maybe illegal drugs, and try to trudge through the day in misery with some nice kvetching at your husband thrown in for maximum effect, while you dutifully go through the motions of cleaning and cooking and laundry and Facebooking and bugging your kids to clean up their messes and practice piano, but really, ultimately, there is only one thing to do here: Be sick. Achoo.

MEDITATION PRACTICE FOR MOMS AND DADS, Tip #31: Just cleared my fridge of about a million of these little "Magnetic Poetry for Kids" doohickeys. They were wonderful when we first got them--we made all kinds of creative, brilliant, and witty statements--but that was a few weeks ago and now they have disintegrated into a bunch of word debris infecting every corner of my fridge. While mindfully removing piece after piece, I visualized simultaneously removing thought debris from my brain. Just like the doohickeys, our brain has an amazing capability of creating brilliance from small parts. But then it just keeps them all in there like a good little data processor until they unravel and float about, further obscuring our efforts for potential cleanliness of our mind. In the Buddha's teaching, "the criterion of genuine enlightenment lies precisely in purity of mind." Are there any similar, metaphorical models for your mind in your physical world that you can purify?