Find Quality Landing Places

A quality landing place. Photograph by the author.

Every thought, idea, impression, feeling looks for a landing place. A thought arises like a jet taking off, flies, and eventually looks for a landing place. The effectiveness and happiness of life and society are related to the quality of landing places.

To discover your landing places, look at what follows any stressful thought, feeling, or emotion. How do you handle, treat, or resolve it? Whatever it is, that’s a landing place. It may be a good place, a bad place, or neutral.

I watch my thoughts, feelings, ideas, emotions, and then I watch where they land. If I have quality landing places, my life can be effective and happy. If I have no landing places, I can go beyond effectiveness and happiness. If I have bad landing places, my life won’t be so happy.

If a thought or mental or emotional impression arises, and I have a strategy for minimizing the impact of the impression, that strategy is a landing place. I need quality landing places.

People who nurture quality landing places build quality lives, homes, and societies.

Here are 7 steps you can take right now to improve the quality of your landing places and even go beyond:

1. Practice mindfulness.

2. Practicing mindfulness, be aware of thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

3. Practicing mindfulness, be aware of where thoughts, feelings, and emotions land.

4. As you identify each landing place, ask yourself whether it is healthy, whether or not you need it, whether or not you want it.

5. Learn how to break and create habits. Break the habits of resorting to unhealthy landing places. Create new habits of resorting to healthy landing places.

6. Keep a journal as part of your mindfulness practice.

7. Go beyond thoughts, feelings, emotions, and landing places. Don’t deny them. Don’t stop following the preceding 6 steps. Just pay attention to the place where there is no landing place and nothing to land anywhere.

In that regard, pursue the teachings of nonduality in whatever way makes sense to you. Whatever occupies your attention is a doorway to nondual realization. Why? Because it is a doorway to attention itself. So? Well, attention is a doorway to the awareness of your existence.

And awareness itself is a doorway to nonduality. The primary importance placed upon thoughts, feelings, and emotions is transcended, however, you still face and attend to them. Nonduality is not a denial of human nature.

Whatever this writing arouses, what are the landing places? Are they healthy? Do they contribute to a more effective and happier life?

Happy flying!