Mindfully non-searching my house for the mindfulness CDs I bought two months ago

Kabat-Zinn recommends in "Full Catastrophe Living" that you follow the program, and that you do this through his meditation "tapes."  The repeated references to "tapes" discouraged me because it implied that I was unlikely to find instantly downloadable digital audio files, which in turn decreased the likelihood I would ever order said "tapes."  The fact that there was a website that also used the word "tapes," "http://mindfulnesstapes.com/," and utilized a nice tiled jpg background of sand, offered little comfort.

Ah, soothing, hypnotic desert sands...
makes me want to listen to some tapes.

Nevertheless, I forged on.  I found them at Amazon.com and, because I think I happened to be ordering someone's long-overdue wedding gift from there at the same time, I actually made it through the series of clicks to purchase the product!

It arrived a short while later, and boy, was I excited.  My new prized possession sat on top of my Clavinova for a week or two in its shrinkwrap.  At some point, I discussed it with someone, and took it out of its shrinkwrap, and played with the CD for a few seconds.  I considered by what means I could execute the listening to them.  I pondered the only two then-possibilities: my computer room, with the faint odor of cat litter, and my bedroom, on a DVD player from the late nineties that can only play things starting at the beginning of the CD.  I became mildly annoyed at the fact that my ipod nano was currently defunct and that my computer was conspiring against my ever accessing my music files again, deterring me from uploading anything new.   And then...

The CDs vanished!

Well no, they didn't vanish.  I picked them up, completely unconscious of myself, and put them somewhere.  It could have been in the vicinity of the aforementioned CD-playing devices in my house.  It could have been in a closet as a bandaid solution to clutter for the benefit of a rare guest.

LOST

Of course, this happens to me frequently.  I am always misplacing household objects under suspiciously similar circumstances of being not present.  And you would think I would have a method for finding these lost things by now, but what I have is more of a coping mechanism.  Usually I frenetically scan my house, and then give up unless it is an absolute necessity like my keys or my phone.  In that case, I freak out, wail, and demand that whoever's close by (siblings, boyfriends, cats) find the object.  A strikingly high percentage of the time, they do.

But when the thing I have lost is not something I literally need to leave the house, I usually just wait until later, when I have at least a half-hour.  Then start tidying things up and do not strive in particular to find the object itself.  About 30% of the time I will find what I am looking for.  More frequently, I will find something I was looking for in the past but had given up on.  I will not comment on how much of my house-tidying is due to Not looking for something I have lost.

But what's crazy and kind of cool is, this is exactly how Kabat-Zinn tells you you should approach meditation.

Almost everything we do we do for a purpose, to get something or somewhere.  But in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle.  That is because meditation is different from all other human activities.  Although it takes a lot of work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is a non-doing.  It has no goal other than for you to be yourself.  the irony is that you already are.  This sounds paradoxical and a little crazy.  Yet this paradox and craziness may be pointing you toward a new way of seeing yourself, one in which you are trying less and being more.  This comes from intentionally cultivating the attitude of non-striving...

People are sent to the stress clinic by their doctors because something is the matter.  the first time they come, we ask them to identify three goals that they want to work toward in the program.  But then, often to their surprise, we encourage them not to make any progress toward their goals over the eight weeks.  In particular, if one of their goals is to lower their blood pressure or to reduce their pain or their anxiety, they are instructed not to try to lower their blood pressure nor to try to make their pain or their anxiety go away, but simply to stay in the present and carefully follow the meditation instructions.  

As you will see shortly, in the meditative domain, the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment.  With patience and regular practice, movement toward your goals will take place by itself.  This movement becomes an unfolding that you are inviting to happen within you.

(FCL 12-13%.  My Kindle does not tell me page numbers, sorry.)

OK, so as irritating as it was to realize that I had misplaced my damn meditation CDs the morning after my momentous introductory blog entry where I announce my intention to adhere to them strictly, at least I have some experience with this whole non-striving thing after all.

Update:
I found -old medicine, my tallit from 1999 (this was the real treasure!), the labelmaker I couldn't find, the labelmaker I bought to replace the one I couldn't find, several checkbooks.

I invited my boyfriend over the next day and he found the CDs after 5 minutes.  In a place I SWEAR I checked.

I am currently uploading the CDs so that I can lose them again.