The most important thing in my life has been mindfulness practice. Not music, which I acknowledge is fleeting, ephemeral and meaningless except in the context of appreciating this physical, material life. Obviously not relations or people, which I take as a personal fault. Not endeavors or enjoyments.
Mindfulness practice is the only thing that has made my life worth living this long without regret (music made it tolerable and enjoyable, so is still up there in importance). It includes morning sitting practice, which should be the basic practice on any Buddhist path and once trained on it by qualified monastics it's hard to do without. For me personally it also includes Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhist) teachings which among other things deals heavily with death as a part of life, which is something I was ready for. Capping it all off have been Sadhguru videos in the past few months that have given some affirmation that I'm not totally off the rails, barking up the wrong tree, paddling furiously with one oar. Vajrayana came from India, so Tibetan teachings slot in well with the more expansive view of Sadhguru.
It has been worth getting emotions under control, particularly negative ones, using mindfulness training by just noticing them, watching them and not acting on or reacting to them. It's been worth it not being a slave to them and tossed wildly about by them. They still happen and they're still at times troubling or bothersome, but it's great not getting carried away or overwhelmed by them.
Emotions become something "tangible" and able to be manipulated, not just something that happens because we're human. I understand a lot of people like that, the spontaneity of emotions is what makes them human and makes them feel. What they're essentially saying is they like suffering, or they'll take the suffering with the pleasures, but they just don't want to look at it or say it that way. Fair 'nuff.
Then Vajrayana-inspired visualizations can take that manipulation a step further and transform negative emotions into something else as soon as they happen. There's a "bounce" that can be trained to happen: once negativity or anger or despair occur you can recognize it, identify it and bounce it into something positive like realization or wisdom or a mandala or the exact opposite emotion. And it's not fake. Like the negative emotion was real? It's the same raw emotion, that's still there, but seen in a different or wider perspective. Maybe that's why Tibetan lamas are so easy to laugh even at something that seems so dire to the rest of us.
It probably wouldn't be inaccurate to say mindfulness training and practice was the meaning of the whole journey. As karma I'm very happy to have it potentially as a tool that carries over into future lives. There's certainly a lot of other stuff that still will carry over as karma since I don't know if I've worked through them well enough, including neurotic nuttiness and general attachments, but there's always the possibility and hope to be able to continue working on them in whatever way because the seeds of mindfulness practice are also there.
