The idea of being mindful - being present, being more conscious of life as it happens - may seem contradictory to those who are used to sacrificing living for pursuing their goals ... but cultivating mindfulness will help you achieve your goals and enjoy life more. In fact, you're more productive when you're mindful.
But more importantly, being present is undoubtedly the only way to enjoy life to the fullest. By being mindful, you enjoy your food more, you enjoy friends and family more, you enjoy anything you're doing more. Anything. Even things you might think are drudgery or boring, such as housework, can be amazing if you are truly present. Try it - wash dishes or sweep or cook, and remain fully present. It takes practice, but it's incredible.
Life in the Present: A 10-Step Approach
1. Do one thing at a time. Single-task, don't multi-task. When you're pouring water, just pour water. When you're eating, just eat. When you're bathing, just bathe. Don't try to knock off a few tasks while eating or bathing or driving. Zen proverb: "When walking, walk. When eating, eat."
2. Do it slowly and deliberately. You can do one task at a time, but also rush that task. Instead, take your time, and move slowly. Make your actions deliberate, not rushed and random. It takes practice, but it helps you focus on the task.
3. Do less. If you do less, you can do those things more slowly, more completely and with more concentration. If you fill your day with tasks, you will be rushing from one thing to the next without stopping to think about what you do. But you're busy and you can't possibly do less, right? You can. I've done it, and so have many busy people. It's a matter of figuring out what's important, and letting go of what's not.
4. Put space between things. Related to the "Do less" rule, but it's a way of managing your schedule so that you always have time to complete each task. Don't schedule things close together - instead, leave room between things on your schedule. That gives you a more relaxed schedule, and leaves space in case one task takes longer than you planned.
5. Spend at least 5 minutes each day doing nothing. Just sit in silence. Become aware of your thoughts. Focus on your breathing. Notice the world around you. Become comfortable with the silence and stillness. It'll do you a world of good - and just takes 5 minutes!
6. Stop worrying about the future - focus on the present. Become more aware of your thinking - are you constantly worrying about the future? Learn to recognize when you're doing this, and then practice bringing yourself back to the present. Just focus on what you're doing, right now. Enjoy the present moment.
7. When you're talking to someone, be present. How many of us have spent time with someone but have been thinking about what we need to do in the future? Or thinking about what we want to say next, instead of really listening to that person? Instead, focus on being present, on really listening, on really enjoying your time with that person.
8. Eat slowly and savor your food. Food can be crammed down our throats in a rush, but where's the joy in that? Savor each bite, slowly, and really get the most out of your food. Interestingly, you'll eat less this way, and digest your food better as well.
9. Live slowly and savor your life. Just as you would savor your food by eating it more slowly, do everything this way - slow down and savor each and every moment. Tune into the sights and sounds and awaken your senses to the world around you.
10. Make cleaning and cooking become meditation. Cooking and cleaning are often seen as drudgery, but actually they are both great ways to practice mindfulness, and can be great rituals performed each day. If cooking and cleaning seem like boring chores to you, try doing them as a form of meditation. Put your entire mind into those tasks, concentrate, and do them slowly and completely. It could change your entire day (as well as leave you with a cleaner house).
Keep practicing. When you get frustrated, just take a deep breath. When you ask yourself, "What should I do now, Self?" The answer is, "keep practicing."
"When you drive around the city and come to a red light or a stop sign, you can just sit back and make use of these twenty or thirty seconds to relax - to breathe in, breathe out, and enjoy arriving in the present moment. There are many things like that we can do." - Thich Nhat Hanh
From my perspective, having a full, authentic life is about having healthy, vibrant relationships — your relationship with yourself, with others you know, with the world at large, and/or with something greater, if that suits you. Without relationships, there can’t be much else.
So how do you make changes in how you do your relationships? What behavioral psychologists know is that making changes — and keeping resolutions — needs to be broken down into small, achievable, and measurable steps.
If you want to make positive changes to support healthier relationships, pick one do-able thing — a small, achievable, measurable change. As you might reasonably guess (based on what I write about here all the time) my suggestion is to practice mindfulnessmeditation, as a way to rewire yourbrain to be able to “do” relationships in healthier ways (see my previous post, Nine Ways That A Meditating Brain Creates Better Relationships).
Then, if your resolution is to meditate, break that down into small, achievable, measurable steps as well. More on that in a moment — first, take a look at what goes into making a clear resolution to create a new habit.
Help yourself make meditation a resolution you can keep
First, get clear about why you’re doing meditation: What’s your intention? What’s yourmotivation? Challenge yourself to boil those two things down to one sentence each. (Or 140 characters each, if you’re a Twitterer.) Then, know that “stuff” will get in the way, be it external stuff (like your pipes have burst first thing in the morning, so you need to take care of that rather than do your morning meditation), or, more likely, your internal resistance.
“What internal resistance?”, you say. “I really want to meditate regularly, it’s just that other stuff keeps getting in the way.” Consider these commonly lurking thoughts, which can rather sneakily turn into “external stuff,” or the belief that you can’t meditate:
Nothing seems to happen when I meditate, so making time for it isn’t worth it.
Something does happen when I meditate — meditation is changing me, and that’s scary, because then I’m in unfamiliar territory.
I’m afraid of what I might discover or feel if I slow down, if I listen to myself, if I open my heart.
I won’t be able to do it right/perfectly, so what’s the point?
All of these can be thought of as ways we shift our gaze away from the real culprit: ourfear. The good news is that by meditating regularly, your fear won’t take your brain (or your relationships) hostage the same way any more. You’ll still experience your fear, but it’s more like sitting firmly in the saddle and holding the reins of the horse — it won’t gallop off with you helplessly dragging behind. So, meditating more will help you avoid it less.
Okay, enough about the philosophical part of the program — let’s get down to practical matters.
Here are a dozen tips for making your meditation practice a worthwhile habit that sticks:
1. Pick a time. For example, get to it immediately when you get up in the morning. Before coffee (gasp!), before a shower, plop yourself down and just do it. Meditation sets the tone for your nervous system for the day, so you’ll reap the benefits that much more – plus, you’ll feel noble and accomplished all day. 2. Let go of the idea that you can’t meditate. One thing I hear a lot is “I can’t make my mind stay focused.” There’s no “doing it right” – it’s a practice. The practice of brining your wandering mind back again and again is actually what researchers believe does the re-wiring in your brain. Having a mind that wanders is actually a useful tool in meditation. There is a video about how a difficult-to-focus mind can be an asset in meditation practice. 3. Set your calendar. Planning to do a new behavior every day for a year is beyond what most of us can accomplish — setting ourselves up for failure. Make your resolution just long enough to become a habit — and then do that same time period over and over.
How long does it take to create a new habit? (Here’s a link to a great post on this.) Estimates vary, because (a) people vary, and (b) the depth of the habit varies. For example, it takes less time to establish the habit of drinking a glass of water every morning than to get in the habit of doing fifty pushups every day. As for developing a meditation practice, in my experience, it takes most people one or two months of regular practice to make regular meditation a habit. The good news is that there are already measurable changes in your brain after just two weeks, according to one leading researcher, Richard Davidson, PhD. 4. Be the exception. Be aware that the dropout rate for new meditators is high — some say that only two in ten will be practicing, even periodically, after a year. Resolve to be the exception to the rule, and also know that you have good company with others who are struggling. Be kind to yourself about how hard it is to develop a new, healthy habit. 5. Keep your expectations in line with what meditation is, and what it isn’t. For example, don’t expect to always get an immediate “hit” or relief like you get when taking medicine (although you might feel that way during, or after, meditation). And remember that you’re changing your brain, not just decongesting your sinuses — it takes time. 6. Start small. I agree with Daniel Siegel, MD, who says that rewiring the brain can be helped by even as little as three minutes of mindfulness meditation, done regularly, and that the brain seems to benefit more from frequent, shorter meditations than less frequent, longer ones. I often recommend starting with five minutes a day, and perhaps working up to twenty if you feel it is working for you. (There are other benefits to longer meditations, but for the purposes of brain integration, it’s fine to go for less time, as long as it is regular and frequent.) 7. Have fun! Meditation can be serious, but it can also lead you in some delightful directions. I’ve actually fallen off a meditation stool from laughing so hard. 8. Do it naturally. I strongly recommend against using technological short-cuts like brain-wave inducers. The benefits of mindfulness meditation, from a brain-integration perspective, comes from the practiceof getting different parts of your brain working together. The techno “shortcuts” brag that they force the brain to switch gears — so you can just be the passive receiver. Passively getting your brain activity to change is like having someone else lift your arms for you when weightlifting.
(A relevant joke: A monk ordered a hot dog (vegan, I guess) from a hot dog vendor: “Make me one with everything.” (Insert first laugh here.) The monk pays for the $2 hot dog with a $5 bill. The vendor takes the cash and does nothing. When the monk asks for the $3, the vendor replies, “Change comes from within.”)
9. Learn the basics. When you’re first starting out, you might find it helpful to start with a guided meditation.(There are many good resources for this, including a free download, as well as guided meditations from people I respect a great deal, including Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Jon Kabat-Zinn – click here for specific recommendations.) Eventually, though, for the same reasons in#8 above, once you learn to meditate, and know more about how to guide yourself, then I recommend moving away from guided meditation. It can still be useful if you need a “refresher,” but training thebrainto do the task of meditation on its own seems key in the sort of re-wiring seen in the research literature. Also, if you choose to use guided meditations to learn the ropes, then I recommend that it be without background music, if for no other reason than the music is an added “event” for the brain to process.
10. Change it up. Meditation doesn’t have to happen while you’re seated in lotus position in a perfect tranquil space (again, “perfection” is not required!) Due to an old ankle injury, I can’t sit cross-legged, so I meditate on a chair or stool. People with back or hip injuries sometimes lay down and use a chair under their lower legs to lay in “astronaut” position. You can do a walking meditation, meditation during yoga, meditation while eating — there’s even a raisin meditation. The focus of your meditation can also vary: It can be helpful to balance your practice between the sort of breathing/noticing practice (called insight meditation, or vipassana), and a series of focused intentions like metta practice (you can search “metta” and “Sharon Salzberg” for excellent resources on this form of practice).
11. Aim for imperfection. Know at the outset that you’ll not be perfect in keeping your resolution. Research on creating new habits shows that missing single days doesn’t reduce the chance of forming a habit. Additionally, positive reinforcement (giving yourself gold stars for the days you meditate, or your own personal equivalent) is demonstrably more effective in changing behavior thanpunishment(beating yourself up for the days that you don’t meditate). 12. Irritation and challenges can be meditation aids. Remember that having challenges when you meditate can make the session “easier,” and even more potent. If I have an itch during meditation, I don’t scratch it at first — I’m usuallygratefulto have something to focus on other than my breath. (If the itch continues — which, after focusing on it, it often doesn’t — then I can use it as a way to practice being mindful of my hand moving to scratch it, and of the sensation of the scratching — you get the point.) To quote Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, “sometimes negative emotions and problems are good for practice. If everything is good and convenient – there is a nice temperature in the room, I’m not hungry or thirsty – then there is not much meditation because it is easy to forget. But once you have some challenge or suffering, then it is easy to meditate.”
I hope you find these ideas helpful, and I invite your feedback.
On life's journey Faith is nourishment, Virtuous deeds are a shelter, Wisdom is the light by day and Right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life nothing can destroy him; If he has conquered greed nothing can limit his freedom.
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