It’s rough. It’s raw. It’s unedited.
My first ever video is up on my YouTube channel.
Will folks prefer that over the written format?
We’ll see!
here’s a link to the video:
-
Last week, I announced that I would be transitioning to a podcast, effective immediately, but I changed my mind – I’ll continue posting from time to time AND I’ll also experiment with posting my videos directly in this blog. In the meantime, here’s a “Bonus Track”!
News! News! News! Every day, more news. Bad news, good news, predictions of disaster, actual disasters.
How can we bring mindfulness to this endless barrage?
The news we consume is an awful lot like the food we consume. We can make healthier choices. We can limit our consumption. We can do intermittent fasting. We can cut out junk permanently.
We can start to bring ourselves into a healthier balance by reflecting a bit on our current “diet”. How much news are we actually consuming? How much variety is there in our “diet”? Are we consuming all our news from just one source or a variety of sources?
We can also consider how we feel after we consume. If we spend an hour watching the news, how does that affect our mood? Does it leave us optimistic and hopeful, or depressed? How’s our energy level? Do we have indigestion from what we just consumed?
Some people are more sensitive than others. Maybe you are one one those. Just as some people can eat a meal high in MSG and feel fine, while others get sick or get migraines, so too some people are much more strongly affected by the news. If that’s you, maybe you should stay away.
Lastly, we can bring more mindfulness by slowing things down a bit. Are we consuming the news out of habit, repeating the same behavior day after day, or are we actually CHOOSING to go and spend X amount of time consuming THIS type of news from THESE news sources? Making choices and being intentional is always preferable to mindless, automatic, scripted, behavior patterns.
In short, while it’s important to be aware of what’s happening in the world around us, we need to bring intentionality and choice to our consumption. Let’s make sure we choose from a variety of sources, with a variety of perspectives (balanced nutrition) and that we limit our consumption (no bingeing), and that we are mindful of what effect our consumption is having on us (adverse reactions).
What we put in our bodies BECOMES our bodies. What we put in our minds can, if we’re not mindful, BECOME our beliefs, our attitudes, our thoughts, and even our behaviors. It matters. A lot.
Choose wisely.
-
This will be my last post on the mindful coach blog. It’s been a wonderful experience to write one blog post a week for nearly a year – I never knew I had so much to say!
I had two reasons for starting this blog. Firstly, I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned over the course of 50 years as a mindfulness practitioner. Secondly, I wanted to try my hand at writing and see if I enjoyed it and was any good at it.
Looking back now over the 42 posts I’ve published, I can see that I accomplished both objectives. I believe I’ve provided some useful content that will, I hope, inspire people to start paying attention to their attention. I’ve also learned that, yes, I do enjoy writing.
However, I’ve also noticed that the world is moving increasingly to audio and video instead of the written word.
My next project will be to start a podcast. I’ll add links to it here when the project is up and running. I hope to learn and develop some new skills along the way.
I also intend to turn this blog into an e-book (once I figure out the best way to do that) which I’ll share with anyone who wants it.
Whether you’ve read all of my posts or just one or two, I want to thank you. Your time and attention is the most precious thing you have, and therefore the most valuable thing you can share. I truly appreciate you having spent a bit of your attention on reading my words. I hope I was able to bring some insight to you via this blog.
May you be well.
-
I tore my ACL and I can’t walk! I may need surgery!
How is this a good thing?!?
I don’t write much in here about what’s happening in my life. I prefer to write about ways that you, dear reader, can bring more presence into your life. This week, however, I will get personal.
Two days ago, I made a wrong move and within a couple of hours my knee was the size of a grapefruit…a BIG grapefruit. I couldn’t put any weight on my leg. I couldn’t bend nor straighten it either. And the pain was excruciating.
And it turbocharged my presence.
All of a sudden, I had to pay really, really close attention to every little move I made.
I had to completely disable the AUTOPILOT.
Every step became a potential trap risking more pain. Sitting had to be adjusted. Standing had to be adjusted. Stairs became almost impossible.
Mindlessness was not an option!
I share this because I learned something: when you HAVE TO be super mindful, you CAN be.
I’ve been more mindful, more present these last two days than I have since my last extended retreat. And it’s almost effortless. It’s as if my entire body-mind and brain is working harmoniously to keep me super mindful from moment to moment. All to avoid pain.
I’m intrigued by this. How can we bring this level of easy mindful presence into our lives without sustaining a serious injury? I’m going to reflect on that.
Please don’t go out and seek an injury as a way of incredibly boosting your presence! But ask yourself if you could be, say 5% more mindful today.
What if it COULD be easy? Would you do it? These are interesting questions.
My take away (other than “I better see a doctor about this”) is “if mindfulness can be this easy when I’m injured, could it also be this easy in other ways?”
I’ll report back once I’ve healed a bit. In the meantime, be careful! It doesn’t take much to mess up your entire routine.
-
In a post a few months back, I introduced the “Magic Mindfulness Question”. That question was “What’s happening?”
I truly love that question for its power, its ability to focus the attention on what’s happening now, inside of us (our thoughts and feelings), around us, and by us, what we’re up to.
Now, I would like to introduce that question’s cousin, the “other” magic question, which is “What’s next?”
“What’s next?” is also a refocusing question. It draws the attention not just to what you’re doing now, but more importantly, to what needs to be done next.
Imagine you’re hacking your way through the jungle with a machete. You have a crude map and a compass. You have a destination, say, a long lost temple (with apologies to Indiana Jones!)
The first Magic question (what’s happening) is like pausing, looking around, and getting your bearings. It’s akin to asking “where am I?”. The second Magic question is like asking “What’s my next step?” or “what direction do I need to go in to reach my destination?”
I think the second question is as useful as the first. It holds the possibility of adjusting one’s direction slightly. Maybe we’ve strayed off the path a bit and need to get back on it. Maybe we’re exploring a new area and it’s suggesting we might want to choose a different destination.
Together, “What’s happening?” and “What’s next?” are a formidable duo, like Batman and Robin. I suggest you try pairing them together. Maybe take a moment now, get your bearings, and take the next step on your journey. Happy trails!”
-
Whether or not you’ve read Alice in Wonderland, you’re almost certainly familiar with the expression, and the experience, of going down a rabbit hole. Generally, it means that you’ve become engrossed in a line of thinking or research to such an extent that you’re not able to come back to familiar territory – you’re a bit lost and you can’t seem to find your way out. But there is an easy fix for this.
The reason this is familiar for most of us is that it is the nature of thought to get stuck in loops. You start down a particular line of thinking and before you know it, you’re back into a repetitive loop that never leads anywhere but to the same conclusions. You can try a hundred times to start down that path hoping to come to a new or different conclusion, and every time, you’re back in Wonderland.
It’s extremely frustrating, primarily because we EXPECT to arrive at a different place. This is why I like the metaphor “train of thought”, because unlike other modes of transportation, the train cannot leave the track. Once you’re on the train to Paris, you end up in Paris. Our thoughts may APPEAR to be free to jump tracks, but in reality this rarely happens, unless we have a flash of insight.
And this is where the fix can be quite simple: shift the context. Thoughts are quite mechanical in nature, and are often associated with a particular context. The way out of a rabbit hole is a change in your context. I’ll suggest two ways to do this.
The first shift that can lead you out of a rabbit hole is to shift your time horizon to either a very short one or a very long one. You could, for example, ask yourself if the situation you keep mulling over and over in your head looks different if you focus on this exact moment, one second at a time. That’s usually too short for the same story to unfold. Bring yourself fully into this exact moment and look from the perspective of one second. Most problems disappear at this time scale. Stay in the moment, experiencing one second at a time, for as long as possible. At this scale, problems look very different.
The other extreme is to put your problem in the context of an entire lifetime. A problem that seems huge in the context of one month or two seems much smaller when viewed in the context of 85 years. Ask yourself, how big will this problem seem to me 50 years from now? Or perhaps explore it from an even larger viewpoint: how important will this problem seem about 1,000 years from now? 10,000 years? the farther out you go, the smaller the problem seems.
The second shift that you can make is to move yourself to a different environment. Take a trip. Go to a different city. Or even just to a new coffee shop. Go somewhere unfamiliar, with different faces and smells and things to see. You don’t have to go far to change your environment. Go to a new trail in the woods. Just changing your environment forces your brain to adapt and focus on new cues. Doing this can shift your perspective enough to break you free from the train track and into a different perspective. This alone can lead you and your thoughts to a different destination, and different conclusions.
Yes, thought is mechanical and easily gets stuck in a loop. The next time that happens, try playing with your time perspective, and try moving yourself to a new environment. That will likely be enough to pull you out of the rabbit hole.
-
If the title of this post intrigued you, you’re not alone. In my decades of teaching mindfulness, the most common preoccupation of my students was the question “Why?”
Let’s be honest – training attention takes time, is sometimes really challenging, and is not a lot of fun. So why on earth would anyone start down that road and, more importantly, stick with it for years and years?
My answer is this: if you’re not in control of your attention, then someone else will be.
Which kind of reminds me of this quote:
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” – Carl Jung.
What you pay attention to MATTERS!
It matters because attention shines a spotlight on certain aspects of your life while leaving other aspects in the shadows. It matters because what you pay attention to strengthens certain networks in your brain. And it matters because what you pay attention to in your life, in many ways, is your life.
I don’t want someone else to tell me what matters; I want to figure that out for myself.
I don’t want my attention to be hijacked by any opinion group and held hostage. I want to be free to choose what to highlight.
I don’t want marketers and advertisers manipulating my attention and determining the quality of my experience.
Take back your attention! It’s an act of defiance!
Say to the world “It’s MY attention and I’ll decide what to do with it!”
Your attention is valuable. Many forces are competing to control it. If you don’t fight back, they win. You lose.
Ask yourself right now, “how much of the time am I consciously choosing what I’m doing with my attention?” If the answer is “rarely or not ever”, then maybe it’s time for you to start training your attention, and take back that control, that freedom to choose.
Thanks for letting me have a few minutes of your attention. I hope it will have a positive impact on your life.
-
In my nearly 20 years as a coach who integrated mindfulness and coaching, I frequently made reference to a concept that I learned as a teenager: the inner game. I’d learned about the inner game from a wonderful, wonderful book called “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey. Published in 1974, exactly as I was falling in love with the game of tennis, this book presented ideas that aligned beautifully with those I was learning about meditation and mindfulness.
I won’t go into the concepts in the book, (I do suggest you read the 50th anniversary edition) except to extract one key concept: mastering your mind is the key to optimizing your performance, no matter what your domain is (sports, business, arts, etc).
But what exactly is it that we are mastering when we master our minds? And who’s doing the mastering?
It’s by doing mindfulness practices that we come to understand that the voice we “hear” when we talk to ourselves is just a tiny fraction of all that we are. The inner voice is also not all that helpful much of the time, and yet we give it such a huge amount of attention that it might as well be our master. And it is a terrible master!
The practice of mindfulness is in many ways the practice of dis-identifying with the “speaker” of one’s thoughts, and putting the voice in its proper place, as an unreliable and fickle side-kick. It’s like an annoying child that runs along beside us from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep (if it will let us), endlessly pattering on about everything that’s going on, and making us want to scream “will you please just SHUT UP!”
That’s the beginning of the inner game, right there!
The realization that if you can’t make that voice shut up, then clearly, it’s NOT YOU. It pretends to be you, and if you believe it, well, it gets to be your master. If, on the other hand, you see it as the output of activity in the brain, and a very limited and ineffective point of view, then you are on the road to harnessing the much greater power of an integrated mind. You bring the power of your unconscious processes on line.
Once you can gain that mastery, your performance starts to be all it can be. Your natural talent and abilities will come into play, of course, as will the amount of practice you do. What won’t happen is the self-doubt and self-criticism that can massively get in the way of your best performance.
The inner game can be very challenging at times, but it delivers the goods. And it will improve not just your tennis game or your golf game, but also can help in almost every area of your life.
I highly recommend the book, even if you’re not a tennis player. And most of all, I highly recommend you explore the inner game and learn for yourself what a difference mastery over your mind can make.
-
It’s Valentine’s Day and every newsletter I’ve received has a headline involving love. Why buck the trend? But the love I want to write about today is not so-called romantic love, but rather love of reality, just as you find it.
The Stoics called this Amor Fati, loving your Fate. I think of it as a full-bodied embrace of just exactly where Fate has brought you. Let me unpack that.
Let’s start with the notion of “just exactly where Fate has brought you”. This idea runs counter to our perception that we are the ones who have brought ourselves to exactly where we are. Our current reality is the product of our own choices and decisions. And yes, it certainly appears to be so.
Amor Fati suggests that a force was also at work, behind the scenes. Even as you were making your decisions and taking your actions, there was force at work that either worked alongside you, helped you along, or did the very opposite, and put roadblocks in your way. Things turn out the way they do because two things were happening: you were making choices, and Fate was helping or hindering.
The idea is not to stop making choices – it’s just to realize that Fate may have other plans. Consider the old Yiddish adage, “Man plans, and God laughs”. There’s something humbling about recognizing that the whole universe is not here just to meet our wants and needs.
Now about the “full-bodied embrace”. Why embrace? Because the act of loving what is goes beyond just accepting what is. It goes beyond surrendering to it. It means welcoming it with an embrace as one would a beloved friend. This is your life! You may not like parts of it, but this is it. And to embrace it in a full-bodied way means to observe and recognize even your own bristling at certain aspects of it.
Imagine personifying your life as a beloved friend and saying to that friend, “you’re not perfect, but I love you just the way you are, now come here and let’s hug!”
Happy Valentine’s Day!
-
This is my now, right now, mindfully witnessed.
There are thoughts of what the content should be. About 75% of the field of awareness of trained on these thoughts., putting them into words and typing the words.
There are sensations of fingers tapping keys. There is also peripheral awareness of sensations of a sore back and a sore neck, a stuffy nose, and the taste of coffee in my mouth. These sensations make up about 15% of the field of awareness right now.
There also arises a feeling of relief at having found a fun topic to write about, and a feeling of excitement about actually writing it. These feelings make up about 10% of the field, of my experience.
A thought arises around how you, the reader, will respond to this post. Will you like it? This thought lasts about 5 seconds and moves on out of the field.
The stuffy nose sensations brighten and take more space in the field. An impulse to stop typing and blow my nose arises briefly but is dismissed without any action taking place. An awareness of the unpleasantness of the stuffy nose is pushed away by the joy of generating these words.
An impulse arises of taking another sip of coffee and that impulse is followed. The sensations of the warm liquid can be followed from my mouth to my throat to my belly, and I notice their pleasantness.
A thought arises along the lines of “that’s enough. That should do. The reader will get bored if you wite much more on this topic.” The thought is considered. There is no disagreement with that. So I type these last few words, amidst feelings of satisfaction.
Leaders and Entrepreneurs Pay Attention 