Category: Mindfulness Practice

Resilience is Not Endurance or Acceptance of a Toxic Situation

Resilience is very much about “bouncing back” from adversity or setbacks. Richard Davidson in his research has shown that resilience can be measured in terms of the rapidity with which the body returns to its “baseline” – measured in terms of level of cortisol and the level of activation of the amygdala. He maintains that resilience is not acceptance or endurance of a toxic environment that is unjust or inappropriate.

Resilience can be built through developing life skills that enable you to move beyond significant adverse life events. Richard and his colleagues have identified conscious ways to build resilience by using meditation and mindfulness practices focused on developing bodily awareness, social connection, personal insight and life purpose.

Resilience does not lead to acceptance of a toxic situation but rather builds motivation and skill to address the situation effectively. Mindfulness practices designed to build resilience also strengthen your capacity to manage stresses experienced within a toxic situation by increasing self-awareness, enhancing self-regulation, improving clarity and calmness and releasing creativity.

Resilience and compassion: building motivation and capacity for action

In the previous post, I discussed social connection as one way to build resilience and compassion meditation (loving-kindness meditation) as a way to develop social connection. Professor David DeSteno, renowned psychologist and author of The Truth About Trust, maintains that the ability to build social connections through compassion (through assisting those in need) makes us more resilient over the longer term. 

Kelly McGonigal, in her presentation on The Science of Compassion during the Mindful Healthcare Summit, maintained that compassion benefits everyone in a system – the person who shows compassion, the recipient, colleagues and witnesses (e.g. the hundreds of thousands of people who have witnessed the compassionate action by Mo Cheeks).

Kelly’s research and that of her colleagues suggests that people who undertake training in compassion (such as Compassion Cultivation Training [CCT] offered by Stanford University) become strong and resilient advocates for system change where people are suffering. She maintains that participants in CCT are more able to effectively change a toxic situation through their hope, courage, renewed energy and strong social connection. She suggests that this “very work of change is a form of compassion”. On reflection, compassion appeared to be the driver in an earlier reported case where participants used action learning to redress a toxic work environment.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditations designed to build resilience, we can increase our motivation and capacity to act effectively to change a toxic situation that is causing suffering for people. By building social connections through compassion, we not only strengthen our resilience, but also enhance our capacity to act effectively with hope and energy to address the suffering experienced within the toxic system.

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Image by Bruno Glätsch from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Shaping Our Brains to Build Resilience

Richard Davidson, Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, recently addressed the Mindful Healthcare Summit on the topic The Science of Resilience. Richard, an internationally renowned neuroscientist, stated that his research and that of his colleagues has convinced him that we can shape our brains in a way that builds resilience and helps us to flourish rather than be tossed around “like a sailboat without a rudder on a turbulent sea”. Richard is the co-author with Daniel Goleman of the book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.

What is resilience?

Richard defines resilience as “the rapidity with which you can recover from adversity”. Linda Graham described this trait as “bouncing back“. Richard stated that neuroscience can actually measure the rapidity of recovery by exploring (through brain imaging) two key aspects of the brain that feature in dealing with stress or adverse situations, (1) the level of cortisol released by the brain and (2) the degree to which the amygdala is activated.

He highlighted the brain’s plasticity as proof that we can train our minds and take more responsibility for shaping our brains and determining the direction of our brain plasticity – which most of the time occurs unwittingly through forces external and internal to ourselves. The key is to understand how our brain develops resilience and to make a commitment to shape our brain in a way that builds wellbeing rather than diminishes it.

How to shape our brain to build resilience

Richard suggests that to actively build resilience we need to develop in four key areas through focused meditations and aligned action:

  1. Awareness – he describes this as attention to our own bodies and the tension within. Mindful breathing and body scan can help to develop this awareness and related ability to be grounded in our bodies. Calmness and clarity emerge from this aspect of shaping our minds.
  2. Connection – having and nurturing harmonious and supportive relationships that provide an effective buffer for us when we are feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Meditations that can help build social connection are the loving kindness and gratitude meditations. Positivity, expressions of appreciation and empathy can nurture these relationships.
  3. Insight – an in-depth knowledge of our personal narrative/self-story that generates negative self-evaluation and false beliefs that contribute to a lack of resilience and depression. We have to recognise these self-beliefs as merely thoughts, not reality. Meditations such as the R.A.I.N. meditation, S.B.N.R.R. process and reflections on resentment can help us shift this narrative from negative thoughts generating self-defeating emotions to a positive narrative that is enabling and builds resilience in the face of setbacks or adversity.
  4. Purpose – clarity about life purpose, and alignment of words and actions with this purpose, enable us to surf the waves of daily life and to manage the vicissitudes that inevitably disturb our equilibrium. Bill George describes your purpose as your True North and offers ways to discover it. In a previous post I offered a series of questions to help find your unique purpose and a path of action to pursue that purpose.

Developing a permeable self

Richard stated that the aspect of “insight” mentioned above is a key component of resilience. We tend to develop a fixed and stable view of our self which causes us problems in conflicted situations. It is this “fixed identity” that becomes challenged when our emotions overflow, especially when they “bleed” from one adverse interaction into another encounter. We need to be able to “shake loose the rigidity” by making our sense of self more permeable – open to new experiences, insights and feedback.

As we grow in mindfulness through exploring different forms of meditation on a consistent basis, we can develop a more balanced and permeable view of our self. We can build our resilience and wellbeing through developing awareness, connection, insight and purpose.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Practical Mindfulness for Profound Effects

In the recent online Mindful Healthcare Summit, Jon Kabat-Zinn spoke about the profound effects of practical mindfulness. While the context he spoke about was the healthcare arena – doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and related roles – his comments have universal application because they relate to us as human beings and are built on the latest neuroscience findings.

Getting out of our heads

Jon describes us as “perpetually self-distracting” – we continuously distract ourselves from the task at hand through our thoughts which are incessantly active. Disruptive advertising in social media aid and abet this self-distraction to the point where mobile devices are now described as “weapons of mass distraction“.

Jon encourages us to be awake to the world around us – to the people and nature that surround us. He suggests we need to move out of the “thought realm” into the “awake realm”. He comments that when we are in the shower in the morning, we are more likely to be mentally at a meeting rather than aware of the sensation of the water on our skin. When we arrive at work, we are likely to be thinking about, and talking about, the traffic we encountered on the way.

He suggests that a very simple practical exercise when we wake up is to be consciously aware of our body – to “really wake up” and feel the sensation in our legs, our feet, our arms. He urges us not to start the day by getting lost in thought but to start by inhabiting our own body. When we do so, we open ourselves to the profound effects of being present in the moment, of being open to our capacity for focus and inner creativity.

Listening to others

Jon maintains that “listening is a huge part of mindfulness practice”. To truly listen, you need to be present to the other person – not lost in your own thoughts. When you attend to the other person through active listening, they “feel met, seen and encountered”. Jon draws on the work of Dr. Ron Epstein to support this assertion. Ron, the author of Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity, established through his research and medical practice that “attending” achieved improved health outcomes for both the patient and the doctor.

Being fully present

Jon maintains that while meditation and other mindfulness practices build your awareness, the essence of mindfulness is to be fully present whatever you are doing. He argues that “the kindest thing you can do to yourself is to be present in the moment”. Jon reminds us that “tomorrow is uncertain, yesterday is over” so to live in the past or the future is self-defeating, disabling and potentially harmful to our health and well-being. He encourages us to meet each day (which is all that we have) with a clear intention – a commitment to make a positive and caring contribution to whatever is our life/work endeavour. This will have the profound effect of enhancing our own mental health and resilience, while creating an environment that is mentally healthy for others.

Tapping into our inner resources

Sometimes we can be so focused on the needs (or expectations) of others that we overlook the need for self-caring in the face of the stresses of life and work. He challenges us to befriend our self by tapping into our deep inner resources and “boundaryless awareness“. He contends from his own research and practice in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) that our bodies are “intrinsically and genetically self-healing” and that we are our own “deepest resource for health and well-being”. We need to access these healing inner resources through the practice of mindfulness in our daily life and work.

As we grow in mindfulness through mindful action in our life and work and mindfulness practices, we can tap our limitless inner resources, become increasingly self-healing, develop mentally healthy environments for others and achieve a higher level of fulfillment and happiness.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Sustaining the Practice of Mindfulness

In previous posts I have suggested that to sustain the practice of mindfulness you need to start small. Starting small can even involve as little as one mindful breath at a time. Chade-Meng Tan recommends that you start with less than you imagine is possible – so that you experience a sense of success early. I have also discussed the defences that we employ when trying to sustain self-compassion meditation.

Strategies for sustaining mindfulness practice

Meditation teacher Tara Brach offers additional strategies for maintaining your practice of mindfulness:

  • Practice daily – however short the time you have available. This establishes a momentum and develops a habit.
  • Find somewhere conducive to meditation or other mindfulness practice. Noise and activity in the background can be very distracting and makes silence and focus very difficult. Make it easier for yourself by finding a quiet place and time for your practice.
  • Be conscious of your posture – ensure you begin in a relaxed position that you can revisit daily. This enables your mind to capture the positive bodily sensations associated with your practice.
  • Avoid self-judgment – do not criticise yourself if your mind wanders or if you are unable to sustain lengthy mindfulness practice. The process of bringing your attention back to your focus following a distraction actually builds your “awareness muscle“.
  • Engage your body – bringing your attention to your body and the tensions within can help to ground you and clear away your thoughts. If bodily tension is regularly impacting your ability to sustain your practice, a full body scan can be helpful.
  • Use an anchor to enable you to drop into the present moment easily. The anchor can be anything that enables you to capture the positive sensation of your mindfulness practice. I use the process of joining my fingertips from one hand to those on my other hand. This tends to generate energy and a tingling feeling in my hands. It is something I can access anywhere at any time during the day – whether sitting at my desk, standing, travelling in the train or attending a meeting. Tara offers a list of useful anchors that you can explore for your own use.
  • Persistence is critical – do not give up because the positive gains are often just around the corner. Practice becomes easier over time if you persist and the gains grow exponentially.
  • Deepen your ability to be present in the moment. Tara suggests that a key question to ask is, “What is happening inside me now – can I treat this with acceptance?”. As a general principle, supplementing your standard, daily mindfulness practice with other forms of mindfulness throughout the day can add to the benefits you experience and serve to reinforce your daily practice. For example, in an earlier post I discussed some ways to be more mindful at work. Practice at home, supplemented by mindful practices at work, can be mutually reinforcing.
  • Employ the power of positive emotions – you can practice loving-kindness meditation or gratitude meditation to help you deal with difficult emotions experienced during your practice of mindfulness.

As we grow in mindfulness through sustained, daily practice we can enhance our inner awareness and increase the benefits that accrue from being in the present moment in a positive, constructive and peaceful way.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Saying “Yes” to What We Are Feeling Now

Tara Brach highlights the fact that we spend a lot of our time in a belief trance, lost in thought and focused on going somewhere – looking towards what is coming up in the future. We overlook the present which is the real source of happiness, creativity and calm. She tells the story of the Dalai Lama being interviewed and being asked “What is the happiest moment of your life?” He responded, after a thoughtful moment, “Now”.

Tara suggests that we are strongly conditioned to not be present but to be “on our way to somewhere else”. We view some future moment as the most important in our life when the present moment is really the most important – it is what really matters. This leads to an honest inquiry, “What is it that takes us away from the present?” We can check in on ourselves as each day progresses and become more aware of what is consuming our thoughts.

What is going on for us in our virtual reality?

Tara points out that we are effectively living in a “virtual reality” – disconnected from our senses and the world around us as we become totally absorbed in our thoughts. Underlying this state of “lost in thought” are our embedded wants and fears – what we think we want and what we fear . We become preoccupied with the thought that something is not quite right, that something that should be here is missing. Invariably, this leads to the conclusion that there is “something wrong with our self”.

This preoccupation with deficit in our life leads to a sense of unworthiness. Tara maintains that meditation is a way to wake up from this preoccupation with negative self-evaluation. She explains that meditation has two “wings” – the awareness wing that notices what is going on for us and the kindness wing that treats us with self-compassion. In the final analysis, meditation leads us to accept ourselves non-judgmentally.

A guided meditation – coming home to “yes’

Tara provides a guided practice which she calls, Coming Home to Yes. After becoming grounded through your breathing, you are encouraged to focus on a conflict that is current in your life that generates “difficult emotions”, but that is not overly dramatic. The practice involves exploring the two wings of meditation – awareness and self-compassion.

The focal situation needs to be something that created strong negative emotions such as resentment or envy or that resulted in your acting in a way that you wished you hadn’t – that led to some regret. The meditation involves visualising the catalytic situation and revisiting the strong emotions generated – experiencing them in their full depth and breadth.

When you are able to name your feelings, you can focus on the nature of your reactivity – is it reflected in fight, flight or freezing? Tara encourages you to notice what you are doing when you are trying to resume control – to prevent the reactivity by saying “no” to your emotions, disowning them because they make you feel “less”. You can sense the “no” in your body, mind and heart – opening to the very real experience of your resistance to these negative emotions.

After interrupting the reflective process with a few deep breaths, you can revisit the situation, the triggers, the emotions and instead of saying “no”, you can say “yes” – letting the strong negative emotions “just be”, not denying or acting on them. This gives yourself permission to own these feelings – to allow what is. It does not mean that you automatically accept the actions of the other person, but that you allow yourself to feel anger or hurt, to be real in the situation. You can sense the experience of “yes” in your body so that you can revisit this sensation when a situation in the future engenders strong negative emotions. As Tara points out, in the process you are experiencing the two wings of meditation, awareness and self-compassion.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection on our strong negative emotions, we can learn to own the emotions rather than denying them or acting on them. We can say “yes” to their existence.

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Stop Complaining and Whinging: A Mindfulness Approach

When we complain, we are expressing dissatisfacion with someone, something, or some event. When we whinge we are involved in repeated complaining. Complaining and whinging can become habituated behaviours that are difficult to change. Left unattended, these behaviours can become toxic for ourselves and those around us. However, they can be successfully addressed by a mindfulness approach.

Michael Dawson explains how he attempted to stop his own complaining and whinging behaviour. He decided that he would attempt to stop any form of complaining and whinging over an extended period of 21 days but found that it took him six months to achieve the targeted period. He found that the process of complaining and whinging pervaded his life – at work, at home and en route to various places. The first benefit of his focus on his behaviour was a growing awareness of how often he indulged in making a complaint or whinging – the beginning of mindfulness.

Why is it so difficult to stop complaining and whinging?

Complaining and whinging can very easily become an unhealthy habit. It can be reinforced by others around us. We can use it as a conversation opener – there is nothing surer to generate a response than to articulate a complaint about something. This behaviour is often unconscious and can become a constant part of our life without our being aware that it is happening – unless someone tells us that is what is happening. We can end up complaining about every aspect of our life – the weather, our boss, our life partner, our work, our location, our colleagues, and a former associate or partner. This fault-finding behaviour can become pervasive and very difficult to stop.

Another reinforcing factor is that complaining and whinging activate the negative bias of our brain. The result is that we see only the dark clouds, rather than the “silver lining”. We can develop an unconscious, negative bias that can be further reinforced by social media comments and caustic criticism. It can become hard to resist the temptation to participate in the negative commentary.

The effects of complaining and whinging

The preoccupation with what is negative in our lives can lead to depression. It creates a mindset that is unbalanced and blinds us to what is good, joyful and beautiful in our lives. It can become a deep grove that is difficult to shift because the associated neural pathways have been continually strengthened by reinforcement.

Complaining and whinging can negatively impact our relationships at work and at home. People around us will come to resent our negative bias and, where possible, avoid us or act aggressively towards us. Our negative mindset and its effects on others can lead us to slip into cynicism where we begin to distrust the motives of others, and this, in turn, can drain the energy of other people. So, we end up with a vicious circle, compounded by our lack of internal and external awareness. To avoid self-analysis, we will then begin to blame others for our deteriorating relationships.

A mindfulness approach to stop complaining and whinging

Michael described his mindfulness exercise to stop complaining and whinging in his life. However, any mindfulness activity designed to increase our awareness of our undesirable behaviour in this area can be a useful means to stop this habit.

If you regularly write a diary, you can make complaining and whinging behaviour a focus of your diary entries – recording how often these behaviours occur and what the catalysts are for your repeated behaviour. You might also reflect on an incident where someone you interact with regularly makes an observation about you such as, “you are always negative”.

At other times, you might meditate on a recent conflict that has occurred and explore whether you had engaged in expressing a complaint or whinging about something the other person has done or failed to do. The aim is to firstly raise your awareness of what you are doing and its effects on yourself and others and then progressively stopping yourself from engaging in complaining or whinging. You can begin to move from reflection-on-action to reflecting-in-action, developing the skill to stop yourself in the course of engaging in this negative behaviour.

If our complaints are directed at the clutter in our life, we can learn from Marie Kondo’s philosophy of developing a mindset focused on what brings joy to our life. In her book, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying, she identifies ways to develop a joy-oriented mindset through our approach to tidying our house. This requires reflection on what brings joy to us from amongst our collections of clothes, books, papers and miscellaneous items.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection, self-observation and guided sorting, we can become more aware of our complaining and whinging habit and develop the motivation to change our behaviour to improve our own quality of life and the richness of our relationships. By adopting a mindfulness approach, we can develop self-regulation, a sense of self-control and calmness.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay 

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Savour Life

This morning I attended the funeral service for our colleague and friend, Joyce Maris, who joined our human resource consulting organisation in 2014. She had previously worked for the Australian Taxation Office for 30 years. Joyce drowned in a rip while swimming at Kingscliff on Sunday 10 March 2019. She was 58 years old.

Joyce was someone who savoured life. She loved her tennis and was a member of a cycling group who rode regularly. She savoured her friendships and loved those who were closest to her – her mother, children and grandchildren. Joyce always had a smile, enjoyed travel and lived life to the full. Her cycling group had a spontaneous memorial ride on the Tuesday after her death – wearing black armbands, praying together and riding in silence for part of their journey as they each remembered their constant riding companion.

Savouring life

There is so much in life to savour – we can value our work, savour our achievements and rewards, value the space of being alone and even savour the freedom of boredom which can be the fertile ground for personal growth and creativity. If we can slow our life to appreciate what we have and express gratitude, we can begin to savour everything in our life and live fully in the present moment. Holly Butcher, who died of cancer at the age of 27, urged us to value every aspect of our lives, and refrain from contaminating the lives of others through complaining and whinging about minor issues.

Meditating on death

Joyce’s sudden death was a stark reminder of our own mortality and the unpredictability of our own death. Mindfulness teachers remind us of the benefits of meditating on death – overcoming the fear of dying and increasing our commitment to savour life. The death of a friend, family member or colleague can be a catalyst for us to meditate on our own death.

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection on the life of someone who has died and through meditating on death, we can learn to fully savour life and surf all its waves. We can admire the life balance achieved by someone like Joyce who was fit, professional in her consulting work and a loving mother and grandmother. We can hope, too, that Joyce is enjoying the light, love and peace reported in many near-death experiences.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Valuing Our Work

Michael A. Singer, in his audio program, The Untethered Soul at Work, reminds us of the value of work in our lives. Michael’s emphasis is on how work enables us to grow by removing the internal blockages that disable us in challenging work situations. However, we can value our work on several levels by being grateful for the opportunities it provides for personal expression and interaction with others, as well as for personal growth.

Being grateful for the work we have

Whether we are in paid work, voluntary work or are self-employed, there are many opportunities to value, and be grateful for, all that work provides. At one level, work adds to our sense of self-worth in that we can earn an income and/or provide services to others. If we can keep the end user of our efforts in mind, we can learn to appreciate what it is we do in the form of “work”. For example, in my role as an organisational consultant, I define my work as enabling people in organisations to have the conversations that they need to have about the things that are important to their productivity and mutual well-being.

We often take our work for granted, not valuing the work itself and the opportunities it provides. We can stop ourselves at any time during the day to express gratitude for some small aspect of our work – a simple gratitude exercise. We can precipitate this awareness and associated habit by occasionally making our work the focus of a gratitude meditation. In this way, both our work and ourselves will experience the benefits of gratitude.

Being grateful for the opportunities work provides for personal growth

Work, whatever form it takes, provides us with the opportunity to express ourselves; to use our knowledge, skills and experience to benefit others (and ourselves); and to be motivated to build our capabilities. As Michael points out, it also provides the learning environment for us to overcome the personal blockages that get in the road of our inner growth. Difficult tasks provide us with opportunities to understand ourselves better, develop discipline and realise a sense of achievement in overcoming personal obstacles that hold us back.

Being grateful for the opportunities work provides for developing relationships

One of the major sources of depression is when people feel isolated, cut off from other people. Work enables us to interact with others in a positive and collaborative way and to build constructive and valuable relationships. This benefit can be fully realised if we continuously work on our own personal growth and the development of mindfulness.

We can learn to value each interaction we have with others in a work context (even if we work from home), if we develop the skill to interact mindfully. This means being fully present, openly aware of the other person and engaging in active listening. If we connect and share through mindful conversations, we can create personal and social transformation.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation on our work and simple gratitude exercises related to work, we can learn to appreciate the opportunities provided to us for personal growth, self-development and self-expression and meaningful relationships. This can lead to personal transformation and contribute, even in some small way, to social transformation. We can contribute to connectednesss in a world where superficial connection through social media and damaging disconnection abounds.

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Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

How to Do Those Difficult Tasks That You Avoid or Put Off Doing

We all have tasks that we ought to do, or want to do, but that we avoid or put off because they are difficult or challenging. Sometimes our negative self-stories get in the road, other times we may have developed the habit of procrastinating without knowing why. We find ways to distract ourselves from the task or take on other tasks that are not important or time-sensitive. We may have difficulty building up the energy to tackle the task in addition to overcoming the personal barriers we create that prevent us from completing the task.

Leo Babauta, creator of the Zen Habits blog, offers a comprehensive strategy to address this problem of avoiding or putting off tasks. In his article, How to Do Your Scariest Tasks of the Day – with Joy, he introduces an approach that he describes as creating a “training container”. He discusses how to develop the training container and offers a number of steps to encourage you to undertake the associated training in a spirit of joy.

Creating a training container to develop the habit of tackling a difficult task

Leo is an internationally recognised expert on developing habits – he has 2 million readers who seek out his wisdom in this area. The training container (or dedicated block of time) acts as a routine (for a new habit) that can be developed to suit your own personal and work style and that, with persistence, becomes an integral part of your day (just like any other training or gym regimen).

The key elements for creating a training container are:

  1. Set aside a time of the day when you train yourself to do the task. It’s important to allocate a set time that suits your lifestyle and/or work pattern that you can dedicate to the training. I’m a morning person, so I find that mornings are best for training myself to complete a difficult task. You can let others know about your dedicated time and even set up a reminder through the alarm on your mobile phone. The time set aside may change as your circumstances change, e.g. when I was writing my PhD, I used to write at 4am for two hours before our baby woke up and before the phones started to ring.
  2. Set aside a place for this training. You can find a space that is different to your normal place of working so that you break free of environmental blockages associated with your procrastination. If I have a difficult task to work on, I go away from my office and work at the kitchen table (with a view) or go to a tolerant, coffee shop. If you have a recurrent difficult task, you can go to an alternative space daily and treat it as your training space.
  3. Set up a ritual for starting your scary/difficult task. Leo, who happens to be a mindfulness expert among other things, encourages you to develop a ritual at the start to focus on your intention and commitment to dedicate your attention fully to your task. This helps you to undertake your task mindfully, fully utilising the opportunity that the training container provides.
  4. Focus on a single task during your training session, do not multi-task. I learnt early on that if I start the morning with reading emails, I get side-tracked very easily and hours can pass before I get back to my difficult task or have to put it off to another day. If you find that you feast on the news, you will have to develop the discipline to put off chasing the news until you have finished your training session. This discipline of undertaking a single task during your training session, not only builds your capacity to focus but also enhances your productivity.
  5. Revisit your “why”. You need to get in touch with the fundamental reason you want to do the difficult task – Who are you doing it for?, Who will benefit from it? In my case, I try to keep my focus on my readers who come from all walks of life but who share many common personal difficulties that impact negatively on their lives. Richardo Semler suggests that you ask yourself three “why’s” to get to your deeper purpose. Focusing on purpose builds motivation.
  6. Express gratitude at the completion of your training session. Leo suggests that initially you set a timer for your training session. He urges you not to rush off to something else when the session is completed, but to take the time for a brief gratitude meditation. As he puts it, “Bow to the practice, and to yourself, out of gratitude.” In the long run, you will certainly be grateful for having set aside the time, place and focus for your training container.

I have found these tactics very useful in creating the discipline and focus to write this blog. Yesterday, I completed my 300th post. I now have a set time and place every second day when I write my blog and maintain a single focus throughout the research and writing involved. I have found, too, that some preparatory work in the form of thinking or research before my writing day also helps me to start writing because I am not starting from a blank sheet. So, jotting down some notes during the day may be helpful when you come to tackle your task within the training container.

Training with joy

Leo provides a number of ideas to help you bring joy to the challenge of completing your training session. Two of these steps – dropping into your body & staying with your sensations – are consistent with my previous discussion on managing anxiety with mindfulness.

Leo also suggests that playing some music can help to achieve the mindset and focus necessary to realise joy in undertaking your difficult task. I play classical music when I write this blog. I find that Mozart’s music strengthens my concentration and increases my relaxation. I have yet to follow Leo’s final step, “Dance with the chaos- let your body move to the music”. He also suggests that the dance can be figurative in the sense of having fun while you are encountering uncertainty and venturing into an aspect of your life that you used to avoid or put off.

As we grow in mindfulness – by bringing a disciplined, mindful, focused, curious, grateful and joyful attention to a difficult task – we can experience greater productivity, energy and sense of achievement. Overcoming procrastination takes time and persistence but having a plan like the “training container” can help us to remove the blockages that get in the road of achieving our tasks and associated, meaningful endeavours.

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Image by rawpixel from Pixabay 

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Exploring Awareness Without Boundaries

In a previous post, I explored Diana Winston’s discussion of the three dimensions of awareness – narrow, broad and choiceless. In this post, I want to explore “boundaryless awareness” which is often called “choiceless awareness“. I will be drawing on a guided meditation for resting in boundaryless awareness provided by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The expansiveness of awareness

Jon reminds us that our awareness can take in an endless array of sensations, thoughts, and emotions as well as conscious awareness of the fact that we are observing, thinking or experiencing. Our awareness is like the unbounded expanse of the sky or the galaxies beyond.

With narrow awareness we hone in on a particular focus such as our breathing, sounds around us or a specific self-story; with broad awareness we open ourselves to all that is going on around us. With boundaryless awareness we progressively open to our total inner and outer reality without constraint – not choosing, entertaining or engaging – just being-in-the-moment. Jon reminds us that we are often extremely narrow in our awareness, just fixated on ourselves – e.g. on our addiction, our pain or our boredom. Boundaryless awareness creates a sense of freedom – moving beyond self-obsession to openness to what is.

A guided meditation on boundaryless awareness

In Jon’s meditation podcast, provided by mindful.org, he takes us through a series of stages that gradually open our consciousness to the expansiveness of our awareness – beyond depth, breadth and width.

In the 30 minute meditation, he begins by having you focus on the “soundscape” – the sounds that surround you and the space in between each sound. He encourages you to “be the hearing” – to rest in the very act of hearing, thus deepening awareness not only of the sounds but also of the fact that you are hearing them.

In the next stage of progressing in awareness, Jon suggests that you now move your awareness to the air that you breathe and the sensation of the air on your skin as well as consciousness of its progress through your body. You could even extend this to breathing with the earth, so that you are attuned to your participation in the “breathing globe”.

Jon points out that while all this is going on your body is experiencing sensations – aches and pains, pressure of the chair on your back and legs, the sense of being grounded with your feet on the floor. [As I participated in this meditation, I even had the sensation of movement in my fingers (which were touching) – lightening the pressure of touch, growing thicker and expanding outwards.] Jon suggests that you let your awareness float across your body sensations as you breathe, sit, hear and feel.

You can extend your awareness to your thoughts, not entertaining them but growing conscious that you are thinking – letting your thoughts come and go as they float away. This awareness simultaneously embraces feelings elicited by your thoughts and accompanying images and memories.

In the final stage of this guided meditation, that Jon calls “one last jump”, you allow your mind and heart to be “boundless, hugely spacious, as big as the sky or space itself” – an awareness that has no bounds like the “boundarylessness” of awareness itself in its uninhibited form.

Stability through narrowing your focus

If you find that you need to stabilise your mind as you experience the unaccustomed sensations of “weightlessness” or unbounded awareness, you can return to a narrower focus – your breath or the sounds around you. In returning to a narrow awareness, you can sense the limits of this focus within the broader field of unbounded awareness. Boundaryless awareness, however, is accessible to you at any time you choose to pursue it.

As we grow in mindfulness by resting in our awareness -narrow, broad or boundaryless – through meditation, we come to realise the expansiveness of awareness and the freedom and calm that lies beyond self-absorption, with all its various manifestations such as addiction, negative self-stories or depression.

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Image by O12 from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

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