Tag: daily routine

Making a New Year’s Resolution

At this time of the year, we are encouraged to make New Year’s resolutions covering each of the major areas of our life, e.g., relationships, health, fitness, work, and finances.  What we typically do is end up with a list of things to improve on.  Sometimes they remain just a list and are not actioned.  Other times we add them to our very full to-do list and they become another stressor and ammunition for beating up on ourselves if we don’t achieve them. 

It is interesting that experts in the area of habit formation suggest that we focus on a single habit in a single arena of our life and make an achievable resolution in relation to one aspect of this arena.  Leo Babauta, creator of the Zen Habits blog with a readership in excess of 2 million, is a strong advocate of focusing on a single habit and he reinforces this approach in his book, The Habit Guidebook: My Most Effective Habit Methods & Solutions.  Seth Godin, famous internet marketer and author of more than a dozen New York bestsellers, argues that you should start small, start now.

The role of mindfulness in habit formation

Leo maintains that mindfulness has a role to play In helping us to pursue our focused resolution and develop a new habit.  Mindfulness helps us to overcome negative thoughts, avoid procrastination, develop self-reinforcing strategies, appreciate our achievements (however small) and improve our overall self-management.  Leo argues that the self-awareness that we gain through mindfulness makes us conscious of the things that trigger undesirable habits, enables recognition of habituated responses, and serves as a refuge when the habit-pull becomes intense.  So, there are many ways that mindfulness can underpin and strengthen our New Year’s resolution.

Developing a habit of mindfulness

The advantage of concentrating on a mindfulness practice is that the benefits flow into all arenas of our life because so much of our life is interconnected.  We can see this in operation when we begin with a single habit in other arenas, e.g., our daily walk.  If we walk regularly, we tend to want to eat better, we get fitter, our mood improves and we are better able to relate effectively with others.  As mentioned above, mindfulness has this overflow effect through its power to develop focus, self-awareness, and self-regulation.

There are some key strategies that facilitate developing and sustaining a habit of mindfulness:

  • Start small – Chade-Meng Tan, author of  Search Inside Yourself and one of the creators of Google’s course of the samename,recommends starting with one breath at a time. 
  • Develop a daily routine – build towards a daily practice.  This may take some time – choosing an appropriate practice and finding the right part of the day to practice.
  • Link the mindfulness practice to other things that you do daily  – this ensures that at least daily you are engaged in your mindfulness practice.  For example, I link a mindfulness practice to waiting time (which occurs often throughout a day, e.g., waiting for traffic lights to change).
  • Don’t beat up on yourself – if you miss a day here or there, do not cultivate negative self-talk such as “I’m hopeless, I can’t even maintain a single, small habit”.
  • Appreciate and reinforce your newly acquired habit – remind yourself of the benefits that you are gaining through your new habit. One way to reinforce your practice and maintain your motivation is to develop a personal mnemonic that captures the benefits you are experiencing.

Reflection

Focusing on one small habit initially provides flow-on benefits and tends to permeate many aspects of our life.  As we grow in mindfulness, we can be more present to what is happening around us, more able to engage in deep listening to others and be increasingly appreciative of the benefits that a new habit brings to our daily life.

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Image by alexvi82 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.

Discipline Creates Freedom and Success

Koya Webb, in her recent presentation at the You Can Heal Your Life Summit, spoke passionately about how discipline creates freedom and success.  She made the point that discipline underpinned her success as a college track star and more recently as a celebrated holistic health healer and yoga instructor.   Koya sustained two serious injuries that shattered her dream of becoming an Olympic track and field competitor.  It was a breathing meditation incorporated in yoga practice that enabled her to recover from the dark hole of depression after her injury and go on to establish a highly successful career as a globally recognised yoga teacher.  Koya has recently published her book, Let Your Fears Make You Fierce.

Koya maintained that discipline incorporating mindfulness practices leads to freedom because it releases you from negative self-talk and fear that depletes your energy and power and enables you to create the life you want and to make a difference in the world.  She recommends a daily routine incorporating mindfulness practices in the morning and at lunch time.  Koya suggests starting your morning practice before you become lost in, and stressed by, your email, text messages or your news channel.  I have found this approach essential to sustain my daily practice of researching and writing this blog.  Koya’s suggestion concerning a lunch-time daily practice is designed to break down the accumulated stress of the morning.

A daily routine of mindfulness practices

Koya described her daily routine that incorporated several mindfulness practices.  Her recommendation is to develop your own rituals to create a daily routine that suits your preferences but engages your body and mind to reinforce your mind-body connection and tap into your life force.  Some of the elements that make up Koya’s routine are as follows:

  • Breathing meditation – Koya begins each day with several breathing meditations, some involving slow, deep breathing, while others require quick, sharp exhalations.  These breathing exercises clear away fear and anxiety if you envision the outbreath releasing you from their hold.  The in-breath is envisaged as drawing in energy and power.
  • Movement – yoga is Koya’s preferred choice of movement; other people may prefer Tai Chi or similar meditation-in-motion practice.  Her YouTube© channel provides videos offering training in several yoga poses for different levels of practitioners, along with inspirational videos on holistic health practices.
  • Connect to nature – there are numerous ways to connect to nature and enjoy its energising and healing benefits.  For example, you can be mindful of the breeze, cloud formations, the movement of birds and butterflies and the sight of rivers, oceans or mountains. 
  • Visualisation – the focus here is to visualise a positive, ideal future to replace negative perceptions about the past or present or a fearful future.
  • Writing a gratitude journal – gratitude has numerous healing benefits and serves to replace fear with hope, envy with appreciation and apathy with energy.  It also blocks out negative self-evaluations and diminishing judgments about self-worth.  Writing itself reinforces and deepens insight, leading to growth and development.

Koya maintains that the discipline of a daily routine incorporating mindfulness practices enables you to set up your day so that it works for you, not against you.  She argues that if you establish a daily ritual for your mindfulness practice you will “put yourself in a higher state of vibration”, your energy will flow more fully, freed from the blockages of fear and anxiety.

Reflection

The discipline of daily practice is difficult, but the rewards are great.  It requires forgoing some things and making space in our lives to enrich it in a holistic way.  As we grow in mindfulness through these diverse mindfulness practices and the discipline of a daily ritual, we can restore our energy and motivation and experience freedom and success.

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Image by NickyPe 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.

Mindfulness at Work

David Allan maintains that the best place to meditate is at work.  In part, this is because it is often in a work situation that you need to be calm and have a clear mind.  The cost of being frazzled at work is not only lost time through inability to focus but also lost creativity through inability to access the “spaciousness” of your mind.  You need to calm the busyness of your mind to access this creativity.

It is also very true that we spend so much of our time at work that a large part of our day (more than a third) is consumed with thinking and doing, not just being present.  This means, too, that we are not taking the opportunity to access the full benefits of our mindfulness practice developed elsewhere on a daily basis.

David Allan found that he was able to book a relatively underutilised room for 15 minutes a day to enable him to undertake some form of meditation at work on a daily basis.  He found that this short period of conscious mindfulness practice created real productivity benefits throughout his day and served to break the work stress cycle.

Ways to be mindful at work

In a comprehensive article, Shamash Alidina suggests ten ways to be more mindful at work.  I have identified four of these suggestions below that are readily implementable:

  1. Intent to be consciously present – this entails beginning your work day with the clear intent to be present as often as you can.  This intent extends to controlling your thoughts when on-task, maintaining focus even on mundane tasks, working a little slower when the opportunity presents (e.g. after a rush to meet a deadline) and reminding yourself of the very clear benefits for work and life offered by mindfulness.
  2. Use brief mindfulness exercises – there are many opportunities throughout the working day to engage in brief mindfulness exercises.  These could entail open awareness, awareness of our senses, mindful walking or a short compassion meditation.  Sometimes in the workplace we need to engage in a brief self-compassion meditation, instead of beating up on ourselves for a mistake or for unconsciously hurting someone else with our words  or actions.
  3. Overcome the temptation of multitasking – this means consciously avoiding distactions (such as checking social media or the news every few minutes), staying focused on a single task at a time and organising your day where possible so that you can do like tasks together.
  4. Use reminders of the need for mindfulness – Shamash has some detailed strategies here that are very helpful.  Some of these entail linking a work activity to a mindfulness practice, e.g. when the phone rings, taking a deep breath and reminding yourself to be fully present to the caller.   Gradually, with regular practice, these reminders can immediately elicit mindfulness.  Some people may find a mindfulness app an appropriate reminder or an aid to mindfulness at work.
Further ways to be mindful at work

Eckhart Tolle in his talk to Google staff suggested ways that they could be mindful at work, including mindful breathing at their workstation.  Another mindfulness practice that can be employed at your desk is to occasionally focus on physically grounding yourself by ensuring that your feet are flat on the floor and your legs and back are straight.   This can be combined with mindful breathing.  If you are facilitating a workshop you could practise mindfulness through a brief loving kindness meditation directed towards one individual who may be struggling or towards the whole participant group.

Grow in mindfulness at work

If we want to grow in mindfulness through our behaviour at work, we need the strong intent to make the most of the opportunities for mindfulness that work presents.  Regular practice of mindfulness elsewhere will help to build this intent as well as consciousness of the opportunities for mindfulness at work.  Starting small with a single mindfulness practice maintained over three weeks will mean that the practice, such as mindful walking, will become embedded in your daily routine.  You can progressively expand these focused practices so that you become unconsciously competent at utilising opportunities for mindfulness at work.

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

Image source: courtesy of FirmBee on Pixabay

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.