Mindfulness
I think the training in gentleness has a lot to do with learning to observe without judgement. The mind is made to wander and dart around. So there’s no reason to condemn or ridicule it when it’s doing its job. The more often you bring yourself back to the present moment, the easier it gets because you have created new circuitry. Like walking a path through a forest, there eventually will be a trail to guide you home.
When we mediate we all pass through five phases.
The first is setting the intention. As you get better and better at meditating the intention changes, but for beginners, it’s this: I’m going to do my best to pay attention to the changing sensations of breath at the tip of my nose, AND, try to limit the time that my mind wanders.
The second phase is called “forgetting.” What that means is forgetting to attend to breath sensations. For beginners, forgetting is unconscious. They won’t know when they’ve forgotten the breath.
The third phase is “mind wandering.” Mind wandering is what happens immediately after forgetting, and it can last an indeterminate amount of time. But, if you’ve set a strong conscious intention to limit mind wandering, your subconscious mind will wake you up.
That’s the fourth phase, called “remembering.” Every time you remember, rejoice! You’ve done it right.
Then, phase five is replacing your attention on breath sensations and the process starts over. By positively reinforcing remembering, a person gets faster at recognizing mind wandering. Eventually, their meditative skill improves and they stop forgetting the breath altogether. That’s a milestone achievement. No untrained person can meditate for 12 min w/o forgetting the breath.
I had a coach tell me to write about my self and situation in the third person to understand what was going on better
How easy is it to help a friend, and so hard to see our own problems
Because we identify with our problems, and writing in this way helps us remove that
Be the observer.
We set an intention to be the observer. We develop awareness of our thoughts and then explore that awareness.
The example I remember from Mark is road rage. When experiencing road rage, imagine yourself as your own mother looking down at you from your rear view mirror. How do you look to her? Probably ridiculous. How does she feel about what she’s seeing? Probably wanting you to do better, be better, and live more in your higher self.
Viewing yourself from the 1st person persona of someone with qualities you want to embody is a bit of a hack for being the “observer.” This process often provides actionable insights and is a switch we can all flip with ease.
Eventually, you can just say to yourself, “How must I look right now” and then imagine that scene. Next, you can progress to catching it even earlier by thinking “Is my view on this correct? From what place am I reacting?” and those questions can help catch things before they manifest outwardly.
Buddhism involves visualizing and projecting the image of deities with qualities one wants to manifest within. I can get onboard with that and it’s related to this topic of being the observer. Of analyzing how you show up.
Outside of that, choosing to observe from a specific persona is my go-to hack. I always go with my mother. She never lets me down.
When I think of identity, it brings up the 2nd habit in Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the End in Mind.”
In the chapter, he asks that you picture yourself at your own funeral, and the people that love you the most and who means the most to you would take turns giving your eulogy.
It’s quite a powerful image, and his point is for you to start with the destination, on becoming the ideal version that you wish to be remembered by, and focus on working on those things in life.
So I envisioned my children, my partner, my close friends, and those are my “roles” or identities. At the end of the day, the end of my life, I want to have been be a good father, a good partner, a good friend.
What I realized today that is that in this scenario, it’s missing a crucial viewpoint: that of yourself. If you could give yourself a eulogy, what would you say? Did you treat yourself with compassion, love, patience? Were you driven or were you complacent? Did you find worth in yourself, regardless of your accomplishments?
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”