Tag: Stress Reduction

In meditation as in life

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So much of what is involved in meditation instruction is a matter of finding ways to keep it simple. Everyone knows how to breathe: anyone can feel the breath as it fills the chest and moves it in and out of the nose. It’s like climbing stairs. We all know how to take that first step; what is not so easy is taking one step after another after another, especially since in our practice the staircase is never-ending and we can’t be sure where it leads. Yet at each step, all we have to do is take the next step, the next breath.

Barry Magid, Ending the pursuit of Happiness

Dropping the habitual

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When the retreat center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society, first opened, someone created a mock brochure describing a retreat there, with …a wonderful made up motto for us: “It is better to do nothing than to waste your time.” I loved that motto, and thought it exemplified a lot about how meditation serves to help us unplug. Although that motto never made it into our official presentation, it actually was an accurate description of mindfulness meditation. Basically, we enter into mindfulness practice so that we can learn how to do nothing and not waste our time, because wasting our time is wasting our lives.

We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by, those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting –  resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.

Sharon Salzberg, How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Live

The simple nature of practice

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

One way to bring the mind into the present – to ground ourselves in basic meditation – is to meditate on the body and the breath. We can do this whenever we get lost or carried away by thoughts or feelings: just remember, I’m still breathing, the body is still here. That will ground you. It will establish mindfulness in the present. Emotionally we can resist this simple practice. Maybe we’re looking for something else. It doesn’t seem important enough just to reflect on the breath, on our posture, or on the feeling of the body as it is; we tend to dismiss them. But I encourage you to have complete faith in this practice of “just the present moment,” just what’s happening with the breath and with the body.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Bearable Irritation of Being

Transforming, not running away

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If this job is no good, change jobs, If this wife is no good, change wives. If this town is no good, change towns … The underlying thinking is that the reasons for these troubles is outside of you – in the location, in others, in circumstances …This way of thinking and seeing is an all-too-prevalent trap.  There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation … There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges.  In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become our teacher

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Small pockets of air

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It’s a cultural requirement that everyone should at least put on a show of maximum stress. But the average day is not a solid wall of activity — it’s more like Swiss cheese. The key to finding a little bit of personal time is to look for the small pockets of air. Remember, we’re talking about only a few minutes at a time. Most people don’t have the luxury of big two-to-four hour blocks of time, but nearly everyone can find one-to-twenty minute blocks. When you identify them in your own life, schedule them. When you come to the appointed hour, drop everything and get settled for meditation. If you’re still having trouble letting go, meditate anyway. It is better to meditate while distracted than not to meditate at all. If you miss a session because you can’t drop what you are doing, no worries: just get yourself back on track at the next appointed time.

David Dillard-Wright, Meditation for Multitaskers

How some of the world’s biggest companies are embracing mindfulness

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The Financial Times is probably not the first paper that comes to mind if you were considering reading  about mindfulness. However, recently they ran a very good report on how meditation and mindfulness are  part of a huge change in some parts of corporate culture. Some of it is in response to the challenging economic climate we work in, as 25% of all large U.S. companies have launched stress reduction initiatives in recent years. However, some is due to a change in understanding, a recognition of the health needs of employees, and a belief that inner and outer life has to be balanced in a happy and productive employee.  What is encouraging is seeing how some companies are structuring this holistic balance into their environments. For example, General Mills, the company behind Cheerios cereal and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, have a meditation room in every building in their Campus, where employees can drop in to recharge batteries, renew focus or simply take a break from meetings or conference calls. A lot of the U.S and world’s leading companies are involved in this new dialogue, such as Google. Twitter, LinkedIn and Target, and the article goes on to show that, besides health benefits, it also seems to have an impact on cost savings, productivity and leadership quality.

It’s about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected, says Janice Marturano, General Mills’ deputy general counsel, who founded the programme there. That compassion to ourselves, to everyone around us – our colleagues, customers – that’s what the training of mindfulness is really about.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in this article and the whole of it is worth a read. You can check it out here:

The mind business – FT.com (3)