Mindfulness

The older I get, the more I find that my level of mindfulness determines my level of happiness. I would also include related qualities, such as having clearly defined goals, self-discipline, mental clarity and concentration. Without mindfulness (i.e. the awareness of one's own thoughts, feelings, and actions), the mind can just wander off all over the place, skipping from one association to the next, one fear or memory after another, a tendency that Buddhists vividly refer to as "monkey mind". Without mindfulness you can feel as if your life is passing you by, as if you have no control and time is being "stolen" out from under you. And everything starts with the mind first - if the mind is a mess, then the feelings and actions that result will also be a mess (and vice versa).

When I was a teenager and had unlimited free time during summer vacations, I found that if occupied myself with working on my goals and interests that time would just fly by very joyfully. My mind would be so wrapped up in accomplishing goals or learning something new that I didn't wander off into other thoughts or concerns. My mind kicked into gear and focused on one thing and that was the happiest time of all. Such experiences are often described as being in a state of "flow".

But why is it so hard to maintain mindfulness? Without self-discipline to put mindfulness into practice, one can fall into a lesser passive state - sitting for hours watching TV, browsing the Internet, playing video games, drinking alcohol, etc. After wallowing in the passive state you can end up feeling like you didn't accomplish anything. The time flew by with little or no benefit and you might as well have been asleep! Now, this is not to say that mindless leisure and relaxation do not have a valuable purpose. I am all in favor of a little daydreaming or mindless fun activities once in a while to recharge my energy level. The problem comes when you realize that copious amounts of time escaped into nothingness! Weeks, months, years!

Here are a couple of nice quotes from Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a monetary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness.

And this:

The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.

And this fits in well with another life-changing book I love, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. A quote from the very first chapter:

If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health, and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings - everything!

One part of my daily mindfulness practice now includes a spreadsheet in which I monitor the status of my current goals. Every day I check off whether or not I spent some time working towards each goal. This has really helped me tremendously to see where my time has been going! In the past I would create "to-do" lists or schedules, which invariably always seemed to fail. I would not do what I told myself to do, leading to guilty feelings and further procrastination; a vicious feedback loop of failure. But this is different! It is simple self-observation of one's actions and use of time. If you can simply observe yourself, without judgment, you can see what you have been doing with your time and then make adjustments or changes as you go along. It helps to create balance in your use of time, which in turn helps to facilitate the "flow" experience, leading to a higher quality of experiencing life itself.

Tomorrow I will share with you a screen shot of my spreadsheet chart and goals.