Quote of the day

It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

-Bruce Lee

Quote of the day

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

-ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Quote of the day

At the end of the day, I understand that life has road blocks, and life is like school – you’ll be tested; we gotta pass it.

-DJ Khaled

Quote of the day

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

-Albert Einstein

The formal practice of mindfulness meditation

The theory of mindfulness without the practice is like a lecture on hydration without drinking water. It’s very dry, and it doesn’t really do us much good. So this next section is going to be very much around how to apply mindfulness. The application of mindfulness can be divided into a few different areas. Firstly, there’s the formal practice of mindfulness meditation. It’s like the gym work for attention, if you like. But there’s no point in being mindful for 5, or 10, or 20 minutes practicing meditation, and then being unmindful 23 hours and 40, or 50, or 55 minutes in the day.

 So the aim of mindfulness meditation is to have a better opportunity to be mindful when we get out of the chair and re-engage with our day-to-day life. So that’s the informal practice of mindfulness. Now, implicit it in both the formal and the informal practice of mindfulness are also a range of cognitive practices. And the big four, as far as I’m concerned, in mindfulness, have to do with the relationship between perception and stress, letting go, acceptance, and presence of mind.

The little things

IT IS THE LITTLE THINGS THAT MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

There was a man taking a morning walk at on the beach. He saw that along with the morning tide came hundreds of starfish and when the tide receded, they were left behind and with the morning sun rays, they would die. The tide was fresh and the starfish were alive. The man took a few steps, picked one and threw it into the water. He did that repeatedly. Right behind him there was another person who couldn’t understand what this man was doing. He caught up with him and asked, “What are you doing? There are hundreds of starfish. How many can you help? What difference does it make?” This man did not reply, took two more steps, picked up another one, threw it into the water, and said, “It makes a difference to this one.”

 

What difference are we making? Big or small, it does not matter. If everyone made a small difference, we’d end up with a big difference, wouldn’t we?