Over the past couple weeks, I've been spending time each morning listening to a Course on Insight Timer App called "Mindfulness Daily." The short (10 minute) talks are given alternately by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. I wanted to record my notes on each session on the blog, but maybe in chunks of 10.
I would make this a "5 Things I Learned From" but there's too much to say!
Day 1: Pausing for presence. Rumi - "Do you make regular visits to yourself?" Poet: "Create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands." Our minds wander. Learning to pause brings you to what's happening. The pause frees you from habits and patterns and creates a space for clarity and empathy and respond in a balanced way. You can remember what's really important. Let your intention be to carry this quiet aliveness into your next activity.
Day 2: Conscious relaxing. Our lives are often filled with tension and stress, rush and pressure, being carried away. We are often caught in the flight/fight/freeze. We can shift to a healthy way of living. We can pause the busy 'doing' which undermines the quality of life. Practice: notice tension, undo, untangle it; set intention for a relaxed presence. Come into stillness. Imagine: ice -> water -> gas. Receive your breath in a softening belly. Relax each area of body one by one, then open to feel body at once as a field of sensation. Feel calm, open presence. Feel life living through you. (intention:) Start your next activity with relax, spacious presence.
Day 3: Coming Back to Your Senses. (Kornfeld). We are often "lost in thought" worrying, planning, regretting, waiting to arrive somewhere else, being somewhere other than where we are and missing the landscape we've been through. This is a habit, to space out, to be somewhere else. References Joshua Bell/ Washington Post experiment. We can deepen our sense of presence to awake to our senses. Practice: notice places of contact of our body on chair, our clothing, the air as it touches our face. Be receptive to scents in the air, receive the symphony of sounds, let it wash through you, not just with your ears, hear distant, nearby. Feel the soles of your feet, inside your chest, head. Feel life flow through you, listening to moment to moment experience. Sense what's present here and now. Let yourself appreciate this awake inner space of presence and the expression of aliveness that is here. As you complete this exercise, know you can take this to what you're doing next. [each lesson ends with a 1-question survey. today's is "what causes you to space out of daily life?" (a) urgent tasks I've yet to do, (b) the mundane (driving the same route, shopping same place), (c) thinking about what I need to do next and where I need to be, (d) thinking about the past. Then is says the total number of people who have responded and the percentage of responses for each answer.
Day 4: Attitude of Friendliness. (Brach) Your attitude can be one of interest, compassion, patience, warmth. What's typical attitude toward the self? Lacking, falling short, feeling not enough. Learn to be a friend to yourself... like training a puppy. Develop a sense of connectedness. Example of gorilla field scientist who gets closer to them because he doesn't bring a gun. Rest in an atmosphere of ease. Bring a smile to your hear, eyes, jaw, eyes, heart, chest, stomach. Bring a sense of warmth and friendliness and receptive openness. Q: are you frequently judgmental of yourself? (usually, when I make mistakes, when I fall short of a goal, when it comes from others)
Day 5: Mindfulness of Breath. We breath together with all living things; when something stressful happens, breath to give yourself space. Don't control breath; just be aware of it. It helps train the mind in attention. It's the art of steady focused attention. Where do you feel breath? Put your kind attention . Feel next 3; relax mind and body; feel next 3. This breath; just now. See if you can do 4, 5, 6 breaths with calm mindfulness.
Day 6: Calming and Steadying with the Breath. This mindful breathing exercise will help your memory, planning, reasoning. It will help you reduce being jumpy and scattered. New tool: say "calm" on the inflow and "ease" on the outflow. Settle in with dignity and graciousness. You can do 1-minute sessions throughout the day. You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. You can set "limits and expectations" for others. Your breath is always there for you to use.
Day 7: Counting the Breath(JK). Observe your natural breath with kind attention; steady and focus your attention. Build muscle of steadiness and focus. Count breaths: 1->5; 1->10; count backwards as a way to remain alert. Let the number be a whisper; 95% is on breath. Start with 2 deeper breaths, then atention on natural breath. No where to go. Just repeated returns. Grow the counts from 3->5->10. Practice like an athlete or a musician, honing your skill.
Day 8: Deepening the Focus. Every breath is a wave. Notice how each breath has a beginning, middle, end. Notice stillness in gap between breaths; notice how breath naturally begins. Be a steady witness with kind and careful attention. Let steadiness grow: "a few minutes amidst the waves." Relaxed and careful breaths. Steady witness of body. Q: do you encounter difficulty in focusing on things? Under stress, sometimes, when I'm overwhelmed by external distractions, I hope to develop this skill
Day 9: Mindfulness of the body. We are conditioned to escape from unhappy sensations by grasping or pushing away, becoming numb of running away. Put one hand in front of you, move it back and forth, feel the sensations from the inside; then sense the other hand. Feel the aliveness, receive sensations from inside out. Then feet, then up legs to the head. Return to the intimate receptive presence of the breath. Through the day, periodically pause... fell the body from the inside out. Q: how attuned are you to the sensations in your body? limited to intense sensation (pain hunger), not sure, it def needs work, still working on attention to breath.
Day 10: Feeling from the Inside Out. Do a Mindful "survey" of the body. This will help you listen to the messages about your well being from your body, connect to others, and have a visceral connection to the natural world. Will help us feel love, joy, empathy, creativity, empowerment and plant ourselves in the living universe. Imagine your body as a house: where are you living? Scan body for tension. Widen to sense whole field: breath and feel sensations. Come back to home base of feeling: hands? Rest in this. Q: what's your relationship with your body like? I only feel sensations on the surface, I tend to view ift from afar, generally unhealthy, it's something that could use improvement.
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