5 elementos essenciais para spirituality
As the day progresses and your brain starts to tire, mindfulness can help you stay sharp and avoid poor decisions. After lunch, set a timer on your phone to ring every hour.
Learn how the technique of mental noting unwinds anxiety, reduces our reactivity and anchors us in our calm center.
Ideally, you should meditate when you feel calm but alert, and when you won’t be distracted. If you’re a morning person, then meditating in the morning might be perfect for you.
A mantra, or a word or phrase that you repeat to yourself silently, can be used as an anchor for your awareness during meditation. In some practices, a mantra is given to you by a teacher. You can also use your own.
Pair meditation with another daily activity, such as a 1-minute meditation as you wait for your morning coffee or tea to cool, or as you sit in the carpool lane.
Life is rarely ever quiet anyway. We can go into our meditation practice expecting that noises will happen, whether it’s loud music from a neighbor, a dog barking in the street, a truck backing up, or sounds in another room at home.
’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good
So what do I do? We can approach this common experience exactly like we approach distracting thoughts: the moment we realize we’re fidgeting, notice it, let it go, and return our focus to our breath.
Rasmus Hougaard is an internationally acknowledged expert in training the mind to be focused and clear at work. He is the founder of The Potential Project – a leading global provider of corporate based mindfulness solutions operating in 20 countries.
If sitting on the floor is uncomfortable for you, by all means, take a chair or another seat. Just make sure that you are comfortable, relaxed but alert, and can stay in that position for a while.
When we start to feel bored, restless, or doubtful during practice, we can easily remind ourselves of our intention. It can be the motivation we need to keep our commitment.
To better understand the power of focus and awareness, consider an affliction that touches nearly all of us: email addiction. Emails have a way of seducing our attention and redirecting it to lower-priority tasks because completing small, quickly accomplished tasks releases dopamine, a pleasurable hormone, in our brains.
Want to give it a try? With our eyes closed, bring our focus to the top of our heads. Slowly, begin to scan down. Spend about 20 seconds noticing vibration raising how each body part feels, then move on to the next.
According to neuroscience research, mindfulness practices dampen activity in our amygdala and increase the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Both of these parts of the brain help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it. As Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson write in their new book,