Mindfulness and Meditation Made Easier: The Shortcut to Wisdom

To help you master that wild beast, if only so you could stand your own company, you must know how your mind works. You wouldn’t go into battle unprepared, and you wouldn’t go empty-handed into the night. With knowledge and insight, you are prepared to tackle your thoughts in meditation and mindfulness practices. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for the people whose company you’d like to keep.

There is a gulf between the world your brain is designed to handle and the one you live in, leaving you with the choice to suffer or make the required adaptations yourself. It’s doable, but it does take work to put your fate in your hands.

Today, the opportunity is enormous because we live in cities, not caves, deal with information, not nature, and face endless change, not eons of stability. Today’s living conditions are very different from the ones for which the human brain was designed. This monumental gap between living in caves and living in condominiums results in a chronic level of stress that is pervasive and epidemic to the average worker.

Social circles are far more extensive, diffuse, and diverse than ever. While that sounds like increased collaboration and globalization, it’s also enabling lying, cheating, and justifying your behaviour in individually mean and collectively lazy ways. Inequality is enormous, and it is in your face like never before.

A Trainwreck of Unanswerable Questions

Regrets, I’ve had a few people say when they’ve lived long enough. There are particular crossroads in everyone’s life which we expect will turn out one way, and when they don’t, we can’t help but wonder about the other path. Perhaps the alternative route was equally filled with disillusion, disappointment, and denial, but how can you know? Second-guessing and doubt are uncomfortable; maybe we’ll do much to avoid them.

When you can sit silently, the mind is the master, not the body. The body wants to get up and do something else, but the mind commands it to stay put. In meditation and mindfulness, you regain control of your actions and become conscious of your intentions.

It is essential to recognize that you are not your thoughts. Instead, you can separate and view them as you would the opinions of someone you know well. Discerning opinions from facts lets you grasp your motivations and goals differently.

In a Whole New World

The choice to be different has never been so available, if illusory, and so critical. Every child eventually realizes they can choose to be different or blend in. Like a pack animal who knows it’s safest in the center, humans will likely go for the middle ground instead of standing up or voicing out.

Wrongdoers are jailed; sometimes, we realize the law was wrong, not the person. Confusing times when you find yourself at odds with the status quo. Do you double down and recruit for your revolution or surrender to the institution? It’s no longer adequate to leave morality and ethics to what’s been written, documented, and called law if it ever was.

Justice is not limited to punishing wrong-doers. If you are born in a country that believes in retribution and re-assimilation, your question might be more constructive. How do you prevent crime in the first place?

Changing Faster Every Day

The choices that were right for our parents were right for their world. Generation after generation, they have copied their elders because that was adequate. People lived their entire lives in small perimeters with the same kinds of people facing the same decisions.

In the past ten years, even caribou birth times have changed because the tundra and the resources they need for their calves to survive have changed.

Today, ‘well-behaved’ must be redefined as the world presents different dilemmas, consequences, and choices. It might come to mean something closer to rebellion than compliance. When the status quo has got to go, we need those willing and able to stand up and make it happen. We need it if only to keep on keeping on as a species.
These days, when children say, “You don’t know what it’s like to be me,” parents don’t know. It’s a whole new world today, changing faster every day.

In meditation and mindfulness, you pay attention to your thoughts to notice when your accumulated knowledge requires updating, replacing, and overriding and when not to interfere.

The mind contains the knowledge you’ve invested in deliberately, with your education, training and all the ways you’ve chosen to spend your time and attention. It also includes instincts inherent to every human being and what’s unique to you through individual experience in your own life.

In that silent stillness, you can’t help but notice discrepancies between what you believe and what you did, what you expected from others and what they did, and so on. Conflicts arise between your expectations and reality. In that silence, the two must reconcile, and as they do, new truths emerge.

By starting with new truths based on science and what is likely contrary to what you believe to be accurate, you can identify your conflicts and come up with your resolutions in the active fashion that is your nature.

For Health

As an individual skill, science has quantified self-awareness to be low in the general population, while narcissism is climbing and empathy is decreasing. If mind mastery is knowing yourself well enough to know your behaviour, not your idealized behaviour or rosy perception of it, it would seem that society as a whole is losing the battle. To get more of what you want and less of what you don’t, you need some truth out of that mind of yours, and it’s unlikely you are getting it.

That is, unless you are depressed. A lack of belief that you are better than average is something only depressed people admit. In contrast, healthy people succumb to all kinds of ‘cognitive illusions’ preventing them from seeing reality.

Some researchers postulate that depression is for the evolutionary purpose of problem-solving. The lack of energy, fixated thinking, and ability to see reality are precisely what you need to solve a problem. Or, you could take a pill, get back to work, and continue ignoring what your body is attempting to do.

For Wealth

Spending mindfully means making better decisions about time and money. There are more choices than ever for how to make a living, what to do with that income, and when to decide you’ve had enough. We attempt to approach them with quantifiable logic, as we’ve done in the past, but we’ve also learned that it’s not a surefire win.

Decisions about time and money are loaded with both logic and emotion. Time and money are quantifiable, and we learn early what specific quantities represent. But they are nothing on their own; their value is derived from what you do with them. In this way, time and money become inseparable from emotion, even as we try to leave emotions out.

Wealth is a means to an end. Osho, the twentieth-century Indian mystic and spiritual leader, said, “The man who is running after money bypasses everything that is a door to the divine, and by the time he realizes what he has lost, he is at the end of the road, and there is nothing ahead of him except death.”

Joseph Heller, the author of the novel Catch-22, said he had something that a particular billionaire will never have – “the knowledge that I have enough.” What will you spend that money on, or do you know when enough is enough? When you don’t, you risk getting caught on the hedonic treadmill or the consumer debt cycle for your entire life.

For Happiness

Life on the hedonic treadmill is one of the simple pleasures, like cotton candy. You think it’s a matter of effort. If you try harder, the next promotion might deliver satisfaction, even if it’s what you felt last time and it didn’t.

When you chase something to fill a void, you usually get it and then realize it wasn’t enough. The fit is incomplete and impermanent. Chasing becomes all you do until you exhaust yourself, hit the roadblock, or die. About twenty percent of the time, the authority of a doctor and a looming diagnosis can trigger behaviour change. More often, habits remain until the dying day. Stuff will not fulfill you.

Being flexible and adaptable is a survival skill, as is knowing when to stick to your convictions and ignore advice. When to ignore advice and when to listen to it, especially as it relates to your talents, skills, and use of your own life, might be the difference between misery and disease, happiness and health. You can’t please everyone; the people who try know they have a disease.

More happiness should be possible in the face of choice, but we’re collectively headed in the wrong direction. Studies show that more choices don’t make us happier, but less so, as we mire ourselves in regret, thinking that we might have made the wrong choice. We need to learn how to make better choices, which takes inner knowledge of ourselves.

How do you know when to trust your gut, analysis, or guru’s advice? It’s an answer that’s as layered and complex as the one specifically for when you are on the job: when do you follow the employee handbook, and when do you follow culture?

On the surface, it might seem self-indulgently narcissistic to dwell on your inner experience. You do it because you want to change your outer experience, and that has everything to do with better relationships, better outcomes, and less drama. It infects everyone’s life around you, and that affects the world.

When you change your outer experience, it ripples. The people around you react, carrying that change into their lives and contacts. One person at a time might be the only way left to change the world, and now is the time for a change.

With Inner Curiosity

The goal is to become more curious and less critical about yourself – your thoughts, feelings and inner world, than you do about what is on your device, what your friends would think, care, or do, and even more important than the mainstream status quo.
If not for the planet, if not for the next generation, if not for your loved ones, then for yourself. When you do it with both curiosity and compassion, may you come to know self-love. What will start with you?

It doesn’t have to be a solitary, isolating experience. Another person can reveal where your thinking diverges. Where two opinions diverge, curiosity replaces the greyness of apathy, confusion, or conflict. Why would you think one thing, and they believe another? That other person may not be correct and may expose a third path between you, which you could not see before. Out of opinions and science, options and truth emerge.

Mind is the brain in action, and it’s in action as much when we sit still and deliberate as when we do anything. Thinking is a process that is both instantaneous and prolonged, whether you meditate in the moment or live mindfully at all times.

In the Window of Response

Like with anyone, actions reveal attitudes, beliefs, and preferences. If that transparency scares you, there’s no time like now to ensure you and yours are sending the right message.

Timewise, there is a small window where you can operate, responding instead of reacting. Studies indicate it could be up to ten seconds, which can seem both an eternity and a lifetime, depending on your plans and how you dedicate that window. Since you have but seconds, responding as you wish takes skill, above and beyond, keeping your emotions in check.

Stay present by knowing your mind and its tricks. Knowing your mind results in zero second-guessing and no regret, even if it doesn’t work out as anticipated. Whether it does or not, there’s a comfort in being able to say, like Frank Sinatra, “At least I did it my way.”

To aim for an original mistake could be our highest goal.

Programming Behaviour

We are all a product of our pasts, whether we are working consciously to head in a different direction from it or are propelled unquestioningly forward, for better or worse. Early experiences create deep programs, some of which don’t manifest until adolescence and adulthood, but the adult has difficulty seeing it, let alone changing it.

You don’t know everything that went into your mind, nor do you need to. Mind is your brain in action, so you only need to mind what’s in play. It is a program for you to code, create, build, manipulate, and control and update. You can trust the result when it spits out a product because you are the coder.

Changing behaviour can be a simple matter of changing the environment. Our environment triggers more behaviour than many of us realize, causing us to blame people for inevitable problems. The result is a failure to adequately use policy, design, and insight to enable progress and protect citizens.

Your mind is built to learn, play, grow, decide, and be used for more than second-guessing, rumination, biased analysis, endless regret, and fantasized revenge.

Being alone with a wild mind is something that we can all easily avoid. Today, we all have devices to spare us the moments of silence into which the wild mind loves to creep, whether those devices are electronic or not. It might be a jam-packed schedule and a constant internal dialogue designed to drown everything out.

Technology and distraction may seem preferable to meditation and reflection, but they will destroy your attention span, rational functioning, and emotional stability. If you don’t do the work of contemplation and reflection, you go through life like a plastic bag on the wind.

Buddhist monk Dhandapani says, “People don’t take time out for themselves. No one spends time with themselves. It looks like you are conversing with yourself: contemplation and reflection. People don’t do that. If you don’t do that, how do you know what you want, what to work on, what’s important, where you are struggling.”

Claiming Your Power

Your mind is wild, and what’s wild is also powerful. To use your mind is to use your life, resources, and power in ways that align your intentions with the impacts that will cumulate to create your legacy. You won’t be around to control the story, the evidence, or the people – your results will speak for you.

Knowing your mind is the only reliable way to learn about yourself and how to get what you want out of life. It’s a journey of accurately and precisely reflecting on your actions, learning, improving, planning, and executing with a clear purpose and intention. It’s the only reliable way to live a life without regrets.

With your free download of Practical Wisdom, get ready to spot the path of least resistance for what it is while being able to find far better options for you, your loved ones, and the world.