Meditation in Your Everyday
Episode #1 of the course How to bring meditation into your everyday by Colin Pal
Welcome to the course! Over the next 10 days, you’re going to learn:
• How to meditate and practice mindfulness in a simple and fun way
• How to deal with the monkey mind and the waves of feelings and emotions during your meditation
• Various practices and ways to bring meditation and mindfulness into your chaotic and busy lifestyle
Each lesson will include a meditation practice and challenge to help you put what you’ve learned into action. The key to being successful in this course is to take daily action—even if they’re imperfect actions.
Why Meditation?
Imagine if you could go through a chaotic day—dealing with everything that’s constantly fighting for your attention, everyone who’s constantly stepping on your toes—and still come home with your sanity. Heck, even be happy.
I’m telling you, it’s possible! It’s just a matter of training your mind and training yourself to be resilient to all the chaos that’s happening in and around you. That is exactly what meditation is—mental training practices to help you calm your mind on demand, improve focus and creativity, increase clarity in your thought process, and build the emotional resilience necessary to thrive day in and day out.
Ok ok, I get it. You’ve probably heard all about meditation a dozen times already. The real question is, “How do I do it so that it’s not so boring, and how can I bring it into my busy day?”
Well you’re in for a treat! I’ll be sharing with you 10 ways to practice meditation and mindfulness every day.
We live in a world that has absolutely no intention of slowing down. Which means that we need to be carving out time to slow down, little by little. It’s an odd age where we need a reason to just sit and be still. We live in the past and the future so much that we create this resistance to living in the present moment.
The most basic and fundamental practice of meditation and mindfulness is just to be. To get comfortable with stillness. We are so used to always being busy and always doing something that it’s become quite uncomfortable and difficult to just sit still without an agenda. There’s always this urge to have to do something, even when you have nothing important to do. Like checking your notifications or emails.
“To just be is both the most ordinary and the most precious experience in life.” – Tweet this.
The Practice: A Whole 2 Minutes of Nothing
This practice is a simple practice of just being still. Sit comfortably and gently bring your attention to your breathing. As you’re breathing in, notice that you’re breathing in. Breathe out, and notice that you’re breathing out. Every time your attention wanders off (and it will), just gently bring it back. Just do that for 2 minutes.
If that’s too hard, you can do an even easier version of this—just sit with no agenda for the whole 2 minutes. That’s it. The idea is to move from “doing” to “being” and to embrace that stillness.
Your Challenge
My challenge for you today is to practice this Whole 2 Minutes of Nothing at least twice today. It’s easy and can be done absolutely anywhere—at your desk, while waiting for a friend, sitting on the train, or even on the toilet. You could probably do it right now!
Tomorrow, we’ll dive deeper into what meditation is.
Cheers,
Colin
Recommended book
“The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation” by Thich Nhat Hanh
Share with friends