Be Trouble Free :: October 2007

By Andrew Burnham - October 18, 2007

Product Resouces

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Leaders and others who make small and consistent efforts in the direction of working mindfulness enjoy more personal power and self control. They are centred during challenging situations and with other people. If we want to be in the moment and have more time and energy, we must be rigorous in observing how we process people and events.

The Problem

Lurking out there right now is some situation, person, or event that may catch you off guard. It could have the power to agitate you, the power to create stress, could make your thinking negative, push your buttons and lay waste to your energy and ruthlessly kill all your time. This happens when we are not aware.

Holding our Attention

In a few quiet moments sometime today, hold your attention on your breathing for some time. Did you notice your attention wandering? If we are honest and check, we find that most of the time, our minds are running us and we are pulled along like a dog on a chain. We are not aware that we have given up control of our own thinking to our conditioning and stories playing out in our minds.

You may identify with some of these comments:

• "Funny, my mind just went somewhere and I wasn’t aware."
• "It was like I was not there."
• "I started thinking automatically."
• "I noticed that I was starting to dwell on other things."

If we have so little control over our thinking when focusing on something simple like our breath, imagine - or even better - look directly at what happens to your thinking during trying and stressful times, difficult situations, and your response to unexpected negative news or results. When someone pushes our buttons we tend to quickly lose control.