Transcription
Welcome to this lesson on how to have a positive mindset and basically how to have fun all day. Now, people often think of meditation as this very serious activity. Now, I'm going to get serious and focus my mind, but paradoxically, one of the quickest ways to progress in meditation is actually to have fun while you're doing it. My teacher, Bante Vim Lamy, who's a Buddhist monk and quite a quite a character, he he had a fun way of getting us to do this and viewing our meditation as a game. So you would say, "Can you be happy while you're chopping this or sweeping that or washing this or going to the toilet or eating? Can you do that? Can you keep it going? Don't let your mind just ho hum." That's what the practice is all about.
So when this becomes a lifestyle, a meditation that's pretty much all day, whenever you use the recognized step to remember that you're distracted, that's when your progress will be really fast. Because then, instead of meditating for 10 or 30 minutes a day while you're sitting, which is also a very important part of the practice, you're training your mind all day. And we've already talked about how neuroplasticity can occur pretty much all the time when we're retraining our mind through these mental bicep curls of recognizing when the mind is distracted, releasing the distraction and the tension in our body that comes with it, relishing in that moment of um, very subtle moment of peace and bliss, and then remaining in that state, whether it's with the object of meta or other objects as we develop the practice in this course.
Now, you might think that sounds great, but I've got a busy job, a busy day, and all these things to do. So let's talk about how to bring the practice into work so you can have fun while you're working, even if your job isn't something that's typically creative or something you enjoy. One way to do this is to bring a sense of play into the work that you're doing. So you can smile while you're working and bring that metha towards whatever it is you're doing. You could even think, "May this help many people," or "May this benefit whoever it's going to benefit." And that will make your work more meaningful, and it will also give it this sense of play and this sense of kind of lightness to it, instead of just trying to meet deadlines or feeling stressed while you're working, which is training a certain state of mind. The psychologist Carl Rogers called this, quote, "the quiet joy in being oneself, a spot spontaneous, relaxed enjoyment, a primitive." So this is, uh, what we're going for is kind of this natural, uh, buoyancy and lightness in our mind that we can keep relishing in and remaining in, uh, throughout the day, even if we're doing something like waiting for the gas pump at the gas station, where normally our mind might go into automatic habits of worrying or thinking about what we have to do next. And instead, when we recognize, we can release those thoughts, release the tension that they cause in our bodies, some kind of subtle muscular tension often felt in the head and neck area, and that allows us to then relish and just, "Oh yeah, it feels good to actually just be here, present."
So this mental fitness and meditation lifestyle is a complete, uh, swapping of our typical formula. Often we think success equals happiness, and in this way of going about it, happiness equals success. When we're able to have an uplifted, joyful mind, that means we're being successful in the practice. And we'll see later on how this develops wisdom, so it actually has a deeper purpose to it. But everybody's trying to be happy, so you've already succeeded when you smile and relish and enjoy the fact that you're present and you can be with your object of meditation. That that's a victory, and you're retraining your brain in the process, so you can look forward to more happy states in the future.
Lastly, I want to give a few kind of practical tips and ways to have fun throughout the day. And the first is a little technique that I learned called Pomodoro, which means, uh, tomato in Italian. Uh, its inventor in the 1980s used the tomato-shaped timer. What you do is you set your timer for about 25 minutes. The idea is you set your timer, and at the end of that shorter period, you, um, if this is possible during your work, you would then get up, um, stretch a little bit, go for a walk, or you might just take a minute to meditate and do some breathing. And it's a way to check in and especially notice if there's tension in your body and maybe your mind's become serious or you're no longer smiling. And that's a chance to check in, to take a break, and, um, it's been found to make people quite productive. I really enjoy it because it makes my, um, work a little more, it kind of breaks up my work into manageable periods of time so that I'm not, you know, accidentally find myself 90 minutes later, you know, what have I been doing, and I haven't been so productive, and there's all sorts of tension and stress in my body. So this is one technique.
Another that I already mentioned is to dedicate whatever you're doing towards other people. So this is activating kind of pro-social parts of your brain. It's activating those positive emotions, and, uh, you can even say something to to yourself like, uh, you know, "This this work is is service," and you really tell yourself that, and so it becomes that way in your mind. Another is to relish in small lights throughout the day. These can be just the simple fact of a blue sky. Often we're kind of spring-loaded for the next event, and we'll just mechanically go do almost like a laundry list of things throughout the day. And this is a way to slow down and enjoy, relish in these smaller moments throughout the day that can easily go unappreciated. Another technique is to approach whatever you're doing in a new and creative way, even if you've done it a thousand times. This is like the Zen strategy called beginner's mind, where you put yourself in the mind of someone, almost like a child, and you might find, uh, creative, fresh ways of of doing the same old work. Another is to simply monitor for tension in your body. You can notice when your shoulders start getting tight up like this, and that will typically not feel so good, but we might not notice it if we're working, uh, intensely or getting really into some activity. So if you kind of monitor in the background with your meta awareness, you can sense when the body is getting tight, and then pause and relax those areas of the body, and notice how that relaxes your mind.
Another is to, um, keep your gaze wide if possible. This actually affects the state of mind and it probably activates the right hemisphere of the brain, which is more present and more kind of U wide oriented. Bro has a broader focus compared to the narrow or ability to focus in on one thing. So that might be necessary when you're doing a task to have this kind of laser beam focus, but the more we can be in a broad state of vision, then the more relaxed we'll be, and and you may find you're in this kind of parasympathetic rest and digest state instead of a more tense fight or flight state. This next one might be obvious, but just do one task at a time. It's it can be quite stressful to multitask, and so the more we can focus on one task, the better our quality of work often, and the more efficient we are. And just a couple more, you can check the attitude in your mind, and you might check in every once in a while and see, "Am I rushing to get this done, or am I relishing in what I'm doing?" And then finally, I love this one. You know, you can use the tools at your disposal. So you might play in the background some calming music, or dolphin sounds is one that I love. And you might work out in nature. So the environment also impacts your state of mind, and you can be aware of how it how it impacts your, uh, mental state, and then choose the environment that's going to give you the best chance of being in that tranquil kind of relish mode of being and remaining there longer.
All right, wonderful. So your daily challenge is to take some chore or work today and treat it as play, and that should be fun. And then just a reminder that if you're on the Fit Mind app, there's this mental fitness survey, which is a daily survey to fill out and essentially track your mental fitness over time. And that's a wonderful thing way to see how your practice progresses. It won't be linear necessarily, there will be up ups and downs, but over time you can see trends in these qualities of mind that we're developing. As always, thanks for taking the time to train your mind, and I'll see you for day five. [Music]