“Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviors. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain. ”
Day 15 Morning Scorecard and Mindfulness Self-Reflection:
Staying Mindfully Alive
If you travel on vacation to a new place you will be naturally "mindful" of your surroundings, as you take in the novel environment and curiously examine different customs. This new place will feel exciting and pleasureful because your brain is releasing dopamine into your system so you "pay attention" to these unknown circumstances. From an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors needed to be mindful when entering a new place so they could remember where valuable resources were located and pick up on incoming threats. In today's world, however, we spend much of our time in the same locations and with the same people, causing us to become less engaged with our surroundings. This is bad news for us because a bored brain is an unhappy brain. When your brain isn't stimulated by novel experiences and conditions it will start to ruminate and create unnecessary problems. Therefore, without our nomadic lifestyle to naturally prompt us into mindfulness, we need to tap into this system ourselves. We can do this by treating the familiar as unfamiliar, looking at our common environments with a new set of eyes. When we look at the world with this "beginner mind" your brain will naturally gravitate away from our problems and towards what is right in front of you.
FACT: When you’re bored your serotonin (contentment) levels go down and acetylocholine (muscle activation) levels go up.
TAKEAWAY: When your brain doesn’t have a job to do it instinctively makes you feel agitated and ready to move.
Guided Mindfulness Meditation
One of the things I miss most about being a child is the relaxing feeling I would get as someone read me a story. Listening with your full attention is an all-consuming activity and lets you escape the torment of your monkey mind. That is why I often do the adult version of “story time,” when I listen to guided youtube meditations. These great resources are free and always accessible twenty-four hours a day. I much prefer listening to these “stories” over wasting my time worrying about the daily news broadcasts. Mainly, because guided meditations focuses on how wonderful the world around you is, instead of telling you what's wrong with it. Indeed there is much about the world that needs to be changed, but meditation reminds us that there is also so much right about the world as well.
FACT: Researchers have calculated that the chances of humans being alive on earth are around: 1 in 400,000,000,000,000.
TAKEAWAY: We’re so lucky to be on this earth considering the size of the universe and what it takes to sustain life on a planet. Yet somehow we always find something to complain about.
“Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.”