The main 10 things that I realized for 35 hours of meditation last week

We continue to acquaint you with the translations of Chris Bailey's articles, where he shares the tips that he learned during the “a Year of Productivity” project . We have previously published articles by this author, they are available in our blog in the “Personal Productivity” section . We want to remind you that the common goal of all articles is to share the author’s experience of how to become more successful and effective everywhere: in your personal life, relationships with friends, yourself, and of course at work (whatever you do)!

So we give the word to Chris!
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About four years ago I was in a tea shop and read a book about meditation when a Buddhist monk came in and sat down opposite me. Looking up from my reading, I accidentally looked at him and saw how consciously he sipped his tea. He slowly brought the cup to his lips, inhaled the aroma of tea, then slowly drank, enjoying the taste, and slowly lowered his hand back. He drank so slowly that it took him about an hour to empty a small cup.

I remember thinking: it's a complete waste of time.

In the end, he could have done so much more in this hour. What if he took the book? What if he listened to a podcast or a few TED talks and learned something new? What if he called one of his monk friends to join him? This hour could be much more productive.

Today I think exactly the opposite.

Four years later - yesterday, to be precise, I sat alone in my kitchen and sipped tea - and, moreover, I did it consciously. Like that monk, it took me about an hour, but I really couldn’t have imagined a better way to usefully spend time.

At first glance, meditation and consciously doing things look absolutely pointless, and on the surface they are. The real magic of meditation happens inside. Meditation and awareness completely rebuild your mind. These practices stimulate a rush of blood to the brain, calm you down and allow you to better cope with stress. They also rejuvenate your brain by increasing the amount of gray matter, and organize your thoughts. It was also found that they help score higher scores in testing. Not to mention the fact that they make you feel amazing.

For the past seven days, I have been meditating for as long as 35 hours, and, delving into this activity, I have seen from personal experience the countless number of its benefits.

Here are the 10 main things that I realized during the 35 hours of meditation last week.

10. If you have no desire to meditate, try to bring awareness to your daily life.

For the past seven days, I have experimented and tried various ways to combine meditation and awareness with my daily life. I think many people do not like the idea of ​​meditating, because on the surface it seems strange and difficult. If you do not want to practice meditation, I think you can get almost all the same benefits if you try to find ways to bring awareness to your daily life. Last week, I consciously: I shaved, took a shower, went on foot, had a bite, drank tea and did much more.

If you put awareness into your daily life, it will allow you to benefit from meditation, and the benefits will be even greater if you are already meditating.

9. You can perform any action that does not require thinking process, consciously.

Experimenting and trying to engage in consciously different activities, I found that it was easier to focus on some things than on others. The main thing that I discovered is that the less you need to think in the process of any activity, the easier it is to make the action conscious . If you are looking for activities in which you could bring awareness, start with those that do not require mental activity, for example, cleaning or washing dishes.

8. Meditation helps you play billiards better.

Or engage in any other sport, in fact. Billiards is a game (or sport?) That requires unbelievable concentration, patience, awareness and focus. Most of the time I play solo billiards to think about my ideas and plans, and I was surprised to find that during this experiment I scored more goals than ever.

Many people believe that efficiency in sports is 90% dependent on the mental component and 10% on the physical, and I am sure that if you are active in sports, meditation will increase your effectiveness . Not surprisingly, athletes such as Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, and many others practice meditation. [one]


7. Meditation cleans the memory of your brain.

Computer RAM is its short-term memory. Focusing on one thing during meditation, you clear your mind of thoughts that not only trains your “attention muscle”, but also clears the memory of your brain.
This alone is reason enough to practice meditation. Clearing your brain's RAM reduces stress and allows you to better focus on important things throughout the day.

6. Meditation allows you to work with quick wit, instead of just working harder.

During the experiment, I tried to work as much as possible to be able to test how meditation affects my productivity.

I found with interest that meditation made it much easier for me to determine the most productive types of activity in work and personal life, which allowed me to work more effectively, instead of working harder.

I think there are two ways to do more: invest more time and effort , and this is a lousy way, or determine the types of activity with the greatest return, so that you can act wisely, instead of just working harder. Meditation allows you to step back from your actions, to see the whole forest instead of several trees and be smarter at work, and not just harder.

Bringing meditation and awareness into everyday life is easy. For awareness you need to fully focus on your activities. Find a kind of activity that does not require a special thought process, then start doing the work more slowly and pay special attention to the actions that your body and mind want to do spontaneously. Hooray! At this point, you practice mindfulness.

5. The more significant a business is, the easier it is to postpone it.

When I started the experiment, meditate once and for a long time. But I often found that I couldn’t concentrate properly, and I didn’t succeed, because I was putting too much responsibility on myself.

When I broke my meditation into several shorter periods of time, I became much less distracted and managed to do much more.

Breaking up other activities into smaller, easier to perform tasks, significantly helps to solve a similar problem. If you are learning, plan your time so that you can study one chapter at a time instead of five. Similarly, the thought of cleaning in the basement can be discouraging (especially if it takes a day or two), but cleaning the basement for only 10 minutes is a more feasible task. This is a much shorter amount of time, but you really do it. And starting, you might want to continue!

4. You get twice as much pleasure from food when you eat it twice as slowly.

If you are like me, when you eat something delicious, you want to eat it immediately! Quickly! And in vain. When you understand how much pleasure you get while eating something, you get twice as much pleasure by eating it twice as slowly.

When I began to consciously eat food during the experiment, it was the most delicious food I have ever eaten, not only because I consciously focused on its taste and structure, but also because I did it more slowly so that to enjoy and taste what I eat.

If you want to get more enjoyment from food, eat more slowly. Even better, practice conscious eating. This practice will also help you eat less, because you will notice when you are full, and do not eat too much.

3. Meditation makes you a more sympathetic and patient person.

When I wrote the first draft of this article, I sat next to my girlfriend, and she added to the end of the title of this paragraph - "and the best, more patient guy!". Last week I noticed that I was becoming more caring, patient, and sympathetic. I helped those things in which I did not help earlier; cleaned when I did not need; rendered services to strangers simply because he could; and found that I listen to other people much more attentively.

Patience is a quality that I diligently try to develop in myself, especially when it comes to interacting with people. 35 hours of meditation helped me to become more attentive, sympathetic, caring and patient than I had been for a long time before.



2. Never try to kill time. You have a certain amount of it and you will never get more.

My mind travels to quaint places when I meditate, and during the last week I have been thinking more about time. With each new meditation, I almost felt like time was running out. Last week I thought a lot about how little time I had available.

There are many ways to spend time and far fewer ways to get more time at your disposal. 35 hours of meditation made me look at my actions from the outside and made me realize which areas of my life are most important to me . If you pursue the same, I cannot advise you anything better than meditation.

1. Your actions are all that you own.

Each of your actions falls into one of three baskets: actions already taken, actions taken at the moment, and those that you are going to do. The problem with most is that they spend most of their time in the past, or in the future , reflecting on the stupid or great things they have done in the past, or on the actions they are going to do.

But the thing is: the past has already come true, and the future is only your idea of ​​how things will happen (and if you are like me, then you are mistaken 75% of the time). The actions you take at any given moment shape your future and create the past. The present is the only time that ever really exists.

One Buddhist parable says that your actions are the only thing that really belongs to you, and that they are the soil on which you stand. I agree with this statement. Meditation trains you to focus on the present moment and, more importantly, it teaches that you can never deal with more than one moment in time.

0. A quick walk through the forest.

Imagine walking through the forest in the picture above.

It is a delightful autumn day, not too hot and not too cold, and a light breeze barely waving leaves when you pass by. You are immersed in the movement of the branches, in the perfection and tranquility of the day and in trembling look up, thinking about how beautiful your life is.

Now imagine that instead of walking along the path, you drive it by car. You rush past the same trees, but now they mean much less to you. There is no depth in them. Of course, you can take a second and think about how cute they are, but even in this case you would not hear the rustling of the leaves and would not notice how the parrot sat on one of the branches.

Perhaps you would not notice the trees at all.

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Many people perceive their work as something that needs to be done faster and faster. They want to do more in less time and get from point A to point B as soon as possible. Many articles on this site are dedicated to just that.

But productivity also has a downside, which I discovered last week.

Personal productivity is absolutely meaningless if you do not notice how it makes your life better and more meaningful. It may seem strange that just sitting on the priest and doing nothing can make you more productive, but personally I can’t think of a better lesson that could bring so much perspective and meaning to your life like meditation.

Meditation, unlike fast driving in the picture above, is slow, calm and unhurried. It makes sense to your activity, helps you to reveal your essence, and, in my opinion, this is one of the best gifts you can give yourself.

If you are not yet practicing meditation, I highly recommend it.

1. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/athletes-who-meditate-kobe-bryant_n_3347089.html www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aR2aP.X_Bflw

PS Some time ago we published one of the most interesting articles from Chris Bailey - 10 basic lessons about productivity, which I learned by indulging in idleness during the week .

Translated by Vyacheslav Davidenko, founder of MBA Consult