Zen leo babauta10/4/2023 What’s the weather like outside? Do a quick check of your weather app. These days, nearly everything we want to know is a few keystrokes away, almost instantly gratifying our desire to know something. You can also find lots of great ideas about finding focus in life and cultivating mindfulness by reading Leo’s Zen Habits blog. It’s about finding a gentle way to practice opening up to more of life.All of these selections were originally published on Leo’s mnmlist blog. In the end, this isn’t about being tough, or coercive with ourselves. If it’s too intense, stop, and find someone to help you. And get help from a professional therapist if this feels at all dangerous - it shouldn’t get to the level of danger, just medium discomfort. It’s important to be gentle with yourself as you do this, and loving. Emotions, feelings about ourselves, things we haven’t processed. When we cut off our escapes, we start to notice the things we don’t want to be with. See if you can notice the feeling underneath these mental escapes. Advanced: Notice when you’re complaining, making yourself into a victim, taking your anger out on people, beating yourself up or being harsh, fantasizing, etc.Go food sober for a couple weeks - that means no intoxicating food.See what feelings surface, and let your treat be processing these feelings. Quit caffeine or alcohol (or whatever favorite substance you have) for a month.Put off email and messages until later in the day, if this is something that you do a lot.Notice what comes up internally when you stay for longer. Stay with a hard task or project for 10 minutes longer than you want to.Or walk around your house or office, just seeing what you can notice. Not distracting yourself, but just sitting and thinking. Spend intentional time away from your computer.You will uncover what you’ve been trying to avoid. This will be uncomfortable for many - that’s OK. Go off your phone for most of the day.In my Fearless Living Academy, this is the main thing that people are practicing - they are working with changing their habits, finding purpose and creating a meaningful impact in the world … but the path to that is to face discomfort without always having to escape. But we don’t have to seek out a new activity to practice … we can just stop escaping from what’s already happening. So how do we practice? Some people like to do cold showers or hard workouts - and these are excellent. It’s quite an opening thing, to be able to fully live. We grow our capacity to be with all of life.Īnd then we miss out on less of life. Not to the point of torture, but just to the point that’s just beyond our comfort zone. When we feel uncomfortable, stay for a little longer. So the opportunity, then, is to practice not escaping. Our connection with others.Īnd this becomes trained - the more we do it, the less capacity we have for facing uncomfortable things in the future. Not only the nature and light all around us, but our human experience that’s happening in this moment. We also miss out on the beauty of what’s going on right now. We limit ourselves by having to avoid difficulty, or scary projects. We can’t stay in an uncomfortable moment where we don’t know how to do something, or don’t know what the outcome will be. However, when we try to escape the moment, we are limiting ourselves. So what? Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not - as I said, it’s eminently human. These are all ways to get ourselves out of the present moment. We do it in other ways too: complaining, gossiping, over-apologizing, people pleasing, bragging, showing off, worrying, overthinking, catastrophizing, making ourselves the victim, ruminating about what happened or what we should have said. But you might notice that what they have in common: they all take us away from whatever is happening in this moment. I have no judgment of any of these - they are not necessarily bad, and I do them too.
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