5 Mindful Musings: Oct 20, 2023

Hi Everyone! Here is your weekly dose of "5 Mindful Musings", a brief list of what's helping me live a more mindful life.

What I'm Fascinated By

Jordan Peterson Interviews "The Mother of Mindfulness" Dr. Ellen Langer. This fascinating conversation includes:

• how "intentioned awareness" (or "active awareness") paired with humility (ie: accepted uncertainty) allows for a healthier mindset and body
• how the perception of time impacts the effects of disease and age
• the way to view tragedy and suffering so that we may conquer it through faith and hope
• the immense benefits found in carefully considering to what, where, and who you direct your attention

(As a side note, Ellen Langer will be on our Mindfulness Exercises Podcast soon, so keep your eyes and ears peeled!)

What I Recommend

Restructuring Your Life: Making Inner and Outer Changes that Align with Who You Are Now. One of my favorite mindfulness teachers, Phillip Moffitt, is offering this extraordinary 2-day online workshop.

How do we go about making fundamental life changes in a way that is aligned with who we are now? That is the question we will explore in this highly interactive program. During the workshop, you will have the opportunity to:

• Complete self-assessments that bring clarity to what’s working in your life and what’s out of balance.
• Sort out priorities and discern what’s most important.
• Identify core values and intentions so that you are clear about how you wish to live your life.
• Get clear on the ways you hinder yourself from having the life you want.
• Practice mindfulness tools that support you in staying true to what’s most important and help you reorient when you inevitably get off track.

What We Recently Shared

Guided Anapanasati (Mindful Breathing): Noticing Ease and Effortlessness. Instead of focusing on breathing, take some minutes to be aware of whatever you notice effortlessly. What comes into awareness without any effort on your part? It could be a sound suddenly occurs, the initial hearing is effortless just a sound.

It might be a body sensation that arises, and its initial arising is not your plan or intending it or making it happen. The initial experience of the body sensation arises effortlessly even though you might react to it. In and of itself is effortless, there might be thoughts, emotions.

So the exercise is to notice what arises effortlessly. No effort on your part. The sound of the plane.

When you find yourself involved in thought, lost in thought, relax and open up. Notice what comes into awareness effortlessly. There's always going to be something that arises effortlessly if the doors of perception is open.

What I Think Is Important

Why I Recommend Mindfulness of Breathing. Mindfulness of breathing is a foundational practice, but it’s not merely for beginners. Learn why I recommend it as the first meditation we teach, but also, why some mindfulness practitioners spend their entire lives with this one method.

In this podcast episode, I offer mindfulness teachers insight on how to best support others in their breath awareness meditations, methods for addressing common hindrances, and speak to the profundity of concepts such as impermanence and samadhi, which are available in this simple practice.

A Poem I Love

One Morning

One morning

we will wake up and forget to build

that wall we’ve been building,

the one between us

the one we’ve been building

for years, perhaps

out of some sense

of right and boundary,

perhaps out of habit.

One morning

we will wake up

and let our empty hands

hang empty at our sides.

Perhaps they will rise,

as empty things

sometimes do

when blown

by the wind.

Perhaps they simply

will not remember

how to grasp, how to rage.

We will wake up

that morning

and we will have

misplaced all our theories

about why and how

and who did what

to whom, we will have mislaid

all our timelines

of when and plans of what

and we will not scramble

to write the plans and theories anew.

On that morning,

not much else

will have changed.

Whatever is blooming

will still be in bloom.

Whatever is wilting

will wilt. There will be fields

to plow and trains

to load and children

to feed and work to do.

And in every moment,

in every action, we will

feel the urge to say thank you,

we will follow the urge to bow.

— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Wishing you care and ease,

Sean Fargo, Founder, Mindfulness Exercises

Join our online community for guided meditations, group discussions, free downloads and live workshops here: Connect Mindfulness Community

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