Living mindfully

Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance

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WEEK 6: Mindfulness as a Way of Life

Living mindfully RICHARD CHAMBERS: By this stage in the course, you've had an opportunity to establish a daily meditation practise and to use these to become more awake and present in each moment of your day-to-day life. We've explored a number of applications. And hopefully, you will have discovered some that are personally meaningful to you. You've also had an opportunity to learn from the experience of other learners who shared this journey with you over the past six weeks.

Now, however, it's up to you. You may recognise that six weeks is actually really quite a short amount of time to get established in this new way of being. Some of you have no doubt found it easier than others, but all of you will have faced different challenges. And you'll face further challenges as you continue on the path.

At times, you may find that you're practicing regularly with seemingly little effort. And at other times, you may find that obstacles arise such as forgetting or a belief that you're too busy. This is perfectly natural. Remember that you are retraining very old and wellestablished habits of mind with well-developed neural pathways.

Over the past six weeks, you've created a number of new neural pathways through your consistent practise and application and your overarching intention to be more present in each moment. But it's also likely that you will, at times, find yourself acting in old and familiar ways.

In these moments, it's important to remember simply that you are just in default mode again. Just say that you slipped into an old way of being. It doesn't matter whether this happens for a few seconds or minutes during meditation or for weeks or even months at a time where you completely stop practicing.

© Monash University 2015

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 The reality is the same. You've just clicked off into default mode again, taking things for granted, rather than being curious, and being disengaged with what's actually happening in that moment. You just need to bring your attention back to the breadth that you're taking, the task that you're engaged in, or whatever else is happening in that moment in the senses.

And it's helpful to remember something else here to. The moment you realise that you're in default mode, you're no longer in it. Well, not fully anyway. Just as the moments where you realise your mind has wondered during meditation are moments where, in a very real sense, you've woken up. Moments where you realise that you've forgotten to be mindful are moments where you once again are actually being mindful.

Perhaps you might need to pause and take a moment to reestablish your attention on something happening in the present by reengaging with whatever you're experiencing in your senses. Or perhaps, as people commonly report after practicing mindfulness for a while, the moment you recognise that you're not present, you're in some way already back.

And even if you forget to do this, if you instead find yourself judging yourself harshly for being in default mode in the first place, for instance, then in this moment, you've also woken up. Relating to your own tendency to get distracted in this way means that you relate directly to what is actually happening rather than getting caught up in judgments about it, giving into it, or giving up completely.

Instead, it is just a constant process of waking up. This is the heart of mindfulness. It kind of makes you wonder what it would be like to wake up more and more in other moments of your life so these moments of wakefulness start overlapping, huh. We've just planted a seed in this last six weeks, merely scratched the surface. But remember that just a small trickle of water can cut the faintest groove in a rock with the result that the water tends to flow more easily in that groove.

To keep it flowing there, so that it can cut an increasingly deeper channel, we've prepared a handout reminding you of important things that you've explored in the programme. You might like to consciously continue to practise them, both formally during your meditation practise and informally throughout the day.

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