Coaching Videos & Tips - March 12 2020 No.643
BUMS ON SEATS!
Today's Quick Tip dovetails perfectly with today's video where we explore how to practice mindfulness. Remember, from our earlier videos in this mini-series, we practice mindfulness to be mindful... or, simply, to be.
And, if you'd like to go a little deeper, don't forget that you can browse all the "back issues" in The Archive!
Look after yourself. I mean this physically and mentally or, actually, the other way around.
With presence of mind comes right action - you do the right things and avoid doing what you shouldn't be doing at all. With presence of mind comes a measured response to everything - including the nonsense all around us. Presence of mind and its related measured response is what is particularly required right now as we grapple with Covid-19.
All this leads to one unavoidable action you must take at least once each day: meditate.
I have now mentioned, more than once, that we practice mindfulness to be mindful. Our few minutes practice each morning, which is done solely for the sake of doing it, equips our minds to be in flow and in the zone during the cut and thrust of the day.
When you are - in the moment, in flow - you are your own best ally in moving in the right direction - now and in each now to come. When you are mindless, you are your own worst enemy. The choice is binary.
As human beings, we're used to having our choices made for us. As children, our parents did it - for better, for worse or, for most, somewhere in between. As adults, our preprogrammed minds make our choices for us - for worse or worser(!) given the extent to which we are, when on autopilot, divorced from reality.
But it's worse than that because our minds, preprogrammed when we were children, are childish... that means we'll still happily take our lead from any halfwit that we perceive might know more about what we have to do than we think we know ourselves... that's the curse of "Fake News" and social media.
Right now, as the WHO confirms a pandemic, the normal mind is see-sawing from complacency to hysteria... over-reacting either way - the classic symptom of a mind out of control.
The first thing we need to do - you and I for starters - is to ensure that we, first and foremost, look after our own mental health. That will put us in the best place that we can possibly be to look after our health in general... the best for us and the best for those around us.
I'm sure you've been hearing about the latest craze... hand-to-hand combat where the winner gets to buy the most toilet paper! On the other hand, I suppose, if the normal crazy mind is going to cause such a mess by knee-jerk reacting to the circumstances in which we currently find ourselves, you're going to need plenty of paper to clean up the mess!!!
Enough of the toilet humour! Human nature being what it is (evolved automated madness), it's only natural that we've seen emptied supermarket shelves over the last couple of weeks. There isn't an ounce of pasta to be bought around here at present... same for most tinned goods.
But, as we went about our normal (shouldn't have used that word, sorry) shopping Monday, we spotted a gentleman in front of us who had a far more measured response to the current madness. Here was a gentlemen who, with a steady and focused mind, has his priorities right. His shopping trolly contained (and only contrained) twelve three-litre boxes of red wine!