If you want to achieve a big goal you need to live with vitality. This comes from understanding the power of now. Living in the now can really be helped by using mindfulness. So today we talk about mindfulness and give a few activities to get you started.
What Is Mindfulness?
If you were slamming on the brakes to avoid running your car off a cliff, being attacked by a salivating vicious lion, a knife-wielding serial killer in the middle of the night, or barricaded in your apartment in the middle of a war-torn city as missiles fly overhead, then it makes sense that you would be living in survival mode.
You should feel sadness, anger, frustration, and anxiety.
Yet many of us are not in these situations and we still live in survival mode. We still find ourselves addicted to negative feelings. We find ourselves worried about the past and future.
The fix to this is building a healthier mind. We can build a healthier mind through a combination of unlearning, a mindset shift, meditation and mindfulness. Which we can discuss over the next few solo episodes. Not to say it’s surface level stuff, but out of these steps to building a healthier mindset, mindfulness has quick, simple activities that we can implement right away, no matter our experience and understanding. So what is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a broad term, but trust me no matter how you define it, it can help all of us.
Mindfulness is a mental state of self care achieved by focusing one’s awareness only in the present moment.
Mindfulness is calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts and sensationsMindfulness is acceptance, no matter where life takes us we can live non-judgemental, we never know what is good, or bad.
Mindfulness is a state of flow, where we are not concerned with what Joe Dispenza calls the Big 3: Body, Environment, or Time.
Mindfulness is NOT about specific emotions. Sadness, anger, frustration are all healthy when they are supposed to be used. But these emotions are only helpful when they are supposed to be used.
Mindfulness is NOT worrying, or concerning yourself with the future, or reliving challenges from your past. But these thoughts are only helpful when they are supposed to be used.
Why Does Mindfulness Help Us With Goal Setting?
No matter your goal, anything at all, mindfulness will help. But why?
People prevent themselves from big dreams and goals for a variety of reasons:
– some allow their imagination to run so wild that they never take action
– some had parents, teachers, friends, or even people they don’t know tell them it’s unrealistic
– some don’t understand the definition of a big dream
– some settle because they like the safety they have
– some lack the required confidence and
– others struggle so much with a combination of these things that they’ve lost their imagination altogether.
We can attack these struggles from many angles, but regardless of what’s getting in the way, there is one underlying foundation we must all have, It’s understanding the Power of Now.
Power of Now
The fascinating thing is the more we want something, the more we think about having it and in turn the more we suffer through the process of getting there because we think we need the actual thing to feel good. I can’t stress how important this is. In fact every episode could be about this topic, because in a way, it’s the only one that truly matters.
It’s a requirement to ensure we not only achieve our goals, but enjoy achieving them.
We Don’t Want The Goal Right Now Anyways
A silly way to remember this concept is to use the phrase fuck around & find out. You’re going to find out every one of life’s results in your future. But you won’t find out until you do find out. So right now we’re in the fuck around stage, and eventually, we will find out. Look, I want to be one of the most impactful podcasters in the world. But anything worthwhile takes an insanely long time. And so what I really want is to enjoy the journey. The split of being in the present but wanting to be somewhere else is toxic. It will tear us apart. For some people whining and complaining takes over. If this is the case you won’t be able to dream big in the first place. We can not truly dream our big dream if we have stress from our past, or focus on an uncertain future.
When faced with life circumstances we always have three options we can control:
– remove yourself from the situation
– change the situation
– accept the situation totally.
That’s it, there are no other options.
The counter-intuitive thing is to stop focusing on past, or future, to use your mind for planned thinking activities, to learn from results, or to plan your day, but in all other times turn it off, and live only in the moment.
You can only do something NOW! So the Power of Now is about realizing it’s NOT the getting the thing that’s important, that would make life boring. It’s about being aligned with your ambition so greatly that you feel good NOW, in the pursuit, instead of waiting for something. You feel good because you are vibrating at a frequency in line with your dreams.
As humans, we add unnecessary scorekeeping. There is No Score in the universe (such as money, fame, or clout) there is only vitality in the moment.
So how do we do this?
There are many things we can do to strengthen the mind on a deep level. But that requires some long-winded knowledge and techniques. We can look at those in upcoming episodes, but for now, when it comes to feeling good more often, we will focus on Mindfulness exercises you could start at any time.
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