Do It With Your Whole Self

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about integrating more awareness into daily life. So if you bump into a friend at the store and you ask them how they're doing, the answer would probably often be, busy. And we really are these days, many of us. Much of our daily life consists of moving from task to task all day long.

So we're doing a lot of doing, however, we usually don't bring that much awareness to it. Sometimes doing our tasks does feel pleasant. So we might be really enjoying a sense of accomplishment, ease or fulfillment. But a lot of the time our doing swings between, I would say, three states. Sometimes it feels like a drag, we're just doing it because it needs to be done, but with a kind of like a subtle feeling of resentment.

Sometimes we feel stressed and driven and kind of pushing, hurrying through our tasks. And other times we're barely there at all. We're kind of just lost in a mental fog, kind of numb to the world around us. So if our tasks and making up the majority of our lives, then if we can change the way we do them, we can quite profoundly change the quality of our day to day life. So how can we shift our relationship with doing? So for me, the essence of the answer to this is to do each task with your whole self.

How do you do that? See if you can reduce your focus down to doing just one thing at a time and bring your full awareness to it. Seeing if you could bring the same kind of moment to moment awareness that you would have when you're doing something like surfing or yoga or listening to music or watching a sunrise. And if you can bring that to your everyday duties, like eating or brushing your teeth, or being mindful of any sense of resenting the task or rushing through it. And if you notice that, try to take a big breath, exhale slowly and bring your focus back to the moment. If you can do that over and over again, with small tasks, staying present and focused and calm, you bring more of that mindful energy through your whole life.

Like I know one little trick that helps me to stay more present in my doing is to put calming music on in the background, or sometimes I put a meditation timer on when I'm doing something like the dishes I find that really helpful. And then after each task is completed, it helps just to take a pause just for three seconds or five seconds to take in that feeling of completion before moving onto the next thing. So the invitation for practice today is to really try to experience this awareness as a way of living. Infusing mindfulness into the small things many times a day so that you can feel more peace and more fulfillment throughout your day. As always, thank you for your practice.

I hope you enjoy this today. And let's settle in now for today's meditation.