Sharpen the axe

How we THINK is everything. Many of us have never really worked at developing an awareness of our cognitive strategies, but the reason for doing this is to sharpen the axe, to make our thinking with each moment of the day more useful.

Continuously, with each moment of mindfulness, we should work at building mindfulness with the muscle memory of mind … we are not required to be mindful, but being more mindful helps us in all kinds of ways throughout life, especially as we get older and do more thinking, because we can’t distract ourselves by playing the physical games that we used to play in our busy-body younger lives.

Most of us, probably were exposed to meditation or learned our meditation technique by just sitting … now we can meditate, when we’re standing in line, waiting in traffic or waiting for anything …we focus on our breath and maybe that helps us to try to breathe more correctly, continually drawing our mental focus back to just our breath … generally, in meditation, we WORK at disposing of all of the ideas that pop up, because those ideas WILL pop up and it takes mental effort to train the mind. But, that’s what drawing our attention back to our breath is about, even as we VERY MUCH AWARE our surroundings.

For example, when we’re in the line at the grocery store and meditating, we are paying attention to our breath, but we are hyperaware of the store and customers around us and the movement the line. We might look for ways that we can be of assistance and we try to exude calming, pleasant presence, with appearance of confidence and readiness, ready to be of assistance, eg in case anyone tries to do something inapproapriate or rob the store, but we don’t let our mind switch into some form of IDIOTIC action movie, Mission Impossible or storybook Walter Mitty mode … we WORK at being present, breathing deeply, using our breath as the metronome to drawing attention back to BEING PRESENT, ON THE SPOT, WHERE WE ARE.

In meditation, we WORK at disposing of all of the ideas that pop up … because we want to develop the mental discipline of BEING PRESENT where we are. When work at developing the discipline of BEING PRESENT, we are taking steps in larger objective of developing the mental discipline of EXECUTING EVERY THING THAT WE DO WITH INTENTION. Our INTENTION is do every little thing that we do, throughout our day, as we are always PRESENT, with the intention of doing it as well as we possibly can.