January 31 – Month end recap

Dear Friends,

Today is the last day of the 5 day retreat with Adrianne Ross, so I’ll be back to the land of technology later this afternoon. I thank you for your patience! Meanwhile, here’s a reflection for today! I look forward to catching up with your responses.

It’s hard to believe we’re at the end of January! It’s been a busy month, with lots of opportunities for exploration. I hope you’ve found some practices that resonate with you.

Today, I’ll briefly recap some of the key points and practices that we’ve covered.

• Start with intention – we started (and ended) the month by exploring intention; it’s a great thing to reflect on – at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of a meditation, whenever.
• Complete the day/meditation/whatever with a review or dedication. It’s a way to affirm the skillful things you did, and to reconnect with our deeper intentions.
• Breathing is often a good focus for meditation, as it’s always present, and it helps settle the mind. Even taking one mindful breath anywhere in the day can help bring focus and attention back to the present.
• To strengthen daily practices, look for ways to reinforce the habit pattern – cue, routine, reward.
• Body scan is another meditative practice to ground oneself in the present. This can be done through formal guided meditations, or informal check ins through the day.
• “Choiceless awareness” is another style of meditation, in which you bring mindful attention to whatever is calling your attention – what’s obvious in that moment.
• Mindfulness can be done in any posture, including walking, which makes it a great way to bring mindfulness into daily activities.
• Notice and appreciate joy when it arises. By having your radar looking for joy, you may start to notice it more often.
• We explored a couple of ways to bring mindfulness into daily life. One is to select a short, repetitive activity (like walking through doorways) to start acting as a mindfulness bell. The other was to pick a longer chore (like doing the dishes) an try to sustain mindfulness for the duration of the activity. Do you remember what you said you’d work on[CUSTOM DATA]?
• It’s natural that your attention directed towards these tasks might have waned, so ways to help include re-connecting with intention, and exploring with a sense of curiosity.
• Putting the right amount of effort into daily life mindfulness is important. With too much effort, you might notice that you tire out too soon. Try a lighter touch. Just relax.
• Gratitude is another way to cultivate joy. Did you try doing the Gratitude Alphabet?
• When we come back to being mindful after being lost in thought, that’s a great opportunity to start to learn how to recognize mindfulness. You can prime the pump with the question, “Am I aware?”
• Meditation isn’t always lotus blossoms and bliss (or maybe that’s just me). Our minds will wander off. But we can have a welcoming curiosity with our puppy dog minds, and that will help us learn more about how our minds work.
• Kindness practices include the formal meditation with the traditional phrases, and informal practices like aiming your happiness ray gun at random people and secretly wish them well. Even strangers are “just like me”.
• Simplicity can be a great gift! Ask “is this necessary?”
• Another way to simplify and increase mindfulness is to focus on “one thing at a time” – at least some of the time.
• Through our practice, we start to get familiar with our patterns of reactivity. By learning these patterns, we can have a better chance of injecting choice to respond rather than reacting in our habitual way.
• Compassion is a way we can relate to suffering in the world, and tonglen is one type of practice to bring caring to the suffering we encounter in this world.
• Generosity is a natural inclination of our human species. It is important to notice our intention for and acts of generosity so that we can cultivate, appreciate, and take joy in these qualities.
• Generosity doesn’t have to be anything grand. Our time and presence can be the most profound gifts.
• Generosity is something we can direct towards ourselves; we can also practice receiving and noticing the generosity of others.
• We can bring mindfulness to listening and to our speech, through formal and informal practices.

You can revisit all the previous emails on the blog, so check out that resource too.

So that’s a pretty full toolkit! Were there a few of those practices that particularly resonated with you? What will you continue to cultivate going forward? Share your thoughts with me or in the comments below!

With best wishes,
Andrea