The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (10 page)

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Authors: Thomas M. Sterner

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BOOK: The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life

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You can learn to meditate at any age and regardless of your physical condition. I have practiced for over thirty years, and I started out knowing next to nothing about meditation. In the beginning, I more or less felt my way along through my own chosen reading material and classes. Later, I studied in more structured environments and with more experienced people. The benefits of meditation cannot be described; they must be experienced. I recommend it for everyone. There are many books and tapes available to get you started if you are interested (see
www.thepracticingmind.com
for resources I’ve created).

With or without meditation, it is necessary to consciously work to shift your alignment toward the Observer. An effective adjunct method to meditation that I use for this purpose is what I call DOC, which stands for
“Do, Observe, Correct.” This technique can be applied t
o any activity in which you try to engage the practicing mind, but because DOC is easiest to grasp when applied to a physical activity such as a sport, we will start with hat.

I once read an interview with a coach for the U.S. Olympic archery team. He commented that the biggest problem he faced in coaching the American team was that they were fixated on their scores, or the
result
of their shots. It was as if they were drawing the bow and releasing the arrow only to hit the bull’s-eye and earn a good score. This was in contrast to the Asian teams, who, having grown up in different cultures, were consumed in the
process
of properly executing the technique that led up to releasing the shot. Where the arrow hit the target was almost unimportant compared to the motion of drawing the bow correctly and releasing the shot. They viewed the result with an almost detached indifference. For them, the desired goal was a natural result of prioritizing the proper technique of drawing the bow. They operated in a completely different paradigm, and because of it, they were very difficult to beat.

What I want you to understand from this story is that the Asian archers were functioning in the DOC process. They drew the bow, they released the arrow, they observed the result, and then they made corrections for the next shot. They
do
, they
observe
, they
correct
. There is no emotion in any of this. There are no judgments. It is simple and stress-free, and you can’t argue with their technique because, for many years, they dominated the sport.
However, go to most U.S. sporting events and you will see that nobod
y is having any fun unless they are winning. Victory is what we focus on. The players’ minds reel with judgments about where they are in relation to the competition, and they experience all the emotions produced by such mental activity. The minds of the Asian archers were quiet, uncomplicated, and free from mental turmoil. The irony was that, when compared to the results-oriented Americans, the Asians were the ones who were winning. Now, U.S. sports psychologists are teaching our athletes to think along similar lines.

This technique of DOC can and does happen in the background, and very naturally at times. Give a basketball player ten shots from anywhere on the court. He will shoot at the target, or do; then he will observe the shot unfold; and finally he will make corrections based on what he observed. DOC happens in the background, without effort. Like the player, we want to make DOC a natural part of how we approach life.

If, for example, you feel you tend to worry too much, then try to apply DOC to your actions. When you notice yourself fretting over something, you have accomplished the
do
portion. Now
observe
the behavior that you want to change. In your observation of yourself worrying, you separate yourself from the act of worrying. Now realize that the emotions you are experiencing have no effect on the problem over which you’re fretting. Release yourself from the emotions as best as you can — that is the
correction
portion — and try to look at the problem as an Observer.

When you find yourself falling back into fretting, start the cycle a
gain. Just
do
,
observe
, and
correct
. That’s all there is. There is nothing else, no negative emotions or judgments. It’s tiring at first. Remember, you are breaking an unwanted habit in how you deal with problems. The old habit put most of your energy into fretting and very little of it into solving the problem. In a short time, the new habit of DOC will be a natural part of how you operate. You are shooting arrows at a target: “Oops, missed that one by aiming too far to the left, that’s all. Shoot more to the right.” It’s a game of sorts, and you are not letting the villain of emotions play in your game. Soon the enyment that you experience from staying in the present moment will make hitting the target smack in the middle irrelevant.

Don’t confuse evaluating something with judging it. Evaluation comes before the action of passing judgment. You can’t judge something if you haven’t first evaluated it. You can decide to stop the DOC process after evaluating or observing, before your thoughts turn toward judgment. This is what you are doing in DOC. Your observation is the point at which you evaluate your process. Are you heading toward your goal? No? Then jump immediately to
correct
, and skip the judgment because it has no value in your effort.

As you work at this technique, your ability to detach from the emotional content of a situation grows in strength. It becomes easier to apply this principle to more abstract circumstances, such as personal encounters with
difficult people or trying times. At first you must depend on your inn
er strength and determination to separate from a circumstance long enough to apply the principle of DOC. After that initial instant, the game begins. I usually start by remembering a line from the first
Star Wars
movie: The Imperial fleet starts to fire on Luke, Leia, and the gang. Faced with impossible odds, Han Solo says, “Here’s where the fun begins.” A line such as this is a great way to interrupt the momentum of your emotions when someone is difficult with you or you find yourself facing a personal challenge.

This really is where the fun begins, because nothing is more satisfying than quieting the squawking voice of your frightened or insulted ego. In those moments, you realize that you really are separate from that angry or fearful voice and that you truly are the captain of your own ship and crew. In time, this process becomes easier. Like everything else you practice, you get better at it. As you practice, you become more aligned with the Observer within you, and time begins to slow down during such incidents. You see them coming toward you rather than finding them on top of you. Your reflexive movement
away
from the emotional reactions you are so accustomed to becomes an intuitive habit.

Once I had booked a significant piano restoration project with a customer that fell through at the last moment. We had discussed the work several months ahead of time and worked out a time slot that suited both of our schedules. About eight weeks before work was to begin, I
had blocked out the several weeks that would be necessary for the job.
Several days before I was supposed to pick up the work and begin the job, the customer notified me that he had changed his mind and wasn’t going to do the work after all. People who are not self-employed are generally unacquainted with the situation I faced then: when you’re not working, you’re not earning money. This is particularly true in service-type businesses where you operate in piecework format. If you have five calls scheduled for the day and each one should bring in fifty dollars, your day’s earnings will start to dissolve very quickly should two of those calls be cancelled. Even if the clients apologize and reschedule, your weekly income has dropped, and there is nothing you can do to affect that. This situation, which involved the partial rebuilding of a vintage grand piano, was an extreme. It was Wednesday, and starting on the following Monday I had no work scheduled for the next two weeks. On top of that, I was out several thousand dollars in planned income. It was not a good time. Immediately my ego kicked into high gear, turning on the anxiety machine and protesting the injustice of it all. This is where the fun began.

The first thing I did was to step back and align with the Observer. Then I defined my DOC cycle for this particular instance. Because I had been working on DOC for some time, I hung up the phone with a deliberate, detached point of view. I expected the whole ego trip of anger and frustration to begin; I could actually see it coming before it was upon me.

My cycle was this: When the anxiety started, I observed and evaluated
it. I realized that my ego’s sense that the situation was unfair was just a judgment it was making out of fear of income loss. I also realized that the situation just “was as it was,” and its value, whether good or bad, was merely an interpretation I could choose to accept or ignore. I corrected by choosing to ignore my ego’s sense of this situation as good or bad, fair or unfair. I told myself that the situation was merely part of the ebb and flow of financial energy into and through my life. Some jobs I would get, others I would not, and the jobs that I would get would be satisfying because I could compare them to jobs, such as this one, that I had not received. I focused on staying impartial and dealing with the situation in a detached manner, despite how loudly my ego’s internal dialogue protested, “But this is not fair! But this is wrong!” I looked at this as nothing more than a distraction. I would accept this situation as it was, not as how my ego wanted it to be.

In this instance, the DOC cycle was composed of my conscious participation in the whole process: I saw the anger and frustration coming, observed my internal dialogue with detachment, and corrected my reaction to this dialogue. When I completed the DOC cycle in this manner, the anxiety subsided and the internal dialogue quieted. In the beginning, the emotions might return in fifteen minutes, and perhaps I would start to indulge in anxiety, but correcting myself was what I prescribed for
the next cycle. I did not judge my performance in this matter as good
or bad.

Keeping the impartial-observer perspective is what I would do were I counseling a friend through a similar situation. Staying aware that I had a choice in how I reacted to the feelings was what I strived for. Not falling victim to my personality’s conditioned response was my goal. I wanted to consciously make a habit of detaching myself and thereby use my privilege of conscious choice. The periods of returning anxiety steadily decreased in frequency and became less intense as I persevered at the DOC cycle. By the beginning of the next week, they were all but gone. I considered this significant because there was a time in my life when a job’s disappearance would have bothered me for weeks, and my fretting would have really affected the quality of my life.

In reality, this setback wasn’t going to change my standard of living, no matter how much my ego wanted to argue the contrary. My true self knew that. The income would have been nice, but I really didn’t need it to support my family. The whole situation was an inconvenience more than anything else.

During the rest of the week, I focused only on the solution to the problem. By Monday, I had filled those two weeks with work and even had a little time left over to continue work on this book. In retrospect, the loss simplified my life because it allowed me to balance the flow of an overburdened work schedule. The experience increased
my knowledge of the value of DOC and how it truly does make life more
of an adventure.

I have used DOC in every conceivable difficult situation. If somebody barks at me because he is having a bad day, my inner response is “This is where the fun begins. Let’s go.” As I said, though, I don’t make it my goal to tay perfectly detached and unaffected by other people’s behavior or life’s ups and downs. That would be counterproductive because I would be substituting one kind of stress for another. I make it my goal to stay in the process of practicing DOC and to be aware enough of my internal monologues to have a chance to use DOC.

Remember that when you start engaging your conscious will in how you handle difficult situations, you have to take it in short intervals, at least in the beginning. Otherwise you get fatigued, and then frustration is a danger.

If you were to decide to take up jogging, you wouldn’t go out to run a marathon on the first day. Building up the strength and endurance necessary to deal with the rigors of a race of that magnitude takes time and practice sessions. Likewise, the stamina necessary for self-control is a process that you work at daily. You start with short sessions and allow yourself rest. If you are aware of when you are trying, then that means you are in the present moment and you have already won, regardless of where you appear to be in relation to your personal goals. Your goals will always move away from you. That is the way we keep evolving.

Wisdom is not a by-product of age.
Teach and learn from all thos
e around you.

I
f you have children, it is only natural to want to pass on to them what you have learned from both your struggles and your triumphs. We do this in an effort to save our children from having to repeat the learning processes we went through. Ironically, though, in some ways, children are ahead of adults in the way they process their lives and engage the practicing mind. We have much to offer them, but we also have much to learn from them.

When I’ve tried to pass on real knowledge to my own children, I’ve found that it is not an easy task. The reason for this is that there is a large difference between children’s and adults’ perspectives on life. And I do mean our perspectives, not our priorities. I don’t think we differ as much as we might think in the latter aspect. Kids basically want a sense of security, lots of free time, and experiences
that are fun and free from stress. Do adults want anything different?

Yet we do differ in some areas, such as our concepts of time. When I was a child, I felt that the school day was eternal. Summer vacation seemed to go on for years. Time moved very slowly. If I tell my kids we will go someplace special next week, they whine about having to wait so long. Meanwhile, I am wishing that next week were a month away so that I’d have time to complete all my work before next week gets here. If I tell them to do their homework before they watch TV or get on the computer, they protest that the half an hour of homework will take
forever
.

As adults, we usually feel that life goes too fast. We feel there is too much to do in too little time, and most of us long for the simplicity of our schooldays when we were young. And the older we get, the faster time seems to go. Seasons and years feel as if they are flying by. The time between when we were ten and twenty years old seemed to last a century, and yet the time between, say, thirty and forty feels like two or three years. I am not really sure why this phenomenon occurs, but I have never met an adult who doesn’t experience it. It might happen bese when you are a child, you are, hopefully, still naive about much of the world’s suffering, which we perceive as adults. A child’s life doesn’t possess the quality of urgency it will take on in adult years.

Time perception is an integral part of the difference
between adults and children. In general, children don’t seem to have
a sense of where they are going in life. There is today, and that’s it. They live in the present moment, but not really by their own choice; it’s just how they are. There is a paradox here. What’s frustrating as an adult, with regard to teaching them to stay in the present when they are engaged in something that requires perseverance, is that kids can’t see the point. Why work at something that requires a long-term commitment, a perception of time outside the present moment? All they know is their perspective as children. They have no concept of what lies ahead. They don’t see how discipline and effort can pay such great dividends over time, but we do. This paradox is both their and our strengths and weaknesses in the same instant.

Look at an activity such as piano lessons. Many children can’t see the point in practicing because they have no concept of being able to play well and the enjoyment that that would bring to them. That is why
they
get impatient. Why do it? Adults, however, do possess an understanding of the point of practicing, and our impatience stems from the precisely opposite reason. We do have a concept of what it would be like to play well, and that is the very reason that we get impatient. We can’t play well enough, soon enough. So, as an adult, try to notice the carefree nature that comes naturally to a child, who lives for and in the present. Try to help children to not lose that nature as
they grow up in a world that constantly tries to push it out of them.

To me, the reason to work at all that I have been discussing in this book is obvious. It raises my level of control over my life and allows me to choose a path that is filled with more ups than downs. It makes me live in the present and brings happiness and peace to whatever I do in the ever-present moment. It both makes me aware that I am a conscious choice-maker and empowers me with the privilege to make the choice.

I confess that teaching my daughters about reasons to practice is a learning process that I am far from completing. None of us learn anything except through our own direct experiences. Because of this, I try to teach in two ways. First, I remind my daughters of their past. They might not know where they are going, but they do know where they have been. I can talk about an event that was either a problem or a triumph in their lives and help them to understand which qualities they brought into that event that made it seem so. This helps them to shift into an alignment with the Observer within themselves. Second, I remember that they are most receptive to this conversation when they are not overwhelmed by the emotions that were present during the particular incident. I might talk with them when we’re alone in the car and their thought processes won’t be interrupted by outside distractions such as the TV or the telephone. I start the conversation with something like, “Hey, remember last week when you
got upset about what happened at school?” I might ask them how they
feel about it now. This gives me a chance to make them aware of how their emotions affect their perceptions of events. By delaying the discussion of an incident for several days or even a week after it happened, I give them a chance to settle into a more detached perspective, and I give myself a chance to decide how to best manage the discussion.

Here is how I resolved the situation in a way that I felt would make a lasting impression on my older daughter. I told her to give herself two weeks to get over her desire
to have a new pogo stick like the one her sister had just bought. I told her, “
You can swap with her at times if she wants and just keep jumping up and down for the next two weeks.” I told her that it might seem hard to believe, but that the feelings she was experiencing right then were just emotions and that they would pass. I also told her, “If at the end of that time you still feel that you really have to have a pogo stick like hers, I will buy you one for executing such patience.”

I knew this was another case of instant gratification, which never provides any lasting pleasure, and I wanted her to get past the emotion of the moment. About a week into the two-week period, they both had had more than enough of jumping up and down on pogo sticks. Both pogo sticks were banished to the garage for retirement. After the allotted time, while riding in the car, I reminded my older daughter of our agreement and asked if she still wanted a new pogo stick. She thanked me and said, “No, you were right. I don’t really care about it anymore.” I knew at some level that the lesson would stay with her forever.

Another way to pass such concepts on to children is to teach with your actions. I remember a lot of adult behavior from my childhood, and much of it was inappropriate behavior. We can’t control the behavior of all the adults our children come in contact with during the day, but it is
our
behavior that has the most impact on them. A parent’s behavior helps construct a sense of what
works and what doesn’t in a child’s mind. Actions definitely speak louder than words. When I have a difficult workday, I will tell my kids about it later on, when I feel they are ripe for knowledge about how to cope with hard situations. If I am under stress, I might let them know a little about it so they can see how I cope with it by using my practicing mind. Your kids are always watching you. They’re not necessarily doing it consciously, but they’re observing you nonetheless. I have seen both my best and my worst qualities come out in my kids. Because of this, I try to be aware of what I silently teach them and to make it count.

Many adults make the mistake of thinking that because someone is younger than they are, they can’t possibly learn something from them. This is both an egotistical and an insecure point of view. It reminds me of my earlier comment about how we are so convinced that because we came along later in history, we must be more evolved than people who lived in the distant past. I have met many young people, even children, who are more mature and better thinkers than some adults I know. Kids are dealing with a lot more tay than most adults did as children. More is being pushed into their heads at an earlier age. For example, my daughters are doing types of math, such as algebra, several years earlier in their lives than I did when I was in school. Also, listening to children’s points of view can be very enlightening because they tend to be more honest and open about how they feel.

My younger daughter was once involved in competitive gymnastics. As parents, we always
come from the perspective that such activities should be fun things in our kids’ lives, not another stress factor. However, as my daughter progressed through the competitive levels, the demands on her body and her time grew considerably. Three days a week, she came home from school and had only about an hour to just sit. She would start on homework and have a snack. She then went to the gym until 9
PM
, and came home about a half hour later. After eating a late dinner, she would at times do schoolwork until almost 11
PM
and then go to bed, only to be awakened at 6:15
AM
, with only forty-five minutes to get ready for school, and start the cycle over again. All this at the age of twelve. I felt it was way too much, but initially she felt it was what she wanted. Several months into the school year, though, she confided in me that she felt she never got time to just “sit still.” She said, “All I do is rush from one thing to the next. I never have time to stop.”

These moments offer a perfect opportunity to both teach and learn from your children. Listen to what they are noticing about how they are living their lives. As you talk to them about real priorities, good perspective, and engaging their practicing minds, you are also reviewing lessons for yourself. Are you following the same advice you are giving to them? Are you teaching them that you hold the same priorities for yourself? On more than one occasion when I have been overworked, I have talked to
my daughters about the importance of balance in life and how at times priorities need
to be readjusted to maintain that balance. Children have much to offer because we can learn from them if we listen to ourselves as we teach them.

With deliberate and repeated effort,
progress is inevitable.

I
n every moment of your life, your skills are growing. The question is, in which direction? What I have presented in this book is not new knowledge by any means. It is centuries old and is relearned by each new generation. When we understand how we work, and when we stay in harmony with that knowledge, we feel a sense of control, and we can sit back and enjoy the experience of life flowing past us with ease.

This knowledge commands us to stay in the present moment, which brings awareness to all that we do. This awareness gives us the opportunity to take control of the choices we make. It teaches us to stay focused on the process and use our goals as stars to guide our course. When we make staying focused on the process our real goal, we experience a sense of success in every moment. Even when we feel we have fallen out of our focus on the process, the fact that we are aware of the fall means that we
have come back into the present moment. It means that in this awareness, we have come
a long way toward integrating present-minded concepts into the way we live.

With this knowledge, we live each moment to its fullest, and we experience life directly instead of indirectly. When we are in the present moment, we experience life as it happens and as it really is, rather than through filters of anticipation, as when we think about the future, or through filters of analysis, as when we linger in the past. Most of us spend very little time in the present moment. We usually are either thinking about something that has not yet happened (and may never happen) or reliving something that already has. We waste each moment’s opportunity to experience what is real by focusing on what is not.

We have discussed a number of techniques to help us develop present-minded skills and to make the work that is needed to develop the present mind as easy as possible. As you begin to use these techniques in different areas of your life, you will, no doubt, experience moments of frustration. These are, however, just the result of holding imaginary ideals of how quickly you should master any new endeavor that you undertake. We are taught this crippling mindset by almost every aspect of our culture, from the educational system, with its grades, to the marketing media, with its unreachable ideals. Everyone wants to be number one, to have the best, to be an A student. This mindset can be unlearned, though, and we must take on this challenge if we are to achieve any real happiness in
life. Remember, this mindset is nothing more than a habit. Through our efforts, we can make
present-mindedness into a new habit that is much more conducive to our overall well-being. We make and reinforce habits in every moment of our lives. Our reactions to people and circumstances are nothing more than habits. When our practicing, present minds teach us this truth, we gain the power to choose which traits we will manifest in our personalities. Now is the time to begin.

In closing, I would like to say this: All cultures begin by expending their energy and resources on survival. If a culture survives its infancy, its people eventually pass the point of having to spend all their time focusing on staying alive. They get to a point where they can ask
what’s
for dinner, instead of asking
whether
there’s dinner. Their days have more free time. It is at this point that the society faces a fork in its road. We have been standing at this fork for quite some time. On one path, you can spend at least a portion of this free time on expanding your spiritual awareness, your knowledge of your true self. The other path leads away from this truth into an endless cycle of meaningless self-indulgence that, at its core, is an attempt to fill the spiritual void that many of us experience in our lives. The spiritual track record of all the great cultures that have come (and, more important, gone) is, unfortunately, not a very good one. We can and must learn from this historical truth.

If you look at most of the things that we make our
daily priorities, you will notice that in times of personal crisis, they seem insignificant
. And in these moments, by contrast, things that we usually pay little attention to become everything to us. Our health and the health of our family and friends, and who or what we feel the Creative Force is, become our sole priorities, and the dent in the car and the tight budget last month become trivial concerns. Regardless of your religious beliefs, I hope that you feel that everything of a spiritual nature that you acquire in life will be with you forever. Everything else will not. Houses, jobs, and cars come and go; you, however, are eternal.

With this in mind, take time regularly to review all the things that you have acquired in your life, all the way back to your childhood. You will notice that the toy that meant everything to you when you were a child has no significance at all to you now, although getting it consumed your thoughts at the time. You may also notice that your joy in your memory of that toy is not about the toy itself, but about the simplicity of life back then, a simplicity that was rooted in your unknowing, present-moment living. When you look at all the “things” that you had to have through the years, you begin to see that you don’t really care about most of them anymore, certainly not the material ones. Things such as the car or the furniture lose their importance and value to you over time. You may even wonder what you saw in many of those things in the first place.

That moment of realization is a good time to notice if you are repeating the process of struggling to acquire things that you are convinced will end the anguish and
emptiness you feel inside. You come into this world with only your true self, and you leave
in the same way. Everything that you spiritually acquire expands your true self and becomes part of you forever. We need to get off the self-destructive train that runs on the tracks of instant gratification. All things of lasting and deep value require time and nurturing and come to us only through our own effort.

Most of us are aware of this fact at some level. We just get distracted from it by the contradictory flow of information that washes over us every day. You can eliminate a certain amount of this distraction by carefully choosing what you expose yourself to in the way of media, be it TV, music, or reading material. If it doesn’t enrich you, then you don’t need it.

Most important, if we make developing our practicing mind our first order of business, then the process of
becoming
will become an adventure, and we will be filled with peace instead of struggle. I have put down here for you what I am learning in my own life, and through my own efforts. I hope that my words will help you in the same way that those before me have helped me by taking the time to put down what they have learned. Remember, none of these truths are new. They are just the eternal lessons that we have learned and relearned over the centuries from those who have questioned and found peace in the answers. This is where the fun begins.