The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (5 page)

Present-minded awareness can be and is a natural state when the circumstances are right. In fact, we all have experienced this state of mind many times in our lives. The problem in identifying at what times we are functioning in this state is a paradox. When we are totally focused on the present moment and in the process of what we are doing, we are completely absorbed in the activity. As soon as we become aware of how well we are concentrating on something, we are no longer concentrating on it. We are now concentrating on the fact that we
were
concentrating on the activity. When we are practicing correctly, we are not aware we are practicing correctly. We are only aware and absorbed in the process of what we are doing in that moment.

In Zen, this state is referred to as “beginner’s mind.” When you are a beginner in any activity, accomplishing it takes all your concentration, and your mind is empty of chatter. As you become more adept at the activity, concentrating solely on performing it actually becomes harder. Remember when you first started learning to drive a car? You were totally absorbed in the process of learning to drive the car. You had a beginner’s mind. Now when you drive, you have lost that beginner’s mind. You are listening to the radio, which you would have considered a distraction in the beginning. You are having a conversation with someone in the car or thinking of something you have to do later that day. Your mind is someplace other than where
you are, and on something
other than what you are doing. The next time you get into the car, try to think of nothing other than driving the car. Try to keep your awareness on where other drivers are and what they are doing, how the scenery looks, and how your hands are placed on the wheel. If you are alone, try to stop any internal dialogue, and turn off the radio. It will feel maddening. You will find it impossible to give up your awareness that you are trying to
not
think of anything but driving the car. What was so simple and natural when you had no driving skills at all will be seemingly impossible to repeat now that you are fully competent. The point of this exercise is not to make us feel that we can’t accomplish the desired mindset through effort, but to help us understand how we behave and feel when we are
in
it.

This is also the true purpose of the martial arts. Hollywood has made the martial arts seem a form of acrobatics performed by superhumans whose goal is to take on any number of opponents and easily defeat them, but this is far removed from the original nature of the martial arts. The different forms of martial arts serve to teach the participants how to function in the present moment and to force them into this state of mind through a desire for self-preservation. The student diligently works at all the moves of the particular form he or she is studying. These moves are
deliberately
performed over and over again with
intention
and
awareness
, to a point of repletion. They become totally reflexive and intuitive.

When two students spar in a ring, they are completely
focused on the present mom
ent. They are aware of where they are in relationship to their opponent and what their opponent is doing. They observe each second as it comes at them and react instinctively to the motion of the opponent. When your mind wanders in a situation like this, you’re quickly aware of it (you get hurt). There is no time to think of anything but the process of both offense and defense. In each second, you must be ready to both defend yourself or get out of the way of your opponent’s advance and make your own strike when the opportunity presents itself. These sparring matches give the participants the opportunity to experience the instinctive, total present-moment awareness that occurs during life-threatening situations without their actually being in any lethal danger.

If you imagine yourself in a situation such as this, you will see that, during a present-moment experience, you cannot be aware of anything other than the experience itself. This is why we cannot observe ourselves when we are practicing a process-oriented mentality. What we
can
do is use the moments of questioning whether we are focusing on the process to remind us that we are not.

Even though we cannot directly observe ourselves when we are functioning in a process-oriented, present minded state, we can observe this state quite easily in others. One of the best examples of this is to watch someone play a computer video game. You will see perfect practice in action. Video games offer a natural environment for pulling us into a state of focused present-moment awareness.
In a video game, the score
is essentially the end result or product that the player is working for, but the game itself is where the fun is. The process of playing the game takes all your attention. If you take more than a second to glance at the score, it can make or break your attempt to beat the computer at the game. If you watch people playing a computer game, you will observe how totally focused they are on what they are doing in that moment. Even though the best score possible is the ultimate goal, the participants are only superficially aware of it. The process of playing the game requires all their attention. If you talk to people playing a computer game, they may not even answer you because they are so absorbed in the process of the game. Watching a movie can have the same effect on us if we find it particularly interesting. We say it “captivates” us because it captures our attention.

Most of us find that we are very good at practicing properly during recreational activities. We perform these activities with all our attention in the present and on what we are doing. What is the difference, then, between work activities and recreational activities? Why do we find it so much easier to focus on something we consider play than on something we consider work? If we can find answers to these questions, they could help us advance our efforts toward operating in a present-minded state all the time.

I have found that the only difference between the two sorts of activities is that we prejudge them. We make a conscious decision that if we enjoy an activity, it is not work. So we must temporarily suspend our definition of
work
as referring t
o our daily vocation.
Work
, in this discussion, refers to any activity we don’t feel like doing, and though it could certainly include our job duties, or at least parts of them, it could also include any activity that we think is “undesirable.”

We know that this prejudgment of whether an activity is work or play is not universal, because one person’s hobby is another person’s drudgery. Some people love to garden; others don’t even want to cut the grass. I watched a program one evening called
The Joy of akes
. To me, that’s a self-contradictory title, but to the show’s host, it made perfect sense.

The knowledge that we prejudge our activities and then place them into one of the two categories is very powerful. It demonstrates to us that nothing is really work or play. We make an activity into work or play by our judgments. The next time you find yourself doing something that you really don’t feel like doing, stop for a moment and ask yourself why. What is it about the activity that makes you feel that way? You will find that many times you really can’t put your finger on why you don’t want to do something. You will end up saying, “I just don’t feel like doing this right now.” This implies that what you feel like doing is something else that you have defined as “not work.” You are not in the present but instead are in the future, anticipating another activity.

But why, during a subconscious judgment process, do we define one activity as work and another as “not work”? I feel that a large part of what makes us define something
as work is that the activity
requires a lot of decision making, which can be very stressful and fatiguing. This is especially true when the decisions that you are making are very subtle and you are not even aware that you are making them.

Once, when I was preparing a concert piano for an orchestra and soloist, I found myself going through the experience of “I just don’t feel like doing this.” As I tried to put my finger on exactly why I felt this way, I realized it was due to the hundreds of decisions I was having to make during the tuning process and the responsibility that went along with them. When the soloist came out to perform that evening, all his years of practicing and preparation would go out the window if I hadn’t set up this instrument correctly. My stress was generated by my concern about making the wrong decision, for which I would be held accountable. When I started to examine why I was lacking in confidence about something in which I had proven my expertise over and over again, I realized it was because I wasn’t working in the present moment. I knew that I wasn’t really giving my full attention to what I was doing. I was thinking about something I was going to do later in the day that I had defined as “not work.” I subconsciously knew that I wasn’t putting all my energy into the process of preparing the piano because, being so adept at it, I had lost that beginner’s mind I mentioned earlier. I had tuned a whole section of the instrument, yet I couldn’t remember doing it because I had been in the future, daydreaming.

Here is another, similar workplace example of this
that may sound familiar. One
day, while a close friend and I discussed these ideas, she related a story about a situation in her office. Here is what she shared with me. A payroll processor who had a looming deadline to process hundreds of payrolls plugged away at completing her task. Running under the surface in her mind was palpable anxiety about what she might face if she did not complete her task on time and meet her deadline. She might have needed to call a manager to ask for an exception to push through payroll past her deadline. This might not have been the first time she’d had to do this, so another layer of anxiety was added. If she did not make payroll on time, paychecks might have been delayed, followed by email and phone complaints that she would need to deal with on top of her already overburdened workload. A reprimand could have been likely, which possibly would have impacted her annual review. And on and on it went.

All this thought energy drained her, bothe job and when she was at home in the evening. It also constantly tugged her out of the present moment and into the future as she unconsciously considered all these possible stressful scenarios. Under a different circumstance, the act of doing payroll could have had a totally different feeling to it, and for some people, the task might not even have been something they defined as work because the experience that accompanied it didn’t have all these background “what-if’s” clamoring away.

In this situation, even when she was removed from her
“place of work,” she c
ouldn’t relax. She was not present mentally with her family and might even have struggled to be present with something she usually defined as “not work.” What was worse was that none of the vast amounts of energy she expended in running through these possible scenarios went into the process of completing payroll on time and thus removing this task from her workload. Yet she was most likely unaware that any of this was happening. She was merely thinking, “This is work, and I don’t feel like doing it.”

One evening, I happened upon an interview with a well-known actor on TV. I watch very little TV because I feel that most of it offers no return for the time you invest in it. But this particular interview caught my ear because I heard the actor talking about how he had gotten into meditating later in his life. The point of his interview, in the context of this book, is that he said he had become very present moment–oriented. He found it increasingly difficult to plan future events because he was so wrapped up in what he was doing
right now
, in
this
moment. He had learned he could completely enjoy anything he was doing, provided he kept his mind in the present and just focused on the process of what he was doing at that moment. The difference this made in his life and how he felt was very profound to him.

Try this the next time you are faced with doing something you define as unenjoyable or as work. It doesn’t matter if it is mowing the lawn or cleaning up the dinner
dishes. If the activity will take a long time, tell yourself you will work on staying present-moment and process oriented for just the first half hour. After that, you can hate it as much as usual, but in that first half hour you absolutely will not think of anything but what you are doing. You will not go into the past and think of all the judgments you have made that define this activity as work. You will not go into the future, anticipating when it will be completed, allowing you to participate in an activity that you have defined as “not work.” You will just do whatever you are doing right
now
for half an hour. Don’t
try
to enjoy it, either, because in that effort you are bringing emotions and struggle into your effort. If you are going to mow the lawn, then accept that all you need to do is cut the grass. You will notice the feeling of the mower as you push it, and how it changes resistance with the undulations of your front yard. You will pay attention and cut as wide a path as possible, not sloppily overlapping the last pass you made as you gawked at the neighbor across the street washing his car. You will smell the cut grass and notice how the grass glows green in the sunlight. Just do this for one half hour of the activity. You will be amazed. Once you experience how an activity as mundane as mowing the grass can be transformed, you will have the motivation to press on, because the potential effect this could have on your life and how you perceive it will become apparent to you.

I am not going to suggest to you that thinking this way is the easiest thing you will ever do, although, as we discussed earlier, you’ve alread done it many times,
naturally and effortlessly, when yo
u were learning something for the first time. At those times, though, you were not willfully doing it, and therein lies the difference. When choosing which activity to begin applying this technique to, it is best to begin with something in which you have no strong emotions invested. If you suspect that you owe $5,000 in taxes, choosing taxes as your first activity is probably not a good idea — the emotional content would make the task much harder. However, as you become better at present-minded thinking, you will realize its value when you’re approaching emotionally laden activities and negating their power over you. The practicing mind puts you in control of even the most difficult situations and allows you to work with less effort and negative emotion at any activity. This produces inner peace, and you accomplish more with less effort.