A Year To Live - Part 3: Tune In To The Infinite Love That Surrounds You

Let's be honest. Us connecting like this is simply never as good as the real thing.

After all, the real thing - postive, caring, face-to-face human connections - creates powerful biochemical effects and expansive states of mind. I'm hoping to encourage you via the inspirational power of my written word to stick more of these connections into your life, every single day. 

Your body needs it.

This is a lovely quote from Professor of Psychology, Barbara Frederickson:

Just as your body was designed to extract oxygen from the Earth’s atmosphere, and nutrients from the foods you ingest, your body was also designed to love. Love — like taking a deep breath, or eating an orange when you’re depleted and thirsty — not only feels great but is also life-giving, an indispensable source of energy, sustenance, and health.

So how do we tap into this source of energy?

Is it a finite resource, like fossil fuels?

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Before we look at the answer to this, a reminder for anyone just tuning into this conversation now that this is the third and final in a series of emails entitled 'A Year To Live'. 

The idea is that by reminding ourselves regularly that life is definitively a finite resource we can make the most of our lives. You can read Part One in the series about Deep Appreciation here and Part Two here about Radical Forgivenness. 

So, if 2017 is going to be our Year to Live - a year so complete that if we were to pop our clogs on the 1st Jan 2018 they would be disco clogs and we'd be dancing contentedly to meet our maker - then we will surely need to be tapping into this indispensable source of energy called Love as much as we possibly can.

So many people's last words are 'I love you'. 

This says it all, don't you think?

This is the ultimate gift of life: our ability to give and receive love.

Beyond this, nothing really matters.

Tuning into the energy of love may sometimes appear difficult. But this is simply a matter of narrow perception. As Aldous Huxley said: 

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
 

Love is infinite. It is all around us. But we often don't believe its real. Its like we are starving in a land of plenty. 

If we open our eyes, we can see gestures of love everywhere we turn.

Love is so much more than the grand romantic gesture.

Love isn't just the number of heart-shaped likes you get on Facebook either.

Love is the openness and warmth that we show each other, even if just for fleeting moments, each and every day.

Love is a momentary yes to what is.

So how can we become 'more permeable to love' (John Welwood) in our Year to Live?

The key is to notice it.

When you consider the number of connections you have with other beings in any given day, consider that there is at least some openness and warmth in many of these connections: whether the bus driver stops to let you on, a stranger smiles at you on the street, someone listens to you in a conversation, you are greeted with a 'hello' when you arrive at work. 

As psychotherapist and all-round very wise being John Welwood says, "Add up all the interchanges you have with others every day, and you will see that your life is sustained by a flow of interconnectedness, which is the play of love at work."

So my challenge to you in your Year to Live is to tune your consciousness into the Love that underpins everything. Notice this force at play every day in your life. 

Once you have read this, see how many times in the next 24 hours you can notice an interaction that contains even the smallest grains of Love. Let yourself be permeated by Love's presence.

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By the way, a prize for spotting the place in this email where I reference lryics from this highly relevant track, and one of my all-time favourites.

Keep your eyes peeled, because over the next week I will be sending you a mind and heart-focusing tool tool I have created based on this Year To Live practice.

Sending All My Love

Louis

A Year To Live Part 2 - An effective technique to forgive people that have hurt you

Dearest Quiet Evolutionary,

In this newsletter, I'm going to share with you the second practice in this series 'A Year To Live'.

But first, whatever you are doing right now, I invite you to take a moment to PAUSE.

I am going to walk with you hand-in-hand through the techniques behind my current mantra:

Stop. Breathe. Love

Please treat reading the following words as a meditation in itself.

So take a moment to check-in with your state of mind right now. Does it feel clear or foggy or somewhere in-between? Whatever you notice, just accepting it as it is.

Now, turn your attention to your breathing. Notice now how your breathing happens all by itself. Its been happening since the moment you were born, and will continue until the moment you die. It is the animating force within you. And you don't need to do anything to control it right now. Effortless.

Now, place your hand on your heart and feel a connection to the space of compassion within you. There is a basic warmth and openness that is your true nature. Its called Love. If you struggle to connect to that feeling, bring to mind someone you know who is suffering right now. Notice what feelings arise in your heart. If possible, make a commitment to support that person today.

So that is the basic technique behind the mantra:

Stop. Breathe. Love

I hope you find it useful today and any moment when you need to reconnect to your true, peaceful, loving nature.

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Last week, I sent you the first in a series of practices called 'A Year To Live'.

The idea is very simple...

We put important things off.

We convince ourselves we have more time. We can keep putting important things off until tomorrow our whole lives...until there are no more tomorrows.

The best way to overcome this self-delusion we all suffer from is to bring an awareness of your own mortality to the foreground. This is why the practices I am sharing with you are grounded in a total acceptance that this year may indeed be the last year we have to live. If it were, what would you do?

By the way, if you think this kind of thing is 'morbid', just consider for a moment that this response might be a defence from the part of you that is terrified of leaving this earth-bound existence without having given fully of your gift. From my experience, maintaining an awareness that this life is finite and therefore precious is the single most life-affirming practice I know.

If you missed last week's newsletter, you can read it here. The practice I shared was about making a simple list of moments when people have been kind to you. How did you get on?

Over the last 2 weeks, I have had some amazing interactions with people who have been kind to me. Some of these interactions took place in my head, as I recalled, for example, a moment in my first year at secondary school when a boy in the year above was bullying me, trying to stop me from getting off the bus, and a boy two years older than me at school came in and shielded me, helping me get off the bus. This moment came into my mind as I meditated on these instances of kindness, and so I imagined thanking the boy who protected me and said an appreciative good-bye. 

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The second practice in this series is about forgiving people who have hurt you.

Why would you want to do this if you had a year to live? Well, holding onto resentment and bitterness prevents you from living and ultimately from dying in peace and love. This is a physiological truth, not just a metaphysical one. Studies show that extended feelings of anger, bitterness or resentment can affect our immune system, our organ function and our metabolism. Each time we replay in our minds the original event that offended us, the stress hormone cortisol is released into our bloodstream. You can read more about the science here.

So if you want to live, and ultimately die, in peace, I invite you to try the following steps:

1. Take a few moments to run through in your mind any memories where you are still holding onto some resentment. Some memories may be obvious, some will be buried a little deeper down. You will find that once you open the door to this reflective process, some older memories containing energies of resentment will pop up to say hello. Say HELLO back:) These memories are your heart's way of showing you that it longs to be free from grief.

2. Make a list of these moments or people who have hurt you deeply enough to warrant the effort to forgive. It can help to use a 1-to-10 scale: How much pain do I have regarding the way this person treated me? (with 1 being the least amount of pain and 10 being the most pain). 

3. Recognise the venom: Start with the person/incident with the lowest score. Recognize the effect on your thoughts, feelings, behaviours that not forgiving this person/incident has been having on your life. Wayne Dyer compares resentment to being like a snakebite: it’s not the bite that kills, but the venom that keeps circulating around the bloodstream. So the effect that not forgiving is having on your life is the 'venom'. 

4. Make a strong decision to forgive: It is important to remember that forgiving is not forgetting. By choosing forgivenness, you are choosing to release yourself from suffering. We can do this, and at the same time hold someone to account for their actions. Make a strong decision to forgive, knowing that this is for your own peace.

5. A moment of empathy: to forgive deeply, we need to consider this: if we had lived exactly the same life as the person who hurt us, can we be 100% sure that we wouldn't have acted in the same way? Consider the wounds that person suffered in their own life, the pressures and stresses they may have been going through at the time they hurt you. Notice any movement in your heart, that warm, open feeling of empathy.

6. Think of a gift and release the venom: is there a gesture, real or visualised, that you could extend to this person as a symbol of your forgivennes. It might be thinking or speaking kindly of them from now on. It might be calling them, texting them, writing them an email or letter. Of course, in many incidents we may not want or need to contact the person directly. For these incidents, you can imagine extending a gesture of forgivenness and then imagine that any venom that has been cirrculating in your system is released back into Mother Earth who just loves taking this heavy energy and turning it into sweet energy. It can also help to open a closed fist as you release the venom.

7. Gratitude for the lesson: what lesson has this incident or person taught you? Find a place in your heart to feel gratitude for the wisdom this person or incident has allowed you to cultivate.

This is definitely a more challenging practice then last week's. But because it is challenging, it contains a greater potential for your own transformation. If you like science, then you will see that many elements of this practice have been taken from this evidence-based forgivennes practice. In other words, yes, it really works:)

Once you have gone through the list from lighter to heavier situations, you will feel a great shift in your heart, and a growing sense of inner peace. There is no need to rush this process. Just open that door marked 'forgivennes' in your heart, and go gently.

I am struck by the delicious irony that many people reading this will put this email in a file marked 'tomorrow'. 

Here are a couple of quotes to keep you inspired:

There are days when I wish I could erase all the horrors that I have witnessed from my mind. It seems that there is no end to the creative ways we humans can find to hurt each other, and no end to the reasons we feel justified in doing so. There is also no end to the human capacity for healing. In each of us there is an innate ability to create joy out of suffering, to find hope in the most hopeless of situations, and to heal any relationship that is in need of healing.
— Desmond Tutu, ‘The Book of Forgiving’

I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.

- C. JoyBell C.

Sending All My Love

As ever, if you have any questions about this practice or anything else, then please do get in touch.

Louis

A Year To Live - Part 1 - What would you do in 2017 if you knew you had a year to live?

Dearest Quiet Evolutionary,

In the next few newsletters, I'm going to share with you a series of insights I've gained from working with people at the end of their life. I hope these insights will help you have the most incredible year in 2017.

But before we get to that, I like to suggest you use my newsletters as an opportunity to slow down. We are drowning in content. The average person scrolls through around 20 metres of content a day.

Because I have found myself flailing about in the vast Content Oceans too, I prefer now to focus on process or practice over content. An example of a practice that creates space within the noise is a mantra. 'Mantra' means 'mind-protecting'. Here is a mantra I have been working with recently.

Stop. Breathe. Love

 

The instructions should be self-explanatory;)

So, how was the last year for you?

For me personally, this last year has been one big fat rollercoaster.

There have been some thrilling highs, like building an amazing team and working closely with some inspiring young people, parents, and professionals to build the demo of Apart of Me; running meditation groups for parents, teachers, and students and a beautiful meditation retreat where there was so much laughter and love; seeing courage and inspiration and all sorts of other qualities blossom in my therapy and coaching clients; and helping my wife write an amazing book on Inner Beauty - coming out in April;)

There have also been some heart-breaking lows: a series of personal losses culminating in the death of our dear friend Rob who came to the end of his bittersweet dance with MND just a few weeks ago. Please watch his video here.

One thing Rob taught me was this:

live each day as though it were your last day on earth

...stop putting things off for that Great Tomorrow, that illusory moment in the future, created by the 'little worry monkey' in your mind, when everything will be just perfect, when you'll have enough time, enough money, enough confidence to live the life your heart desires. The small truth is that the worry monkey will never feel ready. The bigger Truth is, as Mos Def says, tomorrow may never show up, life is not promised.

Rob is clear in his poem, 'Don't let the moment pass; there is never enough time.' You have the choice. You can carry on living as though there are an infinite number of tomorrows, or you can choose to live your life for the next year in such a way that at the end of it you could die happily, in full knowledge that you had given most fully of your gift, forgiven what needed to be forgiven, loved with a full and open heart, and done things you know you would be proud of on your-death bed.

So if you don't mind quietening down your worry monkey (give him a nice banana) for a moment, my BIG question to you is:

What would you do in 2017 if you knew you had a year to live?

Take a moment, an hour, a day to really think about this. It's your life, and it's a scarce resource, so be wise and take the time needed to really think about these things.

I have broken down this BIG question into some smaller questions and practices for you, which I will drip-feed over the next few emails. I have taken the first question from Dharma teacher Stephen Levine, who wrote a brilliant book called 'A Year To Live'. You can read an interview with him about the book here. And the first question is: 

which people have been kind to you in your life?

Find 5 minutes to write down a list of 'People Who Have Been Kind To Me'. Write down at least 10 people. Go back in time. This is a gratitude practice in itself and will fill your heart with a warm and fuzzy feeling. (If you need a tip, start with your mum. She carried you for 9 months, then gave birth to you, and probably did a few things for you after that too.)

When you have your list, you can take it from the top, going through and thanking each person on that list as though you might never get the chance to thank them again. I promise you, you will feel amazing. I have been doing this over the last week, and it just feels so right. It doesn't need to always be in person. If you can't find that person, just imagine thanking them in your mind's eye.
I also want to thank YOU. Thank you for taking the time to sign up to my newsletter and for reading this. With an endless amount of content available these days, where you choose to place your attention is a big decision, so I am grateful that at least for a few moments we are connected here, right now.

Please do email me stories of people who have been kind to you and how you thanked them.

I will be sharing a selection of these in an article I am writing in the New Year.

With All My Love and Blessings for a New Year lived with full heart and no regrets.

Louis

Beware the 'Narcissism Trap' - break free of the echochamber in your own mind (with obligatory reference to Donald Trump)

This article will break you out of the echo-chamber of your own mind. Do you copy? 

Click HERE to read the whole shabang.

Is there anything wrong with you right now?

Is there anything wrong with you right now? Its a simple enough question, but getting to the bottom of the answer can provide you with the only true peace. Read HERE.

Is Your Heart Ticklish?

A sideways look at the heart as more than just a pump. How might you keep your heart open?

Read HERE.

Using the Magical Power of Unconditional Love to resolve unwanted thoughts and feelings

Unconditional Love can be magical when properly understood and used in the right way. Here I will guide you to the secrets of its magic..

Read HERE.

Make 2016 The Year You Discover Your Pearl Beyond A Price.

In this newsletter blog, I am going to kickstart your imagination, giving it permission to dream beyond your wildest dreams.

Read HERE.

What the Paris massacre teaches us about fear, anger and forgivenness.

Anger Displaced

Dearest Quiet Evolutionaries,
There is a lot of anger in the air right now.

The clearest single impact of the recent massacre in Paris has been to provoke anger, and its bedfellow, fear. We need to acknolwedge that this is our deep, unconscious, instinctive response. It is fight or flight, anger or fear.

This is the terror in 'terrorism'.

Whenever we hear of a tragedy such as this, especially one so close to home, our survival response kicks in, and we immediately relate it to our own experience: “what if that had been me or someone I love in the Bataclan? How can I protect myself and my loved ones?” 

I have found myself over the last days being swept up in this survivalist state of mind and the emotional contagion it feeds. The years of anger and resentment that has now morphed into the violent acts of ISIS have themselves triggered further waves of anger and fear, as I have clearly seen across social media. People are angry against the News Corporations (and by default those of us who get our information from them), for making such a big deal of the tragedy in Paris, when terrorism is happening all over the world on a daily basis. People are getting angry at how Western countries have dealt with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, creating the problem of Isis in the first place. And I can speak for myself and say I have felt angry, angry at how many people feel the need to get on the soapbox whenever there is a tragedy such as this. I was angry too at myself, for passively following this emotive, divisive stream, my ego just seeking (as it generally tends to) opinions it could agree or disagree with, building ever higher walls around its own echo-chamber.

The Wound behind our outrage

As I felt myself getting consumed with angry thoughts, I realized these thoughts and the emotion behind them were in fact signals to a deeper, wounded place inside of my self.

This wounded place in me carries all the resentments, all the fear and anger, the letdowns, putdowns, aggressions and abuses I have ever experienced.

These memories I carry.

They are lodged in my psyche, and the earliest painful memories are lodged more subtly in my body.

After many years of work on this wounded part of my self, I know that I can never access or heal that place if I allow my attention to get carried away on a torrent of negative judgments about external people and events.

You have that wound. We all do.

When you were born and experienced that first moment of exposure to a world in which you were a separate being. There was pain there. Sure, if you were lucky enough to have a caring, protective mother, she gave you enough moments of reassurance, enough 'there there's', to make you feel like the world might fundamentally be a safe enough place. But you never forgot the primal terror of separation.

The primal wound and the memories of hurt it accumulates over the years only lays dormant until an event opens the wound, opening your very own personalised Pandora's Box.

We live in the age of the digital soapbox. Everyone is a broadcaster. To broadcast means literally to 'cast out widely'. When the contents of our very own Pandora's Box are set loose, the natural tendency in these days is for us to cast out widely the contents of our box in the shape of a definite opinion; public reaction is our habit. I found myself pulled to do this very thing.

The Power of Forgivenness

But if our first response is to broadcast our emotions in the form of opinion, this only serves to displace our attention from looking inwards, at our own wounds. On a micro-level, every time you get into a disagreement or full-blown argument with your friend, partner, child, work colleague, your very own Pandora's Box opens up, and years of repressed pain are unleashed, feeding tainted ideas into the story-weaver that is your mind, like a projectionist in an old movie theatre. Suddenly, you can't see the person before you as they are. You are looking at them through spectacles coated with the thick paint of your own personal hurts.

So whenever an event happens that triggers your wounded self, no matter how great or small, it is really imperative that you first look inwards, and tend to your own wound before jumping on the soapbox. This is the only way the world is ever going to heal, one precious wound at a time.

And the most direct and powerful way to tend to your wound is through deep, radical forgivenness. Yes, forgivenness...not some cheesy, antiquated, or weak relic of the Christian tradition...but Forgivenness with a capital 'F': a powerful, direct, conscious choice we can make in the face of a humanity overrun with untended, wounded souls.

Now is the time to broadcast forgivenness inwardly, to send that message loud and clear to the wounded part of your self. You can let this part of you know right now that you will no longer live with resentment or bitterness. You can let this part of you know that in this very moment you are bringing an end to the cycles of pain and violence, by forgiving all those who have ever hurt you, including your self, your own worst enemy.

And so it is for my self, in the face of the recent massacre in Paris, in the face of all the pain and suffering happening all over the world right now, in the face of all the people who have ever hurt me and let me down, in the face of all the times I ever let myself down, in the face of all of our primal wounds, I am reaching deep into my heart in this very moment to activate that powerful quality of forgivenness. May our very own, personal, intimate acts of forgivenness create a million small ripples that together can build into an ocean of love and healing. 

The great Sufi poet Rumi says: "The wound is the place where the Light enters you." The world needs your light right now.

How to Get Free and Grow in Harmony #1: Boredom

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Boredom

Yawn, yawn, yawn. Boredom sounds like a pretty boring and trivial topic, right? But although the mere prospect of reading about boredom may be causing you to yawn so wide it swallows up your face, when you look a little deeper, you will see that boredom as a human behavioural response reveals some vital lessons about why we suffer. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard went as far as to say that: " Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself ." 

Welcome to the first in a series of curated doses of wisdom from A Quiet Evolution. In this series, we will get our psychological microscopes out and look in detail at some of the key areas of human life that can either prevent us or can help us be free from suffering and live in ultimate peace. Each newsletter will finish with your very own dose of wisdom, based on the topic. And so, without much further ado or yawning, please enjoy this first topic: boredom. 

1. Are you bored already? Attention-deficit and boredom. 

You are probably reading this in a rush, acutely aware of (perhaps addicted to) the stream of information and communications that you feel you need to keep on top of in this age of information overload. This brilliant article looks at the connection between information and boredom, starting with the question: 'How could any kid be bored when they have Google?'. It goes on to show, through studies, that in fact much of our information-seeking behaviour online is plagued by an overwhelming sense of boredom. How many times have you scrolled down your echo-chambered Facebook newsfeed, just because? As the author here explains: "The trouble is that information doesn't nourish us. Worse. In the end, it turns out to be boring."

Psychologists have shown that attention is linked to boredom, so that if you can't focus on one thing for very long, you are more likely to get bored. This same study discovered that very bored people tend to blame the external environment for their internal state, e.g. "This task is boring." Are you one of the many people who now flick through their phone or computer whilst watching a film? Do you compulsively multitask? According to Earl Miller, leading expert in multitasking, you are damaging your brain by doing this : “we are not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” 

2. The growth of boredom in adolescence. 

The classic stereotype of being bored is the teenager who suddenly finds a lot of the activities that they used to find interesting boring, as in this classic rendition by British comedian Harry Enfield. 

Why do we change from being a child that can be filled with awe and joy playing with a piece of tissue...to an adolescent that gets bored so painfully and so easily? Well, in , he points to research that shows our brains are developing as teenagers more than at any other time:" The brain is a collection of cells that communicate with one another using chemicals called neurotransmitters. During adolescence there is an increase in the activity of the neural circuits using dopamine, a neurotransmitter central in creating our drive for reward. Starting in early adolescence and peaking midway through, this enhanced dopamine release causes adolescents to gravitate toward thrilling experiences and exhilarating sensations. " This is why teenagers are more susceptible to addictive behaviours, and at much higher risk for suicide. 

3. Boredom, philosophy, and class. 

Ironically, boredom has been a topic of great interest to philosophers over the years. Philosophers are experts in finding meaning in the dullest of things. Blaise Pascal said that: " All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Clearly Blaise decided to sit in a room and write about it! In this article on boredom , we learn the intimate connection between being bored and showing contempt to the thing that we are bored with, whether it be our parents, a dinner party conversation, or life in general. Thus, boredom has traditionally been linked to a sense of nobility and superiority: " Although existential boredom is not tied to a temporary situation, such as a wearisome domestic chore, it is no less the fruit of circumstance, insofar as it stems from a certain degree of wealth and leisure. By and large, illiterate peasants working all day in the field don't have the luxury to despair at the ceaseless collapse of culturally generated meaning in a godless universe." 

4. The danger of boredom 

"Boredom may become Western man’s greatest source of unhappiness. Catastrophe alone would appear to be the surest and, in today’s world, the most likely of liberations from boredom. " (Robert Nisbet)

" If the human race disappears, it will be out of ennui and boredom. Mankind will gradually be consumed ... Look at these world wars, for example, which apparently bear witness to a violent vitality in man but which actually prove its growing lethargy. It will end with vast numbers being led to the slaughter at certain times." (Georges Bernanos) 

As young children, we are all able to entertain ourselves with almost anything. Human beings have an innate drive to play, to create, and to be curious about the world. Sadly, this gets drummed out of us by the increasing levels of largely passive infotainment/entertainment we absorb mindlessly in modern culture, often through our devices. In , we hear about a feeling of living in a movie, a passive need to have something break the all-too-painful silence : 

'I'm living in this movie 
but it doesn't move me 
I'm the man that's waiting for the phone to ring 
Hear it ring-a-ding-a-f***ing-ding' 
 

As we are becoming less and less able to tolerate boredom, we are also more likely to cause harm to ourselves and the world around us. You may have heard of the recent experiment where a team simply left subjects by themselves in a room for 15 minutes with a button that allowed them to give themselves an electric shock on the ankle. Many participants ended up giving themselves the electric shock just to break up the tedium. This may sound insane to you, but most of us will choose pain over boredom or nothingness. So maybe from this point of view, we are all a little insane? How many times have you provoked a reaction in a relationship, just to get some kind of response, just to break the silence? The latest scientific research has showed that our cortisol levels rise when we are bored. Cortisol is the stress hormone, and so it is not surprising that when we are feeling bored we are desperate to do anything to get rid of it, as shown in this documentary trailer. 

5. Boredom, the separate self, and our sense of time. 

Boredom is intimately related to our sense of ourselves as separate and disconnected from other people. Boredom is also related to our sense of time. The saying goes that time flies when we are having fun, but time drags painfully when we are bored. This is not always true. Sometime time can seem to stand still when we are in awe of something, and conversely as we get older time can seem to go so quickly, as though it is slipping through our fingers. In this fascinating piece about how our minds warp time , we learn that as we grow older we feel as though there are less new experiences, and this sense of repetition is why we feel time speeds up 

6. What can you do about boredom? 

"Boredom has to be accepted as an unavoidable fact, as life’s own gravity." (Professor Lars Svendsen) 

We should embrace boredom, according to this wonderful piece on the BBC future section. When we embrace boredom, rather than avoiding it, we can often discover it is telling us something about our self. Perhaps we are lacking a sense of meaning and purpose in our life. Perhaps we feel uncomfortable in our own skin. Whatever the primary cause, unless we can sit still and make contact with our boredom, we will never find out. This can act as a kind of exposure therapy, where we accustom ourselves gradually to the 'pain' of boredom, so that we suffer less in the future. The more we limit external stimulus, the more resourceful our internal worlds become, something Kierkegaard recognised: "The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement. What a meticulous observer one becomes, detecting every little sound or movement ."  So taking yourself away from outside distractions could actually be the best cure for your boredom, even though it may feel initially like the most boring thing to do. John Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness master, says that "when you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting. " In this way you can start to see your inner life (as well as your outer life) as a curious adventure full of things to be delved into and discovered. What does it actually feel like to be bored? Can you feel it somewhere in your body? What kind of stories is your mind telling you that are preventing you from being still and peaceful? 

The Dose of Wisdom 

Spend at least 10 minutes every day for the next week exposing your self to the state where you have no distractions whatsoever, and simply watch what happens to your mind. Don't try to meditate. Just sit still and do nothing. This simple exercise will teach you everything you need to know about your mind:) 

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Thank you for listening. Hope this was not too boring for you. 

Louis Weinstock 
(Psychotherapist for Children and Grown-ups, Meditation Teacher, Radical Pathfinder)