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Pay Attention: "Dude, just sit."

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A lot of people have an in-built resistance to meditating, including me.  This can be for a number of reasons:

  • it seems a bit hippy-dippy
  • you don’t know where to start
  • you don’t have the time
  • you don’t have the right space or mat,
  • you’re not religious
  • you don’t know how
  • … and so on.

The truth is that meditation is pretty simple.

I remember seeking advice from an experienced teacher of meditation and coming to her with all my westernised, commodified questions “do I need a CD?”, “what do I need to buy?”, “how do I schedule this?”, “how do I measure success?” and so on.

She smiled, took a deep breath and said, “dude, just sit“.  Because really in essence that’s all that’s needed:  Sitting, intentionally doing nothing, being present and living in that moment.

Most of the time we don’t live in the moment at all: we live in our past regrets and experiences or in our hopes and anxieties about the future.  Most of what productivity seems to be about is planning ahead.  But learning to focus – in meditation just as in our work – involves Zen-like calm.  It involves pushing the past and the future to one side, and just sitting.

Right here, right now.

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Like this? Try these

Relax: sign up for one of our time management workshops

Read all of Graham’s Pay Attention experiment blog posts

How The Elephant and the Monkey can make you happy « thinkproductive.co.uk 

 

 

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