As I’ve discussed in recent posts, meditation is the primary method for deliberately cultivating the four skills of mindfulness: presence, curiosity, acceptance, and non-attachment. But let us now answer the question posed by George Leonard, author of Mastery:
“Could all of us reclaim lost hours of our lives by making everything—the commonplace along with the extraordinary—a part of our practice?” 1
The answer, as we’ll see, is yes. Meditation is not the only way. There are myriad opportunities each day to practice mindfulness.
For example, a few minutes ago, I went outside to take out the trash. It’s a beautiful spring day, and, instead of walking straight back inside, I paused, turned toward the sun, closed my eyes, and stood for three deep breaths, basking in the warmth. This was a moment of everyday mindfulness.
As with meditation, the practice of everyday mindfulness is simple but not easy. Let’s explore how we can practice everyday mindfulness, what gets in the way, and what we can do about those obstacles.
Presence
Anything that asks for our full attention is an opportunity to practice presence, which is the combination of awareness and focus. Solving puzzles, driving a car, reading a book, playing a game, chopping vegetables, and listening during a conversation are all activities to which we should bring our full presence. Of course, we’ll rarely be perfectly present during such activities, but that’s okay. Just as we practice returning our focus to the breath during meditation, we can practice catching our wandering attention during these activities and bring it back.
To do so requires that we are aware of where our attention is in any given moment. A major part of this practice is noticing where your attention is moment-to-moment. That’s the only way to know that your mind has wandered off.
One way to practice awareness is regularly checking in on your posture. It’s very easy to slip into poor posture as we sit. Bringing your attention to how your posture is right now is a way to practice being aware of the present. Similarly, noticing what your face is doing – smiling, frowning, or neutral – is a way to bring more awareness to your own body. I particularly like this one because it usually helps me bring more awareness to my emotional state, which creates an opportunity to make a change. It’s hard to turn your frown upside down if you don’t even know you’re frowning.
One way to practice focus is to try and use neat handwriting whenever you write something. (This only works if you, like me, have generally poor handwriting.) For me, writing neatly takes full focus. Anything that requires dexterity can also serve as a focusing practice, from tying your shoes to playing Jenga.
There are two ways to bring focus and awareness together that I really like: breathing and social interaction.
If you’ve been meditating regularly, then you can use your breath at any moment to return to the presence of mind experienced during meditation. By becoming aware that you are breathing and how you are breathing, you return to an essential aspect of the present. Odds are, you’ll find that you’re breathing is shallow and quick. You can then choose to take a slow, deep breath, which further develops awareness and focus.
To be adept at social interaction requires presence. This means keeping your focus on the interaction or conversation at hand, listening well, paying attention to body language, and resisting the pull of distracting stimuli and distracting thoughts. To do so requires being aware of where your attention is, where your eyes are looking, what you’re listening to, and what sorts of thoughts your mind is producing.
Are you making eye contact or allowing your eyes to wander around the room? Are you really listening to what the other people are saying, or are you only hearing that words are coming out of their mouths? Are you thinking about what they mean and how they’re feeling, or are you thinking about what you’re going to say next, or are you thinking about something completely off-topic? When it’s your turn to speak, do you pause and respond with carefully chosen words and tone of voice, or do you reply reactively with words and a tone you sometimes regret?
It’s very difficult, but well worth the effort. If you can stay present with other people, they’ll appreciate it enormously and cherish their time with you.
“The most precious thing you can offer the person you love is your presence.” –Thich Nhat Hanh2
Curiosity
Anything new offers an opportunity to practice curiosity. Meeting someone new, visiting a new restaurant, studying a new topic, or hearing a new kind of music are all activities to which we should bring curiosity. Engaging such activities with an eagerness to learn all you can is an excellent way to practice.
But we can also make an effort to bring curiosity to the familiar. Adults tend to walk around the world like they’ve already seen it all and know everything they need to know, so we have to practice approaching the mundane with fresh eyes. This can mean actively trying to see something new, trying to reach a deeper understanding of an old idea, or trying to approach an old activity in a new way. Rather than assuming we already know everything there is to know about something, we can look more carefully and ask why things are the way they are.
For example, I regularly walk the same paths in the park behind my home, but I deliberately bring fresh curiosity to each walk, trying to see if I can discover anything new. Sometimes I notice something unique about a particular tree, or I notice some subtlety about the change of seasons that I’d previously never noticed, or I observe an odd phenomenon among the plants and wonder what evolutionary logic is behind this observation. Spending time in nature is probably the best way to cultivate curiosity.
Another aspect of mindful curiosity is an open-mindedness to new ideas. This can mean trying to learn everything you can about the perspective of someone with a different opinion. Curiosity also extends to your inner world. It means developing a willingness to examine your own thoughts and feelings, even if they’re uncomfortable.
For instance, if something happens that I’m really embarrassed about, I will automatically try to avoid thinking about it deeply because I don’t like feeling embarrassed. I’ll probably cling to self-serving and biased explanations that protect my ego. But the mindful thing to do is to get really curious about what led to the embarrassing situation and why I felt so embarrassed by it. From this curiosity, I might learn and grow.
Acceptance
Perhaps the most powerful form of everyday mindfulness is the practice of acceptance. Our days are filled with things that don’t go our way: setbacks, inconveniences, and frustrations. Each is a chance to practice accepting what is.
Traffic is probably the most ubiquitous opportunity we have to practice acceptance. When you’re stuck in traffic, there’s nothing you can do about it, so it’s silly to be upset. Think about it: You can either be angry and suffer while you wait, or you can accept what is and be happier while you wait for exactly the same length of time.
“Try to look at situations that normally stress you out as an opportunity to play the game.” –Thomas M. Sterner3
Another good time to practice acceptance is when you receive negative feedback. Being criticized is never fun, and the automatic reaction we normally have is to be defensive. But defensiveness is non-acceptance, and it usually makes us look worse. It helps to assume that the negative feedback is only a critique of your behaviors and not an attack on your character or your intellect. It’s also an opportunity to get curious: What can you learn from this criticism? And if the feedback really is invalid or just a personal attack, and there’s nothing to learn from it, it’s a deeper opportunity to practice acceptance. You can’t please everyone, and some people just won’t like you. That’s the way of the world.
Non-Attachment
The final skill of mindfulness is non-attachment, which means not needing to experience any particular outcome or emotion. Since most outcomes are not under our control, it makes sense to be unattached to what happens. We can still try our hardest to get what we want, but we have to accept we may not get what we want. Likewise, we can work daily to cultivate positive emotions, and we’ll still experience the normal negative feelings that all humans experience.
The weather is a simple example of something we can use to practice non-attachment. We want good weather, but this is outside of our control, so it doesn’t make sense to need good weather. We can’t be emotionally attached to a particular type of weather because it may or may not arrive. If we succeed in being unattached, bad weather is much easier to accept. However, the more subtle work on non-attachment is not clinging to good weather when we have it. All sunny days must end, just as summer must turn to fall.
Similarly, because you cannot control your emotions directly, and because all emotions eventually pass you by, you should not become attached to the feeling or not-feeling of any particular emotion. Of course, we all naturally cling to happy feelings and wish for bad feelings to go away quickly, but this is not within our direct control. How you respond to your moment-to-moment emotional state is an excellent way to practice non-attachment.
Another way to practice is by playing games. We want to win, and we should try to win while playing, but whether or not we win is often outside of our control, so we shouldn’t need to win. If the only way you’ll be happy is if you win the game, then it’s unlikely that you’ll enjoy the process of playing. It’s unwise to stake your happiness on any particular outcome, and games are an excellent reminder of this truth. Add this to the long list of reasons why playing games is good for you.
Likewise, mistakes and failures are inevitable, so we shouldn’t let ourselves become attached to success. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing success and striving to avoid failure, but this is different from being attached to success and needing to avoid failure.
Practicing Everyday Mindfulness as a Whole
While it’s important to develop the four skills independently, mindfulness is greater than the sum of its parts, so let’s also discuss one classic way to practice these skills as a unified whole. This is the more difficult side of everyday mindfulness, but it’s also where the real gems are.
When the four skills of mindfulness are brought together all at once, you adopt a lighter, less combative attitude toward life. It’s something we all feel from time to time, and something we often observe in others whom we admire.
The example we’ll use is doing chores.
Everyone has boring, tedious, or unpleasant work that they must do in order to keep their lives in order. Since chores are unavoidable and ubiquitous, they provide an excellent training ground for mindfulness. In short, if we do chores mindfully, we get satisfaction from doing them, but if we do chores unmindfully, we suffer.
Chores are often tasks that aren’t particularly difficult, so it’s tempting to do them in a distracted state, by multitasking or allowing our minds to wander off. But to do so invites clumsiness, errors, and inefficiency, which can cause frustration or at least make the chores to last longer than they need to. It is far better to use chores as an opportunity to stay completely focused on the task at hand. This not only makes the chores go better, but it also cultivates a mindful presence that lingers after we’ve completed our work.
“If while washing the dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.’ What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living a minute of life.” –Thich Nhat Hanh4
If, instead, we can bring our full awareness and focus to what we’re doing, then we have an opportunity to perform the work in a state of flow and develop greater mastery over the task.
“A menial task which must be mine, that shall I glorify and make an art of it.” –Walter Russell
A chore is also likely to be something that we’ve done so many times and which is so uninteresting that we’re likely to have zero curiosity about. This makes it an excellent opportunity to deliberately cultivate curiosity by paying close attention to the subtle nuances of the sensory experience of performing the chore. In doing so, we might be surprised to find joy.
“If you are going to mow the lawn, then accept that all you need to do is cut the grass. You are going to notice the feel of the mower as you push it, how it changes resistance with the undulations of your front yard. You will pay attention to cut as wide a path as possible, not sloppily overlap the last pass you made as you gawk at the neighbor across the street washing their car. You will smell the cut grass and notice how the grass glows with green in the sunlight.” –Thomas M. Sterner5
But, more often than not, we won’t find joy in our chores, and this is where acceptance comes in. First, we overcome the urge to procrastinate by accepting that the task must be done. Then, we begin the task, even thought we don’t want to. And then, while performing the task, we do not fight it; we do not engage in psychological resistance to the work because this leads to suffering.
And we do not rush because we do not need it to be over with as quickly as possible. We practice non-attachment while working by taking our focus off of the outcome and keeping our eyes on the process.
Whenever you bring mindfulness to your chores, the time seems to pass more quickly and more pleasantly than it otherwise would. You complain less, and you smile more. You feel better about yourself during and after the work, and you have more energy leftover to help others or to play. You may even find that the divide between work and play dissolves.
“People who are fixated on separating life from work spend the majority of their lives not living. We need to find ways to bring mindfulness, space, and joy into all our activities, not just when we’re doing something that seems like play or like meditating. If we bring mindfulness into each part of our day, five minutes at a time, our imagined divide between life and work disappears, and every part of our day is time for ourselves.” –Thich Nhat Hanh6
What gets in the way of everyday mindfulness?
Rushing From Task To Task
Being in a hurry is antithetical to mindfulness. When we’re in a hurry, we’re typically thinking about what’s next, rather than focusing on the present. We’re too busy to be curious. We’re not accepting the normal length of time things take and, instead, rushing to make them go faster. And we’re attached to a need to get things done quickly.
This is no way to live your life. We all need to take breaks, even if they’re just microbreaks. Choosing to pause for a moment or two between tasks is an excellent way to return to mindfulness. And if you really believe you can’t make time for such a pause, then you’re overscheduled, and you need to think about your priorities. Is it worth sacrificing your physical and mental health for the sake of productivity?
“It is quite possible to live in the midst of a highly developed technological society and keep an easy, relaxed pace while doing a lot of hard work. We have a choice. We are not mere victims of our environment, and we don’t have to go fast just because everybody else does and urges us to do it too.”
–Eknath Easwaran7
Multitasking
I realized today as I was untying my shoes that I wasn’t even looking directly at my fingertips or the shoelaces. And lo and behold I was struggling. I redirected my focus and untied them with ease and efficiency. Likewise, I sometimes struggle to put my key into the ignition of my car, and it’s always because I’m multitasking: I’m looking at something else or thinking about something else.
“Trying to do many things at once means doing nothing well. As the Buddha says, ‘When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit. Don’t wobble.’” -Eknath Easwaran8
And multitasking isn’t just a way to make easy tasks difficult, it’s unmindful. When multitasking, it’s impossible to focus on what you’re doing because you’re always switching your attention from one thing to another. Your awareness is scattered, so you miss important information. And since there’s no presence, there can be no mindfulness.
Instead, try to develop a habit of monotasking. Engage fully with one thing at a time, take careful, deliberate action, complete it, pause for a moment, and then move on to the next thing.
Distractions
A related issue is distractions. We can never eliminate all distractions from our lives, but most of us allow far more distractions than necessary. The biggest culprit is the smartphone. Do calls, texts, and notifications constantly interrupt your day? Each time this happens, it draws you out of focus and therefore out of mindfulness. Consider disabling most of those notifications and putting your phone in airplane mode more often.
Seeking Constant Stimulation
Modern people have become accustomed to constant stimulation. If we have to wait in a long line, we no longer have to be bored because we have smartphones. But this means that we’re rapidly losing the ability to tolerate boredom. If there’s not enough stimulation, we feel anxious and compulsively check our phones, thus abandoning the present. Remember, those moments of boredom that we now avoid are OTMs.
Mindfulness asks us to stay present, get curious about what is here and now, accept that boredom is a natural part of life, and be unattached to our phones and all the tempting distractions they offer. We all need to remember that we can be bored, alone, and totally okay.
Try to stop checking your phone every chance you get. Try to become aware of your habit of checking your phone for no reason. And, seriously, spend more of your day in airplane mode. You won’t regret it.
Constant Noise
The modern world is noisy, and silence is rare. Right now, from my apartment (with the windows closed), I can hear cars driving by, a dog barking, a plane flying overhead, water running through pipes, and the heater running. And I live in a quiet apartment in a quiet neighborhood. Many people have much noisier homes. Plus, we deliberately fill our homes with noise: music, television, sports radio, and podcasts.
I’m notorious for always having music playing. I forget how much I enjoy silence. Silence is relaxing. Silence creates time to think my own thoughts. And silence helps me be mindful.
“Silence is essential. We need silence, just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.” –Thich Nhat Hanh6
Some of my favorite moments are when I go for a late-night walk when the world is shut down and quiet, or when I find that I’ve walked into a very quiet section of the forest while on a hike. Such silences naturally trigger mindfulness.
Labeling and Judging
We’ve all learned from a young age to label and judge what we see and experience, but doing so is antithetical to curiosity and therefore to mindfulness as a whole. Mindfulness asks us to make less assumptions and adopt a more childlike state of mind, to make less generalizations and be more curious about specifics.
Here’s an exert from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior that explains why this is problematic:
“We entered a giant greenhouse. The air was warm and humid, contrasting with the cool morning air outside. Soc pointed to the tropical foliage that towered over us. ‘As a child, all this would appear before your eyes and ears and touch as if for the first time. But now you’ve learned names and categories for everything: ‘That’s good, that’s bad, that’s a table, that’s a chair, that’s a car, a house, a flower, dog, cat, chicken, man, woman, sunset, ocean, star.’ You’ve become bored with things because they only exist as names to you. The dry concepts of the mind obscure your direct perception. … You now see everything through a veil of associations about things.’” 9
We can resist the urge to categorize, label, and judge by developing a spectrum mindset in which we see complex, overlapping categories and shades of grey. We don’t need to sort out the pieces of the world into black-and-white boxes.
Emotional Downward Spirals
A more difficult problem to address is the ubiquitous issue of emotional downward spirals. When something (or several things) go wrong, it’s very easy to lose your mindfulness. And once it’s lost, more things tend to go wrong because you’re living in your head and not living in the present. So you get progressively more upset and less mindful. Worse still, you probably won’t even notice it’s happening. You’ll just think there’s something wrong with you or wrong with the world.
Mindfulness practices help develop our ability to catch these downward spirals early and reverse them. So the more we’ve practiced mindfulness, the more likely we’ll be to notice that we’re slipping and reverse course, as Sam Harris noted in his book Waking Up:
“Having spent years observing my mind in meditation, I find such sudden transitions from happiness to suffering both fascinating and rather funny—and merely witnessing them goes a long way toward restoring my equanimity. My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.” 10
I’ve started saying “Good catch!” to myself whenever I notice that my mind has gone off the rails. If, for example, I’ve started an imaginary debate with someone in my head while driving to work, and I realize what I’m doing, I’ll stop, return to the present, and say to myself, “Good catch!” I’m praising myself for noticing because being aware of what my mind is doing is the hardest part.
In her book, The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron writes:
“Acknowledging that we are all churned up is the first and most difficult step in any practice. Without compassionate recognition that we are stuck, it’s impossible to liberate ourselves from confusion. ‘Doing something different’ is anything that interrupts our ancient habit of indulging in our emotions. We do anything to cut the strong tendency to spin out… Anything that’s non-habitual will do—even sing and dance or run around the block. We do anything that doesn’t reinforce our crippling habits. The third most difficult practice is to then remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.” 11
Note the emphasis on doing something different. Essentially, she’s advising that we grab hold of the “actions” corner of the feedback loop that controls our lives and use it to return to mindfulness.
Self-Criticism
The final thing that gets in the way of everyday mindfulness is being overly self-critical. As you develop mindfulness, you’ll start to notice how often you’re not mindful. It’s very important here that you don’t chastise yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Remember the puppy metaphor from our meditation guide? In fact, you should be pleased that you’ve even noticed because the act of noticing is part of the exercise of mindfulness.
Buddhist teacher Bhante Gunaratana explains that whenever you realize you’re being mindless rather than mindful, “that wake-up sensation means that you have just improved your mindfulness power. That means you win.”12 Be kind to yourself and embrace the challenge. “Mindfulness grows by the exercise of mindfulness. It is like exercising a muscle. Every time you work it, you pump it up just a little.”12 Struggle makes you stronger.
It’s essential that you approach mindfulness with a growth mindset, which means believing you can improve over time through hard work and the use of strategy. The alternative to a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, which is the belief that if you’re not good at something right away, then you’ll never be good at it. This is just perfectionism by another name. To progress in mindfulness, you must reject perfectionism.
You might also start noticing how unmindful other people are. Again, do not be judgmental. If you spend all day pointing the finger at other people, eventually you’ll find yourself standing in front of a mirror judging yourself. As always, give yourself and others permission to be human.
Developing everyday mindfulness is a slow, long-term process. Impatience is natural, but you must do your best to quell it.
“Everyone knows that it takes time and perseverance to master an art, a sport, a language, or any other discipline. Why should it not be the same with training the mind? It is a worthwhile adventure. We are not talking about acquiring some ordinary ability, but rather about a new way of being that will determine the quality of our entire life.” –Matthieu Ricard13
Every Moment Counts
As we’ve seen, there are countless opportunities to practice mindfulness in our everyday lives. We don’t need to make use of each and every one of these in order to make progress. But we should try to remember that every moment is an opportunity for growth, and every step in the right direction is worthwhile. There is no dose of mindfulness practice that’s too small. Everything counts.
“Every moment … is an opportunity for training the mind.” –Eknath Easwaran14
But this effort does not need to be seen as work or a source of stress, as Harvard’s Ellen Langer explains:
“Trying to remain mindful in all that we do may seem exhausting. In many talks I’ve given over the years, people shudder when I say we should be mindful virtually all the time. They think it’s hard work. I believe that being mindful is not hard, but rather it may seem hard because of the anxious self-evaluation we add. ‘What if I can’t figure it out?’ Anxiety causes stress, and stress is exhausting. Mindfulness is not. Being mindful allows us to be joyfully engaged in what we are doing. Time races by, and we feel fully alive. It can be physically strenuous, but also great fun.” 15
1 Leonard, George. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. Plume, 1992.
2 Hanh, Thich Nhat. No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. Parallax Press, 2014.
3 Sterner, Thomas M. Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life. New World Library, 2016.
4 Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation. Beacon Press, 1999.
5 Sterner, Thomas M. The Practicing Mind: Bringing Discipline and Focus Into Your Life. Mountain Sage Publishing, 2006.
6 Hanh, Thich Nhat. Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise. HarperOne, 2015.
7 Easwaran, Eknath. Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life. Nilgiri Press, 2008.
8 Easwaran, Eknath. Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down. Nilgiri Press, 2012.
9 Millman, Dan. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. H.J. Kramer, 2006.
10 Harris, Sam. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
11 Chodron, Pema. The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Shambhala, 2002.
12 Gunaratana, Bhante. Mindfulness in Plain English. Wisdom Publications, 2011.
13 Ricard, Matthieu. Why Meditate?: Working with Thoughts and Emotions. Hay House, 2010.
14 Easwaran, Eknath. Conquest of Mind: Take Charge of Your Thoughts and Reshape Your Life Through
Meditation. Nilgiri Press, 2010.
15 Langer, Ellen J. Mindfulness. 25th Anniversary Edition. Da Capo, 2014.