Today’s post is a continuation of my original article “My Journey Towards Self-Mastery Part 1”, in which I talked about the structure around my mornings to help with my learning and growth both professionally and personally. I dived into the first aspect of that around my reflection journey. Today’s topic is on mindfulness, its use and its benefits.

Mindfulness

Countless articles and books have been written on this topic but for those not overly familiar with the concept, here is a quick definition attained from here:

“a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.”

For me, one of the essential aspects of mindfulness is around creating space. In the current world environment, many things inject themselves into our lives and continuously bombarded us with information through all our senses. Mindfulness is a practice that can help you stop, pause and be present in the moment.

I perform this part of my morning routine early on before the mind gets distracted by what I want to focus on and learn.

Given my profession, technical leadership, stress is a relatively significant part of my life and is something that I actively work on to ensure it doesn’t get out of hand. Mindfulness is an essential practice for me to help manage that stress and keep it at a productive level which keeps me sharp. I achieve this by stopping to pause and acknowledge the moment and to make space for myself before rushing into the day.

The other aspect of mindfulness that can sometimes seem like magic is the power of just letting your mind wander. In her book “a mind for numbers”, Barbara Oakley delves into this quite profoundly, around modes of thinking, focused and diffused.

For those of you who are Harry Potter fans, this concept is conveyed through Dumbledore, the Head Master of Hogwarts. He possessed what he called a Pensieve, which was a bowl where he would extract disconnected thoughts and memories from his mind and put them in, swirl them around with his wand and wait for it to create associations and connections where there seemed none.

This is the power of diffused thinking, while the mind is idle or distracted, you can start to create links between things that don’t necessarily have a direct association. This is especially true when you are consuming a large amount of diverse content. I have often referred to it as a learning mosaic, the more content you consume, the more you seem to, in the diffused mode of thinking, connect and associate things, and this is where sparks of creativity and innovation can originate. Allan Gannett talks very extensively to this in his book “The Creative Curve”.

If you are unfamiliar with the practice, my advice is to leverage one of the many applications that you can get on iPhone or Andriod to help you with guided mindfulness exercises. I used Headspace for nearly 12 months and found it extremely useful and learnt a lot. Today I perform the practice myself, but it is an excellent place to start.

So in summary, mindfulness is a way to create space and to enable the mind to be “free” which can help with creativity and stress management. It sits as the core part of my morning, and I hope you get some benefits from the mindfulness practice yourself.

Stay tuned for Part 3.