Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life

our experience of lack is a behavior that we have firmly installed into our personalities,

When something feels difficult it is because you are up against the threshold of your

a participant in our thoughts. It teaches us to notice what our mind is doing, to be more of a watcher of our thoughts.

If you don’t know how you would like to react in a situation before you’re in it, it’s a pretty good bet that you won’t be able to figure it out once you’re there.

One reason for this is that the feelings that create this experience are always rooted in either the past or the future. The simple phrase “And then what?” immediately pulls us into the present moment because we cannot have the awareness to ask ourselves this question if we are experiencing this moment outside the present.

Most of us know exactly what sets us off in a difficult confrontation. Without the correct tools at hand, we can very quickly become absorbed in the emotion of the situation. Instead of being the observer of our thoughts, we become tightly integrated with them, acting out whatever we are feeling.

As you work on this empowering change, remember that the practicing mind does not judge your effort in cultivating a new response. It sees only awareness and repetition with the intention toward a specific goal. As long as we are executing

Most of us, when we are setting goals, disempower ourselves at the get-go by investing little or no effort into understanding a realistic time frame for accomplishing those goals. Instead we make an unconscious and uninformed assumption about what the time frame should be. We then begin judging our progress based on where we are in relationship to

As we become more connected with this