My most effective life hack has been to learn to be with my inner experience, just as it is. It changes everything.
Unfortunately, most people want a more complicated solution and are dissatisfied with that answer.
I just sit with that. :)
learn to notice what’s happening with your broad awareness of the space around you. I’ve written before about the idea that awareness—the breadth of things you are able to notice in any given moment—can expand and collapse. Collapsed awareness is like tunnel vision, where there’s a sense that the wider world around you goes away while the thing... See more
You are the machine that fuels everything else in your life.
Paying attention to the mindset that drives that machine, is simply one of the most important things you can do.
Every move, every decision, every action will rest on that. Be sure it is as optimal as it can be.
The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this case there is effectively no space between stimulus and response, so you just act out your habitual behavior unconsciously. If you ever find yourself skimming the news or looking in the fridge without... See more
"You can choose peace in every moment of your life. We have been taught to believe that when we don’t get what we want, or things aren’t unfolding as we had thought they should, that’s bad and thus we should feel badly. This struggling against what is, this inability or unwillingness to love what is, is the source of all of our suffering and it is entirely our own creation. With practice, we can become as masterful at choosing peace as we have become at choosing anything else."
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent; it is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.
What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness. No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering.