We all have a choice moment to moment with regard to how we live our life. We may choose to immerse ourselves into the negative aspects of all that is going on. The news media is particularly adept at spinning negative stories. Pick up any newspaper or listen to any station or report of the news this or that day and it really is filled with negative, depressing stories.
It’s also very easy to get mired into a very negative state of mind with regard to what your body might be communicating to you. Perhaps we are thinking today that:
“My symptoms are flaring up today so I am sure to feel worse tomorrow.”
When we churn the same negative thoughts around and around a hamster wheel of our own creation, we feed into the energy of negativity which is bound to fuel the symptoms.
The key of course is to transform the repetitive negative thoughts that haunt us day in and day out. Instead of being negative, the key is to maintain a positive frame of mind each and every moment of our lives.
My question is this. You’ve been now keeping a written record of what you have been grateful for each and every day. As the days have progressed, have you wanted to add more than just three items to your list? Perhaps you did. On the second or third day you added a fourth and a fifth to the basic list of three.
Have you noticed that during the day you experienced something and you said to yourself,
“Ah, that’s something I want to add to my list tonight before I go to bed?”
Do you see what kicks in when we begin to make a habit of maintaining a positive attitude, a positive state of mind? It escalates into having more and more positive thoughts and more and more positive experiences. It reduces depression significantly. Best of all, it fuels the pleasure of happiness in the moment.
Moment to moment, day in and day out, when we honor and relish the positive experiences of our life, we feed into the positive energy that makes the manifestation of recovery possible. When we support those positive thought forms we create an energy that is conducive to healing and wellness. We may say to ourselves,
“But wait a minute, I’ve got to be sure that I am prepared for the future.”
When you have those thoughts, what are you really saying to yourself? You’re likely saying,
“Oh, yeah, that’s right, I’m going to be disabled in a few years so I need to do some planning.”
That thought is destined to steer you straight into a nursing home. Is that what you really want? Or, do you want to live out a vibrant, free, active life that has a force and an energy that is limitless? Be mindfully grateful for each and every moment of your life.
We tend to remember those negative experiences and we relish those. We go back into the past and say to ourselves,
“I wish I had done this and that. Matters wouldn’t have turned sour if I had acted differently.”
Those thoughts are not going to change anything. The past is past.
The way to change our health and wellness is to live moment to moment, to live in the present. The origins of negative thoughts reside in past memories or future fantasies. It is tough to create negative thoughts when we are mindful of enjoying the present moment.
Your are invited to continue keeping your list of what you are grateful at the end of each day. Continue to acknowledge that there are many glorious, positive experiences that you are having each and every day.
Allow your list to expand beyond the count of three if you so wish. Constrict yourself not. Allow yourself to add more and more experiences, thoughts and actions that you are grateful for each and every day as the week progresses.
I suggest to you, whether you decide to continue the list or not, it is very likely you will be thinking to yourself,
“Ah, that’s something that I could add to my list before I go to bed tonight.”
Once you have turned on the flow of positive thoughts. it is virtually impossible to shut them down. Isn’t that cool?
Feel the positive life force surge within your body. Observe your symptoms dissolve.
May you have a magnificent week as you find yourself being grateful for the magnificence of life itself.
The invitation this week is to fill your heart, soul and body with gratitude each and every day. Here’s how to go about doing just that.
Place beside your bed a sheet of paper or even a journal as well as a pen or pencil. This is going to take only five minutes every day.
Before you go to sleep, retrieve the piece of paper beside your bed (or your journal) and your writing instrument. Reflect back on the day you have just finished living. Write a notation of three experiences that you are grateful for each day this week.
Experiences you record do not have to be large events. They could be very tiny indeed; a smell that you appreciated, a look from a stranger; a comment from a friend or a loved one; a compliment; a special way that you happened to feel earlier in the day even if only for a few minutes.
Don’t make this activity a big deal. You will not do it if you do make it a big deal. It’s a small deal. At the end of the day, take out the paper and pen or pencil and enter a short and sweet notation that answers the question, “What have I been grateful for on this particular day?”
There is no screening or decision making involved here. There is certainly no editing required. Simply make a note of whatever comes first to your mind.
Experience one
Experience two
Experience three
Record whatever you are grateful for – big events or tiny events. Whatever comes to your mind first. You can always add to the list if you wish.
It may be certain memories you are grateful for.
It may be certain thoughts.
It may be a certain feeling
It may be a message your body is communicating to you that has been a welcome, delightful gift.
Whatever you are grateful for note it on your paper at the end of the day. Do it every day. We’re talking just about a week’s exercise five-minutes every day. Becoming mindfully grateful can fill your days with an abundance of joy and happiness.
Enjoy being grateful this week. You can even be grateful you are being grateful!
How long has your list of procrastination opportunities become? When I started tracking the ways that I procrastinate, my list was amazingly long. I surprised myself by the number of times every day that I put a small task aside to be replaced by something that I thought was much more important. I mentioned at the outset of this challenge that this had been one of the most revolutionary changes that I’ve made in my life that really directly relate to how have I’ve become more mindful moment-to-moment.
Here’s what I discovered when I really began to watch and observe my behavior. Yes, I put aside many, many small tasks. What were the consequences of that? The first major consequence was that every day I would have at least two hours (if not three hours) of thoughts that rattled through my mind about all of those unfinished tasks that I needed to remind myself to be sure and complete. I make no overstatement here. I was occupying a lot of my thinking and awareness brain capacity to making sure I remembered to do all of what I had so casually set aside. My brain was filled to the brim with a long list of unfinished tasks to be completed.
What do these thoughts sound like if I were to voice them to you now? I would be thinking to myself,
“Oh yeah, that’s right I’ve got to write that letter to Betty that I promised that I would write.”
“That’s right, I’ve got to buy that present for a friend and that’s going to be due in a couple of weeks so I have to be sure and get that done.”
“There are four or five emails I didn’t respond to last week. I can’t remember quite what they were but I’m sure I’ve got to do that at least sometime in the next couple of days, they’re probably waiting for a reply – well of course I just don’t have time right now to get back to those and I’m not sure, it’ll probably take me 10 or 15 minutes to even find them and I don’t have enough time to go back in my email a couple of weeks ago to find who it was that wrote me and what it was, that’s just too much work, I can’t do that right now.”
“And yeah, that bill, I know that bill for the internet is due. If they shut my internet down I’m really shut down for good so let me think about it. Yeah. That is one I really ought to do right now but I really don’t want to do it. I hate to do the bills but I’m going to go find that internet bill right now. It is probably back in that box where I put all the bills.”
So what do I do? I march back to the box. I’m very proud of myself because I am actually attending to something I know I have to do. I can’t put off any longer. And guess what? I can’t find the bill. The bill is not in the box. So I say to myself,
“But I’ve really got to pay it, I think it’s due today or at least maybe tomorrow so I’ve got to pay it today or else I’ll have to pay the late fee and my internet might actually be shut down.”
What then happens? We’re talking 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes – sometimes an hour – I have to launch a search. I begin to think,
“Let’s see, when did that bill come in? That was two weeks ago and, okay, I went to the mailbox, or was that Deborah? I can’t quite remember that. Maybe I did go to the mailbox and I picked up the mail and then I came in the house and where was I when I looked at the mail?
Let’s see, well maybe I left it in the car, that’s possible. Well let me get the keys to the car, I’ll go out to the car right now. I will look in the car and see if the bill is in the car. Maybe it is in the car.”
I go out to the car. The bill is not in the car.
“Okay, that didn’t work, let me go back in the house. Where was I when I saw the bill? I remember opening the bill, I remember about how much it was, so where did I open up the bill?“
Okay, I could go on and on and explain to you the process of what I encounter when I have these kinds of experiences and of course my frustration level begins to get higher and higher and higher because I can’t find the bill, I know it needs to be paid and I simply can’t get that task done.
I come to a decision point after 45 minutes of looking.
1. Do I just give up?
2. Do I find a different way to pay the bill, like maybe going to the company itself?
3. Do I go online and see if I can find it (although I don’t even know how to do that)?
4. Do I just say, “I won’t bother paying the bill this time? They’ll send me another one, I’ll have a late fee, what does it matter?”
How do I solve the problem? In other words it engages a whole sequence of activities and challenges that really were entirely unnecessary. This is only one small example. It is often the case that when I get ready to do something that I know has to be done, I can’t find the materials that I need in order to actually execute the act.
What then is the change that I made in my life? It’s been a gradual change but what I decided to do is this: When the small little tasks were in my face I started acknowledging when I procrastinated (for, of course, a presumably very smart and rational reason). It’s pretty easy to do. It’s not as if there’s any secret to when you procrastinate, the thought is,
“Oh, I can’t do that right now I don’t have enough time.”
Or a favorite of mine is,
“I don’t want to do that right now. I’ve done 10 tasks that I really didn’t want to do today but I had to do, that’ll be the 11th task and I’m sorry, I’m just not going to do the 11th task. That’s just over the board for me. I’m going to go do something that I want to do!”
That’s usually my rationale. Of course the difficulty as it turns out, since I use the rationale so often —
“I don’t have time to do it right now.”
The little small tasks that I put aside begin to mount up one on top of another on top of another. Soon I have 20, 25, 30 if not 40 undone tasks in the queue, all of which are spread all over my life in different places in different parts of my memory. To now do any one of these little tasks I have to go back in time, reconstruct what it was that I needed to do and must do. It takes me four, five or ten times longer to do the task that it would have than if I simply did it when it came to my attention.
I then made a decision when I recognized all the ways that I procrastinated that I would change my way of behaving. What I’ve done then is when the little stuff comes through and I hear myself saying,
“I’m going to put that aside.”
I stop. I take a breath. I say,
“Whoa! Hold on just a minute! Let’s do that little task right now.”
Yes, it does take usually a little time if I have to pay a bill or respond to an email. But then, it is done. I have finished it! I have even discovered when I have to respond to somebody that takes some thought, it takes some writing, maybe it even takes a little research, maybe that response takes 20 or 30 minutes. It’s much, much more efficient for me and quite frankly it feels a whole lot better when I do it right when the email comes through than if I set the task aside.
Don’t get me wrong. I do put things aside every once in a while. I often get questions that I literally don’t know the answer to Research will be required that will take several hours if not longer. I literally do not have enough time to do that in the moment. I do not attend to every task immediately. Some tasks really do take quite a bit of time to complete. But, when somebody asks me to do something, I make every effort to do it immediately.
People who ask for information need it now. I offer some response which is a start at solving their problem. I respond when I get the question. Now I do not have to dig back in my emails to find the question that was asked weeks ago. What exactly did that person ask me? It winds up being so much more time-consuming and it really eats up my energy to go back and do it if it sits on the shelf for a day or two days or three weeks or four weeks. Attending the tasks as they come through as it turns out is a very healing experience.
The other huge benefit for me personally has been that it eliminates the problem of stuck energy. When we put things aside we begin to create clogs in our energetic system. Energetic clogs slow everything down. There is no flow. No life force is present. Becoming less of a procrastinator has created more flow in my life.
We’re not going to be able to manifest abundance or health or wellness if we are all clogged up with undone tasks. The flow in my life is much better now that I have begun to attend to the little stuff in a timely fashion.
My challenge for you then in this second part of this grand finale of all the mindfulness exercises is really quite simple. Why not give it a trial run? For all of those little things that you tend to put aside – perhaps the phone calls that you know you need to make right then but you put aside – make the phone call! You don’t have to talk a long time. You can just tell the person,
“I just wanted to touch base and say hi, how are you; and by the way I’ve got an appointment in 15 minutes, I can’t talk long.”
That’s perfectly acceptable and it gets that particular connection done. It’s the same for any response whatsoever of a task that you’ve put aside because you procrastinated.
Do everything that comes across your desk, through your computer, through your phone, from your friends, through neighbors. When requests come and you decide you do want to respond to the request, do it right then. Of course you may say “No” and that’s another way to clear out that energy. You’ve made it very clear,
No, I’m not going to do that.
No, I’m not going to attend that meeting.
No, I’m not going to meet that appointment. I’ve just decided it’s not something that I can do right now.”
That clears everything up. You have decided. Instead of putting it aside and saying “Ah…
Maybe I should do that…
Maybe I should go to that meeting …
Maybe I hold have a appointment with that person…
Instead of holding these confusing thoughts you stop, you say,
“What do I really need to do for myself?”
You make a decision. You respond to the person. And it is done. It is complete. There is closure. There is no more pontificating or worrying or agonizing over what it is that you actually need to do.
Again I want to say for me it’s been life-changing. I really think the flow is much better in my life today than it was a year ago. I invite you to launch this particular challenge for longer than a week. See how it goes for you. This may be the first week of engaging a way that you can create
This week become attentive and might I say, mindful of all of the ways that you procrastinate. Permit me be clear however. When I say procrastinate I’m really referring to the little things, to the small stuff. We all procrastinate on big decisions in our lives, decisions like
Should I marry this person or not?
Should I have a child or not?
Should I move to North Dakota or not?
Should I quit my job or keep my job?
These are big decisions that require thought and some intuitive instincts about what’s right for you that really need to incubate, evolve and take shape over time. With time the big decisions become clearer.
The procrastination that I’m referring to in this week’s challenge is procrastinating over the small things. Now, we are certainly different people so I’m sure my list of how I procrastinate will differ from yours substantially. However, let me provide a few examples by way of providing an insight into exactly what I’m talking about. There are a few of the ways that I procrastinate.
Do you procrastinate when the mail is received? “Oh, I’ll just put that aside, I don’t really have time to shift through the mail right now.”
Do you procrastinate when you receive an e-mail from a close friend that requires a response? “Well, that’s not what I planned to do right now so I’m not going to respond to that e-mail at this very moment.”
Do you procrastinate when you pay a bill that actually arrives in the mail? “Oh, let me open up the bill, see what it is. Oh wow, that’s a little more than I expected. Let me just put that away in my little pocket of where I keep my bills. I’ll attend to paying my bills at a later point this particular month.”
Do you procrastinate over washing the dishes when the dishes are dirty?
Do you procrastinate over buying a present for a relative whose birthday is coming up next week and you think today, “Today is the day I really should buy them a birthday present. Today really is not too soon, but wait a minute, today was not the day that I planned on doing that so I’ll have to defer that activity until tomorrow.”
Do you procrastinate when you think to yourself, “I really would like to talk to my son, my daughter, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, my grandfather, my grandmother.” You know, the kind of people that are important people in our lives. Do you think, “Oh I really ought to call them today” and then the next thought is, “Oh no, no, no, I really don’t have time. That call will take some time and as I look through the day that I have planned there’s just not enough time.”
Do you procrastinate when the phone rings and you hear a message on your phone answering machine and you say to yourself, “That’s important for me to attend to but I really don’t feel up to talking with that person right now so what I’m going to do is I’ll answer that call later today or well, maybe I’ll put it off until tomorrow.”
Do you procrastinate when you think to yourself, “During the day I need to go out and get all of the trash in the trash bin for the trash person to pick up who is coming tomorrow. I need to do that right now because later on tonight it really might be too dark for me to see any of it and it may be that it will be raining. But it will probably not rain tonight so I will just wait until later”
I obviously could go on and on with a list of the ways that I procrastinate. Are some of these ways that you procrastinate too? I will cut off my list of the many ways I procrastinate (which it would fill up a 400 page book if I continued).
For the next several days be mindful about all of the many ways that you set aside the little business that needs to be taken care of; those small tasks that all the sudden come up
You know they need to be done.
You know you want to do them.
You simply put the small tasks aside routinely for what seems to be good reasons.
How do you procrastinate?
Reflect.
Become aware.
Acknowledge when you procrastinate.
Track every little small act you put off.
If you want to get really serious about this final week’s challenge, write down all of the different ways that you discover you actually procrastinate.
To clarify, put aside the big decisions. We are talking about the small stuff here. I’ll be back in touch in three days to say more about why this particular challenge, this final week of the Mindfulness exercises, has been so helpful to me personally.
