Empower Your Soul: Mindfulness exercises for daily life (3/4)

Meditation practice to be effective requires consistent effort throughout the day. However many people can’t maintain mindfulness all day because they have a lot of work at the workplace and their house. They may spare some time for meditation but they might not get good results. Due to the mind needing to take time to clear trash of emotions and thoughts that the mind has collected the whole day. Before your mind can be calm, you must meditate for 30-50 minutes or more, but you run out of time. Increasing the meditation time might not be feasible because we have no time left. Thus, we suggest doing the 10 items of homework which are devised by Luang Phor Dhammajayo.

(This article explains the item No.5-7)

When you wake up anew, your mind will likely start thinking about various things, won’t it? Instead of letting your mind wander freely from the morning, hold it in place with these two homework: No.5 and 6.

5. Upon waking, immediately reconnect your attention with a metal object or the center of the body.

This homework continues from No.4, which instructs you to fall asleep in the middle of a mental object as if you were meditating continuously throughout the night even though you may not be conscious while you sleep. 

When you wake up, immediately think of a light and comfortable mental object in the center of your body, covering you, or wherever you feel comfortable.

Practicing this will allow you to seize the opportunity before your mind starts wandering outside. It helps keep your mind calm and establish a good foundation before starting a new day, instead of allowing various matters to intrude, which might make you frustrated or worried.

6. After waking up, concentrate on being one with a mental object or the center of the body for one minute. In that one minute, think you’re fortunate to have survived another day. May all living beings be happy. Our death is certain.

Following on from homework No.5, sit quietly and gather your mind for about one minute. If you find happiness or have inner experiences, you may sit longer than 1 minute. If you don’t have inner experiences yet or still feel drowsy, just do it for one minute. If not, you may lie back down and continue sleeping.

When the mind is still for a while, reflect on your life, “I’m lucky to have survived another day.” Think like this to encourage yourself that you still have opportunities to do good and improve yourself. Don’t let this good fortune slip away.

Then, spread loving-kindness, “May all living beings be happy.” Your survival for another day is also a kind of happiness. Share this happiness with all beings so they may feel the same. Doing this will release anger and hatred, leaving only good wishes for every being.

Finally, remind yourself not to be reckless, “Our death is certain.” Think like this because death may happen at any time and nobody knows when we’ll die, we should focus on doing more good. And creating benefits for this world while we still have breath.

When you practice like this, it means you’ve seized the time from going to bed until waking up to mindfulness training. Taking your wandering mind back to yourself is like achieving 30% success or approximately 8 hours of a day. You still have 70% or 16 hours of your daily life left. The next 4 mindfulness exercises will handle it, let’s see the first one.

7. Throughout the day, create a feeling that you are within the mental object, the mental object is within you, and you are united with the mental object.

Suppose that you choose a crystal ball as your mental object. Imagine that you are inside a large crystal ball. If you can’t think of it, you can use the dome of the sky as your crystal ball, with the center of your abdomen as the center point. At the same time, imagine another tiny crystal ball in the center of your abdomen. This way, you can easily think of it, and won’t forget to imagine the large crystal ball. If you feel bored, you can practice expanding this small crystal ball to be as large as the big one. You’ll feel relaxed, spacious, and not tight, and it will help your mind let go of unhelpful thoughts.

At first, you may not be able to do it for long, and you might forget. That’s okay. Think of it whenever you can, do it slowly, comfortably, and continuously.

Also, by constantly focusing on the mental object, your mind will adjust its purity to match that of the mental object. This makes it easier to keep your mind focused on mindfulness, and it will positively affect various things around you.

This practice is like building armor to protect yourself from bad thoughts. Thus, you won’t speak or act recklessly, and you’ll have a moment of restraint before doing anything. When we’re focused on maintaining good thoughts, speech, and actions, others will respond in kind. It’s like the law of action: when we are a safe place for others, this goodness will come back to protect us as well as a protective shield for us. By the power of this goodness, negative events will be pushed away. We’ll have safe moments in life, and even if we can’t avoid bad situations entirely, their impact will be lessened. For example, instead of being seriously injured, we might only have a minor wound.

In summary, if you can do the first 7 homework, it means you’ve been practicing mindfulness all day. This will promote your meditation practice and make it easier to access inner happiness. There are still 3 more homework to intensify your mindfulness practice during the day.