10 Minutes a Day

The topic today is about remaining or living in the present, moment to moment, and the value of spending ten minutes a day doing nothing in pursuit of that objective. Another way to refer to this practice may be “mindfulness” or even “meditation”. Whatever term you wish to ascribe to the practice of spending ten minutes every day doing nothing, making an effort to remain focused on the present, and quieting your mind, the aim is to reduce stress and enhance well-being by removing yourself from the daily busy-ness and noise that occupy our mind and keep us distracted from living in the present. In Andy Puddicombe’s TED Talk (2012), he discusses both the problem of our daily distractions that prevent us from being present in the moment and suggests a few strategies for taking ten minutes each day to do nothing. Andy makes the excellent point that even though our minds are probably the most important determinant of our overall physiological health, we spend almost no time taking care of our minds; instead, we spend time taking care of our cars, our homes, and perhaps even our physical bodies and yet we neglect our minds. He says that we are so distracted by our thoughts that we are no longer present in the world in which we live. The result is stress and perhaps even clinical depression or anxiety.

We were assigned to practice spending ten minutes a day doing nothing for at least three days in a row and report back on the value of this practice, what we learned through this practice, whether or not this is something we will continue and even encourage others to practice, and how remaining in the moment can provide stress reduction. I have long been intrigued by meditation and its advertised benefits; I have read a few articles and books on the subject, and yet I have yet to become a successful practitioner of the kind of thing that Andy talks about. I desire the benefits, but I have found that meditation, for me, is extremely difficult.

In her book “The Type A’s Guide to Mindfulness: Meditation for Busy Minds and Busy People”, Melissa Eisler mentions a long-used term called the “monkey brain” to describe the common condition of people’s minds and thoughts on any given day, where the mind jumps around from thought to thought like a monkey swings from tree to tree. (Eisler, 2015). She says that in any given day, people have approximately 50,000 thoughts go through their mind and that this noise is something from which we need to learn to detach. We cannot expect to shut these thoughts off, nor should we try (our stress will only increase if we do so), but that we should learn to disconnect ourselves from these thoughts, become a dispassionate observer, and recognize that this massive jumble of thoughts is not really at all who we are; those thousands of thoughts need not define us and keep us from being present in each moment.

I have long been fascinated by the concept of time, and the passage of time as we understand it. The idea of time travel I find especially intriguing; not the theoretical basis for it so much as the possibilities that might open up if we could travel back and forth through time. And the older that I get, the faster that time seems to be passing by. As I think about these things, I wonder what the duration of a “moment” in time is. What does it truly mean to live, or be present in the moment? Again, as Eisler says, there is a continual conversation going on inside our minds all the time; disjointed and jumbled though it may be. For these reasons, and a host of others, I find any form of meditative practice extremely challenging. Here is a moment, am I truly present in it? Oops, there it went, and here is another one. But wait, I was just thinking about the last moment, so I just missed living in this one. I have not yet learned how to successfully disconnect from these kinds of thoughts, and as a result, I have not yet learned to be truly mindful and enjoy the benefits of quieting the mind to be present in the moment.

I once read an article about eastern philosophy that dealt with the martial arts and meditation. I don’t have a reference to cite here, but I remember that this article discussed the analogy of our being like water as a martial artist and in our meditative practice. Water flows effortlessly around obstacles and is persistent in its action. Likewise, as this article stated, we were to let our thoughts simply flow like water, never attempting to grab hold of any one thought and possess it, but to instead let all thoughts pass by as we observed without emotion. To me, that is one of the better analogies that helps me to understand what I am supposed to do when I spend ten minutes (or whatever duration of time) doing nothing. As Eisler says, we are to simply watch the thoughts come and go as we allow our mind to relax. As a psychologist might say, we need to stop “playing the tapes” in our mind and instead to simply be aware of what is.

Practicing mindfulness is indeed something that I intend to pursue and would recommend to anyone seeking to reduce their stress levels and improve their mental and physical health. I say “practicing” because I believe it to be a lifelong endeavor. Becoming “good” at meditation requires practice and effort. As Andy Puddicombe says, our mind is lost in thought (on average) 47% of the time. It is drawing our attention away from living in the present and thereby robbing us of living our lives. This leads to unhappiness as we begin to feel and understand that we are missing out on our life; time passes quickly and we often have no idea where it went as we allow ourselves to be distracted by the thoughts in our own head. Through practicing mindfulness, we can change the way that we experience life, enriching each moment of each day. Obviously, we cannot detach from our thoughts all the time. Writing this blog, for instance, required focusing my thoughts and listening to the conversation in my mind about the topic. But taking ten minutes, or twenty, or even more out of our day to meditate can do wonders for peace of mind, just like taking time to recover from a stressful workout can do wonders for our bodies and is indeed essential for healing, recovery, and increased capacity for exertion in the future.

Failure to practice mindfulness regularly results in stress, unhappiness, and a feeling of missing out on your life as it unfolds. Our monkey brain is a common condition that can cause us to worry. If you dwell on the past, you may end up depressed, guilty, angry, or regretful about things that you cannot change; this leads to a perpetual cycle of “if only I had done this….”. If you try to live in, or figure out the future, you may end up worrying about things that may (or may not) happen and conjure up situations or scenarios that will almost always prove inaccurate as the future becomes the present. Luke, Chapter 12, verses 25-26 say, “Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your lifespan? If even the smallest things are beyond your control, why are you anxious about the rest?” We would all do well to think on these things as we contemplate our individual need to practice doing nothing for ten minutes every day to improve our mental, physical, and spiritual health.