3 ways to be more mindful today

Meditation practice could be described as a work out for the mind. When you notice you’re thinking, about what’s for breakfast or the argument you were in the night before, you recenter your attention on how your body feels as it’s breathing, on your lungs expanding or the cool air entering your nostrils — and you do it over and over again.

Something like a muscle gets developed: the ability to ride the present moment like it’s a wave rather than try to escape it by going off on a train of thought. Whatever the storyline, you drop it and come back.

But what’s all this training for? To prepare for the unpredictability of being human. No matter how solid the economy, your job, or your routines might feel, one day your mother gets cancer and the next your landlord raises the rent. Or maybe none of it feels solid and you’re anxious about what to do with your life or how to pay the bills.

The more you can drop the storyline — it’s her fault that she smoked cigarettes and got lung cancer — the more you can show up right here, right now. The more you can be yourself, which is just another way of saying the more you can be human.

So how do you apply what you learn through meditation to so-called “real life?”

There’s a slogan in Tibetan Buddhism: “Train in the three difficulties.” It comes from a practice called lojong, which teaches us to have compassion for ourselves and others, i.e., teaches us to be more human. If at the end of this post you want more, Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are is a powerful introduction to lojong— I’ve read it three times in the last year.

The first difficulty is “seeing neurosis as neurosis.” Simply put: notice how you react to difficult situations. For example, I’ve recently learned that when it comes to dating, I tend to get caught up in a script that, as a man, I should always know exactly what I’m doing and take the lead. There are many reasons why I have this script, but they don’t matter for this step. What matters is that I notice when I’m getting caught up in a storyline and missing what’s happening in the moment.

The second difficulty is “doing something different.” The point here is to break the pattern, even just a little. Instead of beating yourself up for your neurosis, notice it and then experiment. Every time I feel myself getting caught up in the script, “How to Be a Man,” I try tapping into what my body feels like. I’ve noticed that I tighten my stomach when I’m thinking really hard, so I do the opposite: I relax. If you’re like me, getting out of your head can be a powerful experience.

The third difficulty is “continuing that way.” Neurotic patterns have very deep roots planted by society, parents, and traumatic experiences. We’re like pieces of crumpled paper — it takes a long time to gently unfold the creases and even longer to flatten ourselves out. Our bends and scars may never be gone for good. The hardest part of all this is getting up off the mat when we’ve been knocked down. There will be times, many of them in your life, when your neuroses get the best of you, when you meet someone or a situation that tests your limits and you collapse back into your habitual pattern. Just start at the beginning: see neurosis as neurosis, do something different, and continue the way.

It might not sound like much but this is the work. This is taking a microscope to our “innovative” and “woke” ideas of changing the world, starting a business, retiring with millions of dollars, becoming a rockstar — all the dreams we have of our lives finally being exciting and comfortable, all the fantasies of finally getting praise for our hard work and suffering.

The foundation of all of this is meditation. You sit and do nothing but watch your breath, feel your body, and listen. You notice when you escape because the only way to leave the moment is to go off on a storyline — there’s nowhere else to hide.

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