Word count:8582
hey this is Leo for ash lies dot org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about mindfulness meditation the fundamentals of setting up a mindfulness practice mindfulness is a term that's been used a lot in the last few decades and you've probably heard it in the popular culture but what you probably don't really know is how to actually practice mindfulness effectively and also the profound effects it can have on your personal development and your success in happiness levels in life so here what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about what mindfulness actually is I'm going to define it for you I'm going to talk about the benefits of mindfulness to your personal development and I'm going to give you the 20% of the mindfulness theory that's going to produce 80% of all the results that you want from this practice all right it's going to be a very how to kind of guide so let's get started basically mindfulness from what I've been learning over the last couple of years all the different personal development research that I've done I think mindfulness is the number one maybe the number two most important skill that you can develop in your entire life to be happy and to be very effective as a human being and what's really shameful is that we're not taught this skill at all in school or in college our parents don't know about it our friends don't know about it nobody teaches this to us but it's one of the most important skills of being a human being so very powerful very important tool for self actualization work I want to give a credit here to Shinzon Jung who's done decades of research and study and theory building putting together a very robust and complex and technical mindfulness system so some of the ideas in presenting to you here come directly from him and I'm using his mindfulness system but I'm just taking the very basics that I think are the most important so we're going to whittle it down and I want to give a credit to him because he's done some amazing work and stuff that is really worth taking a look at as you get deeper and deeper into this practice see the thing with mindfulness is that it's a very deep tradition it's over 2,000 years old really starts with the Buddha goes all the way back to the Buddha and there's a lot of different traditions of how to practice mindfulness and here I'm going to give you something that's going to be very very practical and very effective and also very basic and simple but before we talk about how to do mindfulness let's talk a little bit about what mindfulness is what the hell is mindfulness this word mindful to be mindful what does it really mean well it might mean something in the kind of common parlance but here we're using in a very kind of technical sense what I mean by mindfulness is the following thing I don't just mean some vague spiritual term I don't just mean being present and in the moment what I mean is I mean experiencing reality literally exactly as it is that's my definition of mindfulness to experience reality literally exactly as it is I don't know if you've noticed but you are living in a reality of some kind it's a mysterious thing really this reality that we live in but one thing that you should start to notice about it is that it comes to you through your senses and basically it doesn't come to you through any other means all you've really got is you've got sight you've got sound you've got body sensations and feelings you've got emotions you've got thoughts all of these are like sensory channels through which you're receiving stuff you've got also smell you've got taste just these very basic things and through these channels you get reality and that's as real as reality gets for you that's all you really have of reality is the stuff that you're actually Berrien Seng right now this very moment right now whatever is happening to you is what's real and it's changing every single second now this is very different than the way that most people live through life we tell ourselves like oh yeah of course this is obvious Leo so so obviously doesn't even need to be said it's so stupidly simple but actually no see you live most of your life not understanding that these channels are functioning every single second and stuff is changing that they're feeding you raw information you don't really live on that raw information what you live on is you live on your fantasies because your mind filters out 99.9% of all of this raw information and you're completely out of touch with it and instead what you do is you use your prefrontal cortex to imagine fantasies of the future or you think about things that happen to you in the past or you have some sort of emotional reactions that you get caught up in or do you have some sort of plans and goals for the future for your business for your family for your relationships and so on and so forth and you're basically caught up in a conceptual life and you're not very grounded in what's actually most real about reality which is the actual raw data that's being fed to you so what mindfulness is about is putting you back in touch with what's really literally they're not what you're imagining not what you're judging not what you're afraid of not what happened to you ten years ago or what's going to happen to you tomorrow but what's really true right this very second so that's the big picture definition now there's three components of mindfulness that are very important and this will help to explain what mindfulness is in more detail the three components are number one is focus focus is your ability to put your attention selectively on certain sensations within your awareness right now you have probably at least a hundred different sensations bombarding your mind and body right this very second from the sensations in your feet to the beating of your your heart to the pumping of your lungs to maybe a fought to a sensation of hunger to a discomfort in the way that you're sitting or standing to the sounds that you're hearing to the the taste in your mouth to the smells that are around you all of this stuff is bombarding your mind the question is what are you focused on are you able to selectively put your attention on one thing and keep it there for a long period of time without getting distracted this is the skill of focus and this is a very rare skill these days because we live in a very oversaturated environment where everything is asking for our attention and we're constantly multitasking and we're watching TV and texting and emailing and our kids are calling us and our spouse is calling us and all this kind of stuff is happening so our information channels are completely bombarded and we're always distracted it's hard for us to even sit down and read a book for 10 minutes straight without diverting our focus elsewhere because we're just not used to focusing for any long period of time and here I mean it's like apathetic it's like we can hardly focus for just a couple of minutes so that's a very powerful skill to develop because your ability to focus is directly correlated to how successful you're going to be in business and in your career and in your creative pursuits the second component is sensory clarity sensory clarity is how clear are you about the raw data that's actually being perceived by your mind like I said your mind filters out a lot of it and usually we just assume that we have we understand we we experience reality exactly kind of how it is we assume that we know and we're aware of what's going on but as you practice more mindfulness you learn that oh no actually I'm not near as aware as I thought I was sensory clarity imagine if you had a lens on a really professional-grade digital camera you bought an expensive multi-thousand dollar lens really beautiful perfect optics well engineered but then it got some mud and some stains on the lens and it's like it's really dirty really muddy and now you're trying to take photographs through this dirty cloudy lens how good is the picture going to be it's not going to be very clear right but imagine you don't really understand that there is dirt on the lens you're not aware of this you think that that's the way the lens is supposed to be well you're going to go through life looking at life and thinking that you have a clear picture of life but actually you can have a murky picture a muddy picture and unclear picture of life so this component here is also a skill that can be developed called sensory clarity you can actually clear the lenses of your mind so to speak so that you can experience what's actually occurring for you right now in this very moment with orders of magnitude of more clarity than you presently do and the third and final component is equanimity equanimity is a really powerful skill as well it's the ability to experience an emotion or a sensation or any phenomena basically and not be affected by it and not react to it in an emotional way so usually what happens is we get a piece of bad news like we're fired from our job or we think that our boyfriend or girlfriend is going to leave us or something like this and it disturbs us emotionally that's a phenomenon that we receive it's actually a sensation we receive we hear it or we see it but that's not all what happens immediately after that is that we go into reaction mode we're not stable and grounded about that sensory experience but we're all over the place right we get angry you get frustrated get fearful we get jealous and so on and so forth so equanimity is your ability to stay founded and I see no matter what kind of emotions or sensations are being experienced by you whether they're good what they're bad it doesn't affect you at all so these three components if you can develop all of them and you're practicing all of them simultaneously then basically you're practicing mindfulness and what's really powerful is that mindfulness imagine mindfulness as you looking through a microscope now when you look through a microscope with a very low magnification setting such as two times magnification it's cool and you might see some new stuff there in the lens but you don't see that much cool new stuff but then you increase the magnification to 10x and now all the sudden you can see some more stuff you can see little particles of dust and little hairs and stuff that you didn't see before but now when you start to increase it to 100x and a thousand X now you start to see some really freaky things now you get to see like bacteria and little organisms with hundred feet swimming around it's like a whole new world that you're looking at and if you take a microscope with a hundred thousand times resolution and you take a look and you you look at that um that world you go even past the bacteria you can even go into like looking at um at the structure of cells and even further down it like the structure of molecules so the same thing is basically possible with your mind and most people cannot believe that such a thing is possible and it really does become not just you becoming a little bit more clear about reality it's like you see a whole new world when you practice mindfulness for a sufficiently long period of time you start to see a whole new world out there even though nothing has really changed but because your senses are now so much more attuned they're not just five times more attuned or ten times no you develop a thousand times or ten thousand times or a hundred thousand times more mindfulness and that's when some really powerful [ __ ] goes down but to get there you need to learn how to start with the basics so let's start you with the basics here's how you actually practice mindfulness you do it in cycles these are going to be 10 second cycles roughly here's how it's going to work there's basically three main modes through which you experience things we're going to call it seeing hearing and feeling you can see with your eyes you can hear with your ears you can feel with your body so let's actually teach you the technique by actually having you do it alright so here's what we're going to do I want you to find an object somewhere around you in this room that you're sitting in maybe a lamp or a pen or a chair or maybe you're looking out the window you can see a tree something static that's not going to move and run away from you right so go ahead and select an object a lamp would be a good example that's what I'm going to use here so look at that lamp and just notice the fact that you are looking at some kind of object it's a lamp in this case so just the first thing you're going to do is you're going to note it note note for noticing right you're going to note and notice just something you do it just takes a split second to do it in your mind you just note the fact that oh yeah I'm looking at an object so that's the first step the second step is that you're going to label this thing that you're looking at and the label is going to be a silent label that you're going to say to yourself in your internal dialogue and in this case the label is going to be not lamp it's going to be the label si si II as in you're seeing it with your eye right we're going to be labeling based on the channel that we're looking at it through or that we're hearing it through so here's going to be seeing so look at the lamp right now and just in your internal dialogue give it a label see just to register the fact that you're seeing it and your Percy through your vision okay so do that right now should just take you one second okay good and now the final step in the cycle is you're going to look at that lamp and you're going to savor it you're going to take in the raw perceptions that are there the colors the shape of the lamp you're going to take that in exactly as it is right now in the present moment and you're going to do that for about five to seven seconds all right so before I have you do this let me just clarify what I mean we're not talking about whether you think the lamp is beautiful or ugly that's a judgment we're not talking about the story behind the lamp where did you buy the lamb did you buy the lamp at IKEA we don't care about that that's not what you're actually seeing of the lamp right we're here we're only concerned about what's actually literally right there and we're not concerned about you know is the lamp working or not working is it on or off it doesn't matter we just care about what's actually right there in our vision okay so when I say go you're going to look at that lamp and you're just going to savor and take in for five to seven seconds all the colors and shapes of the lamp all right ready go okay good very very basic so what you just did right there is you completed one mindfulness cycle it's about a ten second cycle first you note second you label and third you just savor what's actually there that's it very very simple now that was seeing we also have the channel of hearing so let's do this again but now we're going to do it with the hearing channel when you're hearing a sound and I'm going to just generate a sound for us here which is just going to be a clap sound like this okay so when you hear a sound you're going to again go through this 3-step process you're going to note it label it and then you're going to savor it now where the sounds a little bit trickier because sounds often are not continuous and long they don't stay they come and go real quickly so in the case of this clap it's just a maybe a quarter of a second that you hear it so how do you savor a sound well if it's a short little sound like a clap what you're going to do is first you're just going to note the fact that there was something there then you're going to go and you're going to label it you're going to say here H EA R that's the label here because you're hearing it and then what you're going to do is you're going to savor whatever memory there you have usually you have a pretty good short-term memory so you'll be able to remember what the sound sounded like for a good five to ten seconds pretty easily right and you just savor as best as you can whatever memory of it you have ideally you would do this in real time with a more continuous sound like let's say you're listening to some birds chirping continuously or you're listening to an air conditioning system humming and you've got a continuous sound so you can practice with those those might be a little easier for you but right now we're going to do this with a clap alright so I'm going to do this clap and you're going to do the whole cycle you're going to note it you're going to label it here and then you're going to savor it for five to seven seconds and I'm going to do this with you all right so ready on go you can do this go okay good I did that too so that was the hearing Channel and now let's do the final third channel which is feeling feeling are the sensations that are happening in your body there's a lot of them right now that you're probably not even conscious of for example let's take the feeling of either your butt sitting on the seat that you're sitting on or if you're standing then the pressure on your feet so either the pressure on your butt or the pressure on on your feet so let's take that as our object and what we're going to do is we're going to again we're going to notice it we're going to put our attention to notice basically just means to put your attention on that thing right because your attention could be wandering all over the place so just put your attention on the pressure on your feet or your butt then you're going to label it you're going to label it feel F EE L right because you're feeling this so you're going to label it feel and then you're going to take five to seven seconds to savor it literally as it is I don't care if you like the sensation or you don't like the sensation or if it's painful or if it's beautiful or if it's Pleasant or if you want to keep it or it you want to lose it or whatever it doesn't matter your judgments don't matter literally just what's there so I'm going to give you five to seven seconds right now to do this whole cycle and I'm going to do it myself with my feet because I'm standing and I have some pressure in my feet it's a little bit uncomfortable all right ready go okay good so there we did seeing hearing and feeling and what we also did here what I want you to notice as I want to introduce this distinction of outer and inner so what we did is we focus on all the outer sensations outer seeing outer hearing and outer feeling now let's contrast this with the inner sensations you should notice that not only can you see stuff on the outside in the physical world so to speak but you can also see stuff on the inside in your mind's eye or in your imagination you can also hear stuff out in the physical world that you can hear birds chirping that would be an outer hearing or you can hear stuff on the inside which would be basically the hearing of your internal dialogue or for example if you have a tune playing in your mind like some catchy radio song that would you that would be you hearing internally and then finally the last distinction is the the feeling right so you can feel stuff and this is a little bit tricky here it's a little bit counterintuitive what we're going to call inner feeling is not what you probably think so what we mean by outer feeling is basically all the sensations in your body even the stuff that's like on the inside like your heartbeat or an itch in your body somewhere we're going to consider all of that outer feeling what we mean by inner feeling is going to be emotions so if you have an emotion coursing through your body and emotions are quite distinct from something like an itch or pressure on your feet or a you know a pain in your back those are not emotions by emotions what I mean are stuff like fear anger sadness jealousy loneliness depression frustration it can also be positive emotions like happiness excitement and so forth so when you have that that that's what we're going to call inner feeling and these are somewhat arbitrary distinctions right there's nothing set in stone here these are not like distinctions handed down to us from God we just created these distinctions ourselves just this is like a system this is a system we created to help our mind become more aware of what's actually happening in reality so one thing you should have already started to notice as you were doing these three cycles with seeing hearing and feeling what you probably notice that your mind now is getting a little bit more attuned because you're forcing it to focus on a specific sensation and then you're forcing yourself to actually savor the raw data that's there for you independent of your judgments about it which is very different than the way that you normally run through life normally the way you run through life is you are running around judging stuff and thinking about stuff and you're probably ignoring what's literally right there under your nose so already you're probably noticing that your awareness is expanding you're becoming more attune to the present moment and - what's literally there right in front of you and this is all that mindfulness is designed to do it might seem very simple and basic and innocent and you might wonder like well leo I mean this is so obvious and you're telling me that if I do this for long enough period of time that somehow I'm going to get these really positive powerful personal development benefits and yes you will and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later but for now just kind of trust me on it that you will what's going to happen is you're gonna create a snowball effect as you practice this mindfulness more and more and more you're going to get better and better and better at it and then you will have some extraordinary shifts in awareness and in consciousness so right now let's have you practice on the inner channels so let's start with inner seeing what I want you to do is I want you to imagine a big juicy red apple in your mind's eye just imagine it now keep that image in your mind big juicy red apple and now we're going to run a cycle on it all right so you're going to note it you're going to label it see and then you're going to savor it for five to seven seconds whatever is there don't worry if you don't have a perfect photographic image of an apple nobody does the image is going to be kind of faint and murky whatever you've got of it is exactly what it is all right so just do this the best you can I'm going to do it - ready go okay good so already I was noticing just even in the middle of that exercise I was noticing myself becoming more conscious becoming more aware okay good now let's do a cycle on inner hearing what I want you to do for this exercise is I want you to say a short phrase to yourself in your internal dialogue and your phrase will be let's say I have to do the laundry that's your phrase I have to do the laundry so what you're going to do is you're going to repeat that phrase several times in your mind as you're doing the psyche one cycle right so you're just going to say in your mind silently I have to do the laundry I have to do the laundry I have to do the laundry and just notice it label it here har here because you're hearing it and then just savor that whatever it is however it sounds in your mind savor it for five to seven seconds alright I'm going to do it - ready go okay good so that was inner hearing and finally let's do inner feeling now inner feelings a little tricky because remember we're talking about emotions and right now if you're sitting here just listening to me you're probably relaxed and you probably don't have a lot of emotions coursing through your body but nevertheless there's some kind of emotional baseline that you're at even if you're just in a rest restful state you might just label that emotion as a restful so what we're going to have you do is we're going to have you just look inside your body in a second here and look for any emotions that are there fear anger sadness happiness joy exhilaration restful state any of that you look for whatever is there emotionally and you just notice it you label it you're going to label it feel because you're feeling it and then you're going to savor whatever it is for five to seven seconds and I'm going to do this too alright ready go okay good I actually noticed a little bit of a little bit of kind of nervousness feeling I guess because I'm shooting this live right now and I want to make a good recording so probably a little bit of nervousness in my body and so I just became more aware of that by stopping and actually noticing it and I wasn't really aware of it until I stopped okay good so there you have it that's basically the whole mindfulness system that you need to know right now this right here this much theory will get you 80% of all your results right there's really six things you need to worry about outer seeing inner seeing outer hearing inner hearing and outer feeling inner feeling you might wonder about for example smell and taste what about those actually we're going to call those outer feelings as well so just just to make a really simple system if you're being mindful of something that you're tasting or smelling we're going to call that feel and we're going to label it feel and really we're only using three labels here when you're labeling you're not going to be concerned about whether it's outer or inner the labels are just going to be those basic three all right so that's it now you might wonder how do you actually use this to practice mindfulness how do you set up a mindfulness practice so here it is basically what you're going to do is going to get timer set it for 20 minutes every single day you're going to sit down in a quiet place and you're going to calm your mind down for a minute and then what you're going to do is you're going to start running these cycles and you're going to let your mind just kind of focus on whatever it wants to focus on could be a sight could be a sound could be a thought it could be an image could be a feeling could be an emotion whatever's going on for you whatever's most salient to you you're going to let your mind focus on it then you're going to notice it you're going to note it you're going to label it and you're going to savor it for five to seven seconds the whole cycle should take you about ten seconds right and then you're going to finish that one cycle and then what will happen is your mind will wander off on to some other phenomena and then you're going to do another ten second cycle and then another ten second cycle and so on and so forth for the entire 20 minutes if your mind starts to wander away and totally get lost in stories just bring it right back get back on track and just note label and then savor for five to seven seconds that's it that's your entire practice now what you could do if you want to get little more advanced is you can limit the range of what you will let your mind focus on so for example the most basic practice that you allow the range to be everything it could be sights and sounds and feelings outside or inside but then as you get a little bit more advanced you can limit to for example just sights or just sounds or just feelings or just the inner or just the outer or both the inner sounds and the outer sounds or just thoughts and thoughts are inner sounds plus inner images so you can kind of play around with the range and you can limit those on certain days you might just want to do sounds on other days you might just want to do some sights and so on but I really like the one where you just allow everything because then you can just kind of let your mind loose and just see where it goes and wherever it takes you and there's nothing that you can do really wrong so those are the really fundamental basics now let me give you a couple of pointers and answer some commonly asked questions about this so what will happen to you as you start doing this mindfulness is that two phenomena will come up simultaneously in fact you could have five phenomena come up simultaneously right you might be sitting there and you notice that there's an itch in your foot and also a sound in your mind like the word itch in your mind and also in h and your foot so which phenomena do you focus on which one do you run the cycle on and the answer is that basically for the very starter very basic mindfulness practice you just select any one you want usually what most salient and drawing the most of your attention just focus on that so if the itch is really itching focus on the itch in your foot or if if the word itch in your mind is the thing that's really prominent focus on that so you just focus on one the next question that people might ask is what happens if I'm observing a phenomenon and I'm trying to run the cycle within the phenomenon disappears so for example there's a bird chirping outside and I'm listening to this bird I'm trying to savor the sound of the bird but then the bird stops what do I do well you just notice that it stopped and you can also just savor the memory of it that you have it's pretty good to notice this thing's stopped and at the end in fact you can use a special label for that and the label for that could be gone so you're listening to a sound and then Alton poof it's gone okay cool it's gone note it is being gone actually you can savor the gone Ness of it the fact that the chirping stopped you can actually be mindful of it I like oh it's actually gone I'm aware that is gone oh that's cool and you just savor that for five seconds and then you move on to the next thing pretty simple the next question that people have is what happens if the phenomena changes so for example let's say that I'm I'm feeling some emotion in my stomach and then as I'm trying to savor it and really focus on I'd be mindful of it it morphs from a from a sharp kind of a pain to like kind of a numbness or kind of a warm tingly sensation what do I do well just stay with it and notice what happens to it so it's true that we're not taking static snapshots of life here life is a fluid dynamic thing and things are always flowing this especially is obvious when you're focusing on your thoughts or if you're focusing on sounds or if you're focusing on body sensations those tend to flow and morph and change that okay so whatever you focused on to start with whatever it morphs into just stay with it and just observe the fact that oh yeah I did change that's kind of cool I'm aware of the fact that it morphed and changed no problem another common problem that you'll run into when you first start is you'll put your focus on something let's say some kind of vague sensation your body or maybe an image in your mind or a thought in your mind and then you'll wonder like well what is that I don't really know what that is like I have some kind of weird tingly sensation in my chest I don't really know is that my heart or is that fear what is that I don't really know what it is that's okay a lot of stuff at first when you start you're not really going to be sure of so you're allowed to guess and you don't need to be a hundred percent accurate with your labeling and it's even okay if you miss categorize something for example if you have some kind of feeling in your chest and you're not sure if it's fear or if it's just a physical pain um just go with your best guess and what will happen is that over time as you practice mindfulness for weeks at a time you will get better and better and then you will not have these doubts anymore another question is what happens if the phenomena comes up too fast for example let's say we're listening to a machine gun firing and it's just like a rapid fire like right so there's a lot of little individual sounds of each bullet firing but they're happening really really fast so what do I do in this case well one thing you can do is you can just average them out as they're happening if they're happening continuously you can just kind of average them out and just focus on the average what was happening there the other thing you can do is you can just take the you can just take the memory of it that you have so let's say it's firing and then it stops you can just take that last shot and just recall that and savor it and be mindful that another common concern you'll probably have if you sit there labeling a lot is you'll start to notice that labeling itself is an inner hearing sensation because you're using your internal dialogue to say hear see feel and so on so when you notice this the question is should you then label the labels themselves and the answer is no the labeling and the savoring this is a tool that you're using to become more aware right we don't want to go all crazy complicated and start analyzing the tool and start being mindful of the tool and mindful of the mindful the tool and mindful of the mindful of the mindful of the tool we don't need to go there right just keep it very simple put all your attention on everything but the labels and everything but the process that you're using so it's okay you're going to have plenty of stuff to be mindful of without being mindful of the labels themselves so those are the most common concerns now what I really encourage you to do as a tip this is a tip here really important is to do this practice daily 20 minutes is recommended every single day and if you want to get better faster then you can increase to 60 minutes or maybe 30 minutes 40 minutes then get this up to 60 minutes per day do it daily without any excuses without skipping any days ever without skipping weekends without vacations without holidays because these are all going to be excuses that will ruin your practice so you'll want to start very consistently with no excuses it really takes time and momentum to build up a solid mindfulness practice you're not going to do it in just one week this is really a practice that you do over the course of months and years might sound kind of like a bore like another thing you have to do but trust me it's really going to be worth it it's real gonna be worth it for you and one thing that I recommend if you really want to supercharge your mindfulness is take a mindfulness retreat really common ones the really great ones are called the posture retreats the positive meditation retreats there's a lot of them you can take them for free some of them are paid but a lot of them are free they're basically held all over the world in every country so you can look them up online or wherever and take one of these retreats these retreats are powerful because whatever treat is usually is just 5 or 7 or 10 days of complete silence these are silent retreats there's no talking and you basically just spend 12 hours a day practicing mindfulness day after day after day after day and what this does is this gets you a lot of progress really really quickly so the progress that you will make in one year of 20 minutes every day you can probably get that much progress in a single week at a retreat and the ideals that you do both you should have a mindfulness practice outside of retreats daily and then of course you should take one or two retreats per year to really supercharge yourself and learn more advanced techniques what I taught you here is a very basic form of mindfulness it's very powerful it can take you very very far you don't need the fancy stuff but there's also more fancy elements that you can go learn at these retreats and the last thing I'll say about my tips here is that you might have an objection or question like well Leo you've you released a lot of videos about different meditation techniques you've talked about letting thoughts go you've talked about the do-nothing technique you've talked about strong determination sitting right just sit there motionless with all these techniques and out and now you're talking about this mindfulness technique where I'm labeling stuff very rigorously so which technique should I use which is like the best technique and my answer here is that there is no best technique all of these techniques are good all these techniques in fact are great techniques very powerful techniques and I think you should experiment with them if you are a student of raising your consciousness and you really want to self-actualize what I recommend you do for the long run is test out each of these techniques test it out for a month test it out for three months just see which ones you like which ones you don't like you're probably gonna have favorites but also don't worry too much because even the ones that are not favorites of yours they're still very powerful and very effective there's no like best technique alright so don't get caught in that trap alright so that's it you know how to do the practice the hardest thing now is are you actually going to do it it's so simple is so stupidly simple that most people fail right here they know now how it works but then they don't actually set up and discipline themselves to create the habit they need to do on a daily basis you need to develop this habit like I said at the very beginning this is probably the most important skill you can develop as a human being because this is how you interface with reality can you understand this that this is the interface between you and reality is your senses if you're not mindful of what you're perceiving you're basically not mindful of reality and you're living in some fantasy land you're living in story land you're living in your imagination you need to start to understand and to see reality for what it literally is not what your parents told you about it not what your preacher told you about it not what you read in a book not what some scientists told you but what's actually happening right [ __ ] now in your experience you need to get the skill to see that and you need to improve and cultivate this skill over your entire lifetime this is really not an optional thing if you want to have a powerful life in fact what I want to end on is I want to tell you some of the really powerful benefits you'll get if you discipline yourself to create this habit of mindfulness here the benefits you can get you're going to build enormous levels of awareness and focus and consciousness if you build this a bit of just 20 minutes a day enormous levels I'm talking about a thousand times or ten thousand times more awareness than the average person has this is why people meditate this is why meditation is so powerful is because it's like going for a microscope that has a 2x magnification lens to a microscope that has a hundred thousand times magnification lens it really is that big of a deal but it's going to take some time to get to that hundred thousand times magnification so you need to stay disciplined but the benefit to you of this kind of awareness and focus is going to be that for example in your work projects in your creative endeavors you're going to be able to sit down and just focus for an hour straight no problems without distractions imagine how much more powerful more productive you're going to be if you can do that or if you're listening to your kids or you're listening to your spouse imagine being able to fully listen to them be fully present and not be stuck in your own head it's a powerful thing you're also going to develop emotional mastery this is perhaps the most important benefit of mindfulness practice all those nasty emotions that you suffer from that you don't know how to control and fix for example anger fear depression loneliness anxiety frustration annoyance road rage all this stuff that you experienced all this nasty stuff all of this will melt away when you develop sufficiently high levels of mindfulness it'll just naturally and effortlessly melt away because you're going to see it for what it literally is and you're not going to get trapped in the emotional vortexes that are created by the mind very important you can also use mindfulness to reduce suffering stuff like chronic pain back pain as you age you had her going to have all sorts of pains in your body if you have medical medical conditions if you ever need to go in for for really severe and serious conditions like a cancer or a surgery and you have to be recouped operating from all that or physical injuries right all the suffering you experience even the most sharp forms of physical pain that you would think you can't do anything about because they're just physical right wrong you can dissolve them all away with sufficient degrees of mindfulness it's a very powerful thing you can basically take the sting out of the most excruciating pains with sufficient mindfulness practice mindful is also powerful for increasing your fulfillment in life so not only can you reduce suffering but you can increase fulfillment the more mindful you are the more fulfilment you can get from your food from your sex from your success in business from your interactions with people from your holiday parties from everything that you enjoy about life life is not just about getting these things and feeling happy there's degrees of happiness imagine that you could sit down and eat a meal and experience a hundred times more pleasure from that meal than you normally would because now your mind is attuned very finely honed to see and feel and taste and smell every little morsel of that food that's what's possible and not just with food but with every aspect of life even when you're just standing in line the grocery store waiting to pay your bill you can experience uh feelings of rapture and joy and bliss just by being sufficiently mindful and you don't have to be bored out of your mind like you usually are also what you can do with mindfulness is you can do behavior change so all those bad habits you have like biting your nails and what else smoking drinking / eating all these neurotic bad behaviors that you have you want to change all these behaviors well mindfulness will help you with all of that these behaviors basically happen because you're running away from reality as soon as you're able to resolve reality for what it really is a lot of these behaviors will change effortlessly automatically for you just by putting your focus and attention on them pretty cool the other thing you can do is you can experience enlightenment and you can discover the real existential nature of who and what you are and what life and what reality is through mindfulness so what you can do is if you take your mind from the skills that you've developed that thousand x magnification lens and if you focus that lens on the label I as in I or you the way you call yourself in your mind right I call myself I I think of myself as I I think of myself as this being called me leo but if what I do is I develop enough mindfulness and I shine that mindfulness that awareness on the label I what will happens that label will dissolve and I will see what I really is and you can see that and don't underestimate how profound of a vision and an insight that will be if you ever experience I for what it really is is going to blow you away it's going to knock your socks off it'll change your entire perspective on life it's that powerful that's called enlightenment that's called existential nature that's called who and what you really are that's called truth and you can access that after years and years and years of mindfulness practice so that's kind of like the ultimate level 2 where you can take this so some really cool stuff I hope this encourages you and creates the motivation in you to set up this habit because now you have it all now you know how to do it go ahead and get started today alright this is Leo I'm signing off please click the like button for me post your comments down below share this video with a friend we need more people who are mindful and they come check out actualized org right here this is my website I have a lot of free content on there go ahead and check it out sign up to my free newsletter I release new videos on self-actualization topics every single week stuff from how to meditate better how to develop mindfulness how to develop better relationships how to understand your mood and your emotions how to master every element of your life so you can create the most extraordinary life that you can a life where you're passionate where you're doing the greatest good not for just yourself but also for the world and you can experience that level of rich fulfillment and satisfaction that you get when you're really on top of your game in life that's what I want to help you to do because I've been doing it for myself for the last ten to five years and man it's had some powerful effects on the quality of my life and I love sharing this information with you there's a lot to share stick around every single week do the exercises build the habits you're going to start to see that just within a couple of years your whole life will start to transform so sign up stay tuned and I look forward to seeing you soon you