Episode 26: A Few Phrases for Mindfulness

I've been doing some mindfulness stuff recently. I've never really been,
I kind of break things like meditation. I know meditation isn't exactly mindfulness,
but it's sort of a, almost a subcategory of it. I've always thought about medications,
there's a couple different ways to go about it, right? There's sort of the, what I in my head
consider the formal quote unquote meditation. This would be like a guided meditation where you're,
you know, sitting with your eyes closed and you're, you're focusing on the present and you're
breathing and whatever else that particular meditation might entail. Then there's what I
sort of think in my head as sort of a, a informal meditation, which is sort of that happy place
thing that people do and have, you know, you might, you might have that thing that when you
need to kind of center yourself, you, you go off and do something, you know, I've heard people talk
about, you know, taking a bath and listening to music or blasting music at the top of the top of
the volume and just kind of rocking out to it. And, and, you know, whatever that kind of happy place
thing is, I think that's a form of meditation as well. But in terms of the more, more formalized,
like practice of meditation, I've never done much with that in my life. I've also never done much
with, you know, mindfulness, which is sort of related, but not the same. It's more around
kind of taking stock of the present moment, kind of recentering yourself in the moment,
being able to, to focus yourself in, recenter yourself, all of those sorts of things.
Becoming aware of, of what you're feeling, what you're doing, what might be irking you,
all that kind of stuff. So I've been doing a little bit of this recently, some combination
of these things, not a ton. Uh, I've been doing it as I, right as I'm going to bed,
right before going to sleep. The, the original purpose of this for me, a, it was, some of it was
exploratory, right? Again, I said, I've never really done a lot of this before. So I was just curious
to see what it was kind of all about. But also, um, as I've mentioned before on the show,
I've never been great at getting to sleep at night. Once I'm asleep, I'm usually pretty good,
but that, that initial getting to sleep takes me a long time often. So for a little while,
I was listening to these calm stories on the calm app. They kind of stopped working for me.
They, they worked great for a while and they kind of tapered off. They, they just, I was able to just,
I'd heard them too many times. I kind of was able to zone them out. They, I wasn't focused on them.
They weren't really helping me get to sleep. In fact, they were kind of keeping me up.
So I stopped doing that and I thought I'd try something a little different. So I grabbed this
other app and I'll link to it. It's got whatever, like millions of users or downloads or whatever.
It's called insight timer. I chose this one in part because it seemed to have a lot of free
offerings. You could get in there and listen to some stuff without having to pay anything,
but also it had a lot of shorter form things that you could listen to. So what I was interested in
doing was spending, you know, five to 10 minutes before going to sleep, checking out what this is all
about. The jury's still out for me a bit, um, in terms of what I really think about all of this.
I'm so new to it. I don't want to come off as if I think I'm some sort of expert or that I've done
this for a long time or that I even understand kind of philosophically what it's all about.
What I did want to talk about was that amongst these things and what I, what I've been doing is
sort of there, there's recordings on there. They're anywhere between three and five minutes long.
I'll listen to one or two of them depending on where my mood is and what I, because some of them
are titled things like, you know, self-affirmations for confidence or one of them's, you know,
a guided meditation to help you get to sleep or like, so sort of whatever you're feeling that day
or that moment you might need a boost in or some help with or whatever. They kind of have a selection
for that, which I kind of like. So what I'll do is I'll listen to one or two of them before I go to
sleep. It takes me a grand total of anywhere between, you know, six and 10 minutes. Nice way to kind of,
you know, again, kind of center before going to sleep. What I did want to talk about more than the
overarching practice of this stuff, which again, I'm not anywhere even close to an expert or
proficient in, but there's a few things that have come up across multiple recordings
that I thought were interesting ways of phrasing things and things that kind of rung true with me.
There are things that, that again, after listening to a number of these recordings recorded by a number
of different people. And I get the sense that some of these are things that are typical phrasings
within the discipline of mindfulness that I just didn't know about. Right. So if you're a very into
mindfulness, these probably won't be particularly surprising to you, or they might not be particularly
surprising to you, but they were things that I kind of latched onto and thought were valuable.
So I'm just going to go through three of them. The first phrase that I found rather meaningful
that I've heard across several of these things is some variation on let go of the thoughts that don't
serve you. And they, there's a lot of this phrasing of thoughts that don't serve you relationships that
don't serve you. This concept of, of letting go of stuff and thoughts and things and whatever else
that doesn't serve you. I like this phrasing for a couple of reasons. First of all, it, it, it kind of
intuitively makes sense, right? The idea is that you're letting go of things that are having some
sort of negative influence on you, but that's a, that it's a different thing though, because I, I do
believe in general, and I, and I've wrestled with this in my head, you know, just as I think about
things, I do on one hand, believe that people should let go of things that are negatively impacting
them. However, I don't believe that people should kind of hide or ignore or push away things that are
challenging, which can also be negative. Let me try to state that a little bit differently. There are negative
things in our lives or things that cause stress or things that are difficult or things that maybe we've
screwed up in the past that I believe we need to face head on as people in order to grow, right? In order to
grow, you have to overcome some of these things and push through them and work through them. And I think it's
very easy for people to think, well, I'm just going to tuck this away and ignore it. But I liked this phrasing, this
idea of letting go of things that don't serve you. Because if you're still working through something
that has been challenging, negative, difficult, then it is still serving a purpose for you. And this
phrasing is not saying let go of it and ignore it. What it's saying is once you've gotten to a point
where you have worked through it to the best of your ability and now you're just ruminating on it and
you're not getting anywhere, then it's not serving you anymore. It's not serving that initial purpose
that it once did. And I think that's a very powerful phrasing because it gets at a nuance, at least when I
think about it, it gets at a nuance that can be very easily lost. It gets at that little gray area
between ignoring things that are hard and letting go of things that you're ruminating on and that
you're not letting go once you've processed it and once it's just sort of becoming kind of a negative
cyclical thought. So that's my first thing is let go of thoughts that don't serve you.
Second thing that has come up in some of these recordings, and again, remember, I'm listening to
these before bed. So a lot of these for me are ones that have to do with sleep or decompressing at the
end of the day or whatever. So there's a certain pattern there. My number two one was the phrase,
you've done enough today. And I liked this idea, especially right before going to sleep.
It's so easy at the end of the day, I think, to lay in bed and think, oh, I should have done this,
I should have done that, or I only got through 50% of my to-do list, or tomorrow I'm going to do this
other thing, or I left this half done, or whatever. But I think it's a good reminder at the end of the
day that you've done enough for that day. It's also in some ways, I don't know, a truism or
something. You can't have not done enough for the day because the day is over. It doesn't matter
anymore. You can't pack anything else in. You're going to sleep. So it's a good time to remind
yourself you've done enough that day. Even if you didn't do much that day, even if your day was one
of those, you know, sit on the couch all day and watch TV and veg out because you're exhausted days,
that's okay. You still did enough that day. You have no choice but to have done enough that day
because the day is over. And even on a less extreme note, we don't all need to be so busy all the time.
And it's all right to just do a handful of things, and that'll be enough for the day.
And I'm not saying you should spend all day being unproductive. I'm big into productivity
patterns and tips and how to get the most out of your day. But when the day is over,
there's no sense in really thinking about that anymore. And if you've spent your day
doing what you need to do that day, you've done enough. And even if you haven't,
you've still done enough. That's my number two.
The third phrasing that I really liked was, let go of your attachment to today.
And I'm going to try to articulate what this means or what this meant to me because I found this
oddly powerful. If you have something in your life that you have a hard time letting go of,
something you screwed up once, something someone did to you once, a grudge you're hanging on to,
an event you were embarrassed by, I don't know, whatever that thing is for you or things.
In a lot of ways, what you're doing is holding on to a day or sometime period, but let's just
hypothetically call it a day. You're holding on to a day that has long come and gone. See,
if you think about it or if you think about it from a perspective of the thing, that thing may never
leave, right? If you think about it in terms of the horrible thing someone did to you or the horrible
thing you did to someone else or the horrible experience you had once, then it never goes away
because you're focused on the event or action or transgression itself. And those are abstract
concepts that can be timeless. However, if you think about it instead in terms of that horrible
thing that happened to me last Wednesday or a year ago or 10 years ago, when you tie it to time or when
I tie it to time and my thinking, it seems a little easier to just let it go because that time,
whatever, whenever it happened, came and went a long time ago. So I thought this phrasing of let
go of your attachment to today because how many of us want to be attached to Wednesday of last week
or January 14th of, of 2020 or, you know, whenever do you really want to sit around and, and in today's
world be attached to a day from four years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, it's easier to be
attached to the things that happened that day. But if you, if you bundle the things that happened up
with whatever that day was in time, I think it's easier to just become unattached from it. It doesn't
mean it didn't happen. It just, it's easier to put it in the past, at least from my, my thinking.
So those are my three, let go of the thoughts that don't serve you. You've done enough today and let go
of your attachment to today. As a bonus, just one bonus item. Um, one thing that also comes up a lot
less deep, but rather useful. A lot of these things, especially the sleep ones will remind you to relax
all the muscles in your body. And I do find that useful as I'm laying there to just remember.
It's amazing how tense so many muscles are in your body, your jaw, your neck, your arms, your legs,
when you are even sitting still or laying still, it's amazing how tense you keep all of your muscles
and reminding yourself to just relax them. You might be amazed how much tension you're holding
onto and not even realizing it. So what about you? Do you do any of this stuff? Are there any phrases
you've found to be particularly powerful? These are ones that kind of stuck with me after doing
this for a little while? Ones that kind of called out to me as a, they repeated themes and B,
they meant something to me. I thought there was some deeper meaning behind the sentence themselves,
but I'd be curious to hear, uh, what else has worked for their people in terms of mindfulness,
meditative kind of things and whatever else people might do to kind of stay centered, relaxed and enjoy
their lives.