Posts Tagged ‘mindfulness’

Character Defines the Soul of Who We Are

There’s nothing more important to who we are than our character. By character, I mean how we behave, how we think, act alone (with no one seeing us – darn important!), interact with others, pay attention 24/7/365. You get the idea. It’s our living soul.

Now let’s amp it up a bit. I have a line: Pressure brings out true character, and it doesn’t take much of a push truly to test character. When I say that, the first finger I point at is me and, boy, there are many times I see my character needs positive work, and I work on it. That work applies both to me personally and to my brands, both Gotta’ Eat right here and Breitz! (bright, bold performance wear) because those brands and I are the same.

To notch it up even further, here’s a very recent personal example. First, the setup. I’m divorced (not a bright spot in my life and at least half my fault), I had a longterm loving relationship that dissolved (same parenthetical comment as the last one), and I’ve had a tough time meeting someone I’d like to share an active love of life with near where I live in Hickory, NC. I never thought of trying online dating sites, but others, including my wise-beyond-her-age daughter, suggested I do just that. So “never”, as incredibly, without exception, always happens to me, became “foot-on-gas, LET’S GO!”.

Now, the pressure. I started communicating with a much younger, hammer-gorgeous, smart, warm-voiced woman 3 hours away from me, who immediately influenced positive change in some of my closely held daily personal and work habits. In talking with her, I barely breathed as I recognized how well we matched up. My dear God, there really is something to those non-human, highly mechanized algorithms. Every cell in my body buzzed thrillingly harmoniously that something explosively terrific could develop. Then she said, “Can I ask you a personal question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

Of course, I’d answer! She couldn’t get to know me without me directly answering any question she asked.

“Would you consider coming with me to Turkey to get a hair transplant?”

Faster than a sharp finger snap, wildly electric ecstasy turned to switch-on, electric chair horror. I didn’t sweat. I didn’t get mad. Thank goodness for daily mindfulness training and practice. I told her calmly and firmly I couldn’t do that.

“Why not – even for a woman who would love to love you?”

“Because I’m perfectly comfortable with how my head looks. I’ve been this way for 40 years, and it would completely change who I am.” Yes, it would change my character – and not for the positive – and that is non-negotiable.

To take that one step further – and not that I needed outside validation, but I’m visiting my stepmom now and she was near me and heard most of our conversation. Soon as I got off the phone, she asked with familiar directness, “Well, Bruce. What was that all about?” As soon as I cut to the “hair transplant” punchline, her jaw-dropped, wide-eyed, stunned silent, limp shouldered stare and barely audible “noooo” said it all.

I spoke with that same younger woman last night. It turns out there are quite a few expectation differences between the two of us, and we’ll probably never speak again. Ha! Did I really just write “never” so easily after what I said above what “never” ends up meaning to me? I won’t erase it. That, too, is part of my character. And I’m perfectly big-smile comfortable that both you and I know it!

Best always,

Mindfully Living with “Everything Changes”

Black laptop screen

Only two simple words define the foundation of all there is: everything changes.

The trick – and it’s not magic – is learning to accept change with mindful clarity, especially when that change catches us off guard.

Here’s a very recent “Bruce” example. My laptop screen came up black the other night. None of the fixes I found online with my phone worked. The only remaining answer: get the broken machine to a repair shop. That was “acceptance one”. The proof: I slept as still as a brick in a wall that night.

The next morning, I shot off to Asheville expecting a “we’ll get it done while you wait” turnaround. Wrong. Michael at the shop told me I wouldn’t get a call with a diagnosis about the problem until Monday – maybe. That was “acceptance two”. The proof: a questioning “Really?” came to mind, and I felt it, but I let it go and barely skipped a beat. (I’m still definitely learning.)

In a recent post, I laid out the three ingredients that make us who and what we are: what we eat, how regularly and rigorously we move our bodies and how we manage what we think and how we behave. Not too long ago, I would’ve waisted a lot of energy bemoaning the “REALLY?!?” of the situation, and I’m certainly not now slapping myself on the back with a self-congratulatory “Good job, Bruce!” for not bemoaning. Instead, I owe a wholehearted thanks to the mindfulness and awakened consciousness training I’ve been practicing daily for the past two years through both the “Waking Up” app, which I came upon through the persistent urging of my darn good bud, Jay, and incorporating that training in my daily life as “moment-to-moment” as I can.

Again, there’s no magic to mindfulness/awakened consciousness. The concept is simple; everything changes, and those changes are never the same from one moment – or fraction of a moment – to the next.

For proof, and that’s the beauty of this; there really is proof: just notice what happens to all that you see, hear, touch, smell, taste, think and feel inside from just one breath to the next. Nothing is the same – ever. On a vastly larger scale, look at what happens in our cosmos. Everything is moving forward at both greater speed and toward greater disorder (aka “entropy”) from one fraction of a fraction of a second to another. You can then flip that scale around from the incredibly huge picture of the cosmos to the equally but oppositely extremely high-powered microscopic view of what happens at the quantum mechanical level. Every infinitesimal wave of energy is moving at near the speed of light, and nothing is ever the same.

Mind bending? Sure. But what does this mean to you – or to me as a guy who was told he won’t have a primary work tool, his laptop, for days or longer? It means accepting that reality that can’t be changed, not wasting energy sweating about it and then either letting it go, if the problem is completely out of your hands, or adapting to it, if the problem allows for that. In my instance, it meant learning how to use my phone to do a good part of what I’d normally do on my laptop, like writing this post and then promoting it on social media. Sure, that takes more time than it would on my computer, but I’m just as sure learning a lot about how to work better with my phone that has real and very practical application.

One last thing about practical application and where the rubber really hits the road. Sam Harris, “Waking Up” founder, often says at the end of his guided meditation sessions that the purpose of practicing meditation formally, during which he encourages listeners to find themselves in seated still position, is connecting and incorporating that formal practice with daily life. A few months after starting the formal guided meditation sessions in a still position, I thought closely about how I make that practice-to-living connection and how I could amp up how I incorporate it moment-to-moment in my daily life, as Sam Harris rightfully teaches.

Right away, I changed how I practice, and it has made – and continues to make – all the difference to living mindfully and consciously. Instead of being still when I listen to guided meditation, I move my body and go through my morning stretching & strengthening exercises while paying attention to what I hear. My reasoning for doing that: I’m barely ever still during my waking day. Even now, as I write this on my phone, I’m moving my fingers and my eyes and concentrating on what I’m doing. None of that is static.

Regarding how I adapted to my improvised change to formal practice, yes, I recognized a fall off in attention to guided meditation thoughts and ideas as they were being expressed the first week or so after starting to combine formal practice with movement, but that quickly turned around, and I credit that to the still-position practice I’d already had (and would highly recommend as a foundation to anyone else interested in varying or personalizing how they practice). Through practical application of what I’d learned in still-position formal practice, I learned to listen more attentively, and just as quickly recognized how much more richly the transition from practice to application was affecting my daily life, like realizing I couldn’t fix my laptop black screen and learning that a tool I rely on for many hours daily would not be available for days, which then gave me the opportunity to adapt.

Bottom line: Through daily mindfulness training, I now much better realize and accept that everything changes, just as I know that same recognition and acceptance will always be a work in progress. Now, when change happens, especially change that catches me off guard, I ask myself two things, “Will life go on, and will I be ok?” To answer with a merely obvious “yes” to both would be settling for a disappointing understatement. My answer: you bet, life will go on and both it and I are and will be better than ok.

Right here and now, I very much wish the same to you!

3 Ingredients That Make You YOU: Food, Body, Mind

You’ve heard it many times, “You are what you eat”. That’s only 1/3 true.

Sure, what you eat – plus what you drink and breathe – are the building blocks of every cell in your body. But you are just as much the product of how you move your body and use your mind – and regarding the mind, how you manage stress. As shown in the diagram below, YOU = Food + Body + Mind.

That simple 3 part equation has held true since man evolved as a distinctly separate species from primates four (or so) million years ago. And, despite our transition from millions of years as nomadic hunter gatherers to predominantly agriculturally-based community members only ten thousand years ago, our bodies, and what our bodies need to survive and thrive, have not changed. We still have the same bodies that were built through evolution to survive on foods close to the earth and that still need the same level of daily physical activity and stress management to function properly that we had to rely on to hunt and gather everyday.

That’s just how it is.

And that’s exactly what prompted me to learn for myself, put to practice and then promote how we can best take sensible, life-promoting measures, one step at a time, to help us (me included) make the most of our food, body and mind equation – and do it without making ourselves crazy.

To help provide you with the kitchen skills needed to empower you to make life-promoting foods, I’ll continue putting out fully flavorful picture book recipes to make food preparation as easy as possible no matter how little cooking experience you have.

At the same time, I’ll mix it up with pieces about physical activity and mental/spiritual well being, like, for example the mindfulness/consciousness “Waking Up” practice I’ve been doing daily for over 2 years. Though I’m not pushing any particular program, you get an idea about what I do by checking out the 9-minute video you can see by clicking the image below.

Please contact me directly if you have any questions about any of the above: bruce@gotta-eat.com.

All the best always!

What is Mindfulness and What Can It Do For You?

Mindfulness is the key to living a fully aware, fully awake life

Mindfulness is being fully aware, fully conscious, fully awake. Being mindful (aware, conscious, fully awake) is the key to living a more focused, calm and clear life in the midst of the constant chaos of moment-to-moment impulses, thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences that tend to sweep us away mindlessly.

The difference between mindlessness and mindfulness is the difference between absently bouncing on a hamster wheel while being bombarded with everything life throws at you – with incredible accuracy – and using fully engaged awareness to drop back and see that hamster wheel and all the mayhem that surrounds it for what it really is.

Mindfulness is not checking out of life. Not at all. Mindfulness is checking into life fully engaged with eyes open, razor sharp clarity.

The root of the word “mindfulness” is “mind”, and there’s nothing more important to us than our mind. Our mind is who we are and what we are – always – and it is not our brain. Instead, our mind is an active process. It is all the mental activity going on in our brain all the time that makes up our ability to think and be aware. That ability to be aware, or the state of awareness, is consciousness.

By nature, our minds have been built over millions of years to help us survive in a random world by processing streams of random thoughts and emotions that affect us from a range of a light flicker to a complete attention-consuming fire. We can’t stop that randomness and we never will. 

The real problem, though, isn’t the randomness of thoughts and emotions as they appear constantly in our heads.

No, the big problem is our tendency to identify with those thoughts and the emotions connected to them. Identifying means that we let those thoughts and emotions tell us who we are, which then sweeps us away on a mindless hamster wheel run – all at the tremendous expense of missing the feet-on-the-ground, full-on life power of experiencing our here and now present. 

The bright side of this story (there’s always a bright side!): everything mentioned above doesn’t have to be that way, and the key is mindfulness.

Sure, I’d heard of mindfulness years ago but never practiced it formally until my good friend, Jay, nudged me to do something about it not once but twice. And I greatly appreciate his persistence!

As Andy Puddicombe says in his very focused and equally entertaining 10-minute TED Talk that you can see by clicking this link or any picture on this page, “We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way we experience (them)”. Changing our perspective, relative to moment-to-moment experiences, thoughts and emotions through mindfulness practice and regular application in our lives, is the key to living a more focused, calm and clear life. And, wow, from personal experience, what a difference that makes!

When you watch Andy’s video, you’ll hear him talk about one of the formal methods of achieving mindfulness: meditation. All my life, my response to the idea of meditation was, “There is no way I’m gonna’ take time out to sit crosslegged, eyes closed and say “Ommmm…”. Now, again thanks to my good bud, Jay’s, persistence, I’ve learned that the meditation I now practice daily has everything NOT to do with that and is instead all about waking up and learning how to make the most of my moment-to-moment life as possible. To say that mindfulness and meditation have significantly affected my life is a gross understatement.

But more about that and the specific practice I’ve adopted soon! In the meantime, please give Andy’s video a look. There’s no doubt in my mind that what he says has the power to change your life.

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