I love this talk and the points raised by Andy Puddicombe.
When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment.
I love what he says about the present moment being underrated. As he says, ‘It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it’s anything but ordinary. There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness. To spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy just kind of seems tragic, especially when there’s something we can do about it, when there’s a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted.’
I am certainly very, very guilty of never doing nothing (bad grammar!) and often not living in the present moment, as I’m always thinking of the next thing to do, or the next thing that needs attention. I have a job that pretty much demands I am always living in the future, planning what might happen tomorrow, next week, next month – worrying about the ‘thing’ later or the next day. Constantly on email, phone, Skype, HipChat, text, Twitter, blah blah… So, I find it really hard to even conceive of doing nothing – for me, the time when you’re not doing something is when you read a magazine or a book or look at the internet for fun or see friends. Doing nothing is a pretty scary idea actually, so for me, I think this is almost a case of brain re-training…not sure I can do it but I might try 🙂
