One Minute Mindfulness
Mindfulness has become increasingly popular over recent years, but still the biggest complaint of people attempting to build a practice is that they simply don’t have the time and that’s why they fail.
There is a famous zen proverb which goes like this,
“You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day — unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.”
While this proverb essentially speaks a great truth — essentially that if we think we are so busy and so important that we can’t find even twenty minutes to meditate then we are probably in more trouble than we really even know — it possibly wasn’t written with the modern world in mind. We live in the age of distraction, we are Generation AO, (Always Online), we have apps, devices and box sets to keep us from ourselves. We work hard and long. We attempt to balance work with a social life, family time, and then of course we have to try to develop something like a regular exercise regime.
For the best part most of us fail at this and that is why there is an overwhelming abundance of blogs and posts offering life hacks, productivity guides and personal growth tips, trying to help us get our lives back on track.
Mindfulness at it’s core has always offered a simple and effective way out of this endless, mindless cycle. The problem is that the concept of mindfulness itself has suffered also because now it either appears over complicated and confusing due to too many books, apps and hacks, or it is seen as too simplistic to be a feasible solution for what we see as deeper, more enduring problems in our lives.
I would like to offer a solution, one that has been proven to be highly effective, but does initially seem so overly simplistic it can’t appear to have any deep or lasting effect. I propose, with great confidence, that you can change your life with just one minute of mindfulness a day.
Now I expect this idea to go down like a lead balloon with meditation purists, already horrified that meditation has been diluted and re-branded into ‘mindfulness’ and served up to the masses in 10 or 20 minute servings.
My argument against this resistance is simple — something is better than nothing. If somebody can begin to build a meditation practice and to discover the benefits of mindfulness starting with just one minute a day, how can this ever be a bad thing? With Mental Health predicted to be the number one health risk in the US and UK by 2020, we need to be more open to providing help and strategy to people, equipping as many people as possible with the skills to better cope with life in the modern, technological world. There is no time to be precious or for intellectual snobbery surrounding certain practices and traditions. If something can help someone it needs to be available and it needs to be simple, effective and freely available. Mindfulness offers just that, and we can’t afford to turn people away from it right now.
So how can one minute a day be of any value at all?
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” — Lao Tzu
In order to be successful at building a positive habit at anything we have to learn to circumnavigate our biggest obstacle — fear. When we set ourselves big goals and grand targets or even when we hold high expectations of ourselves within our own minds, we immediately set our minds up for either success or failure. Initially, adrenalin and motivation will give us the required energy to begin a new project or learn a new skill but early momentum can be easily lost when difficulties or some small failures occur. A huge percentage of people abandon their new year’s resolutions by the end of January — they set their initial goals too high and then encounter difficulties, and once fear kicks in it takes a lot more energy to get back up and continue the practice. Most people give up feeling rejected and disappointed.
Tiny steps can help us to constantly avoid triggering this fear and failure mechanism by making the task appear almost irrelevant and harmless, but meanwhile they quietly help us build strong, confident practices and skills.
One test in the US regarding ‘tiny steps’ involved an obese young lady with rapidly failing health, who had previously failed at every other type of diet or exercise plan. She was initially advised to simply stand up for one minute a day, that was all. That simple and achievable instruction helped her bypass her fear and failure mechanism, exercise of any form had previously been out of the question. Within a month the young lady was standing up throughout the entire advertising breaks on the television. By the end of a year her progress had escalated to the point she was running around the block several times, eating much healthier and shedding weight at a phenomenal rate. Tiny steps had help her avoid her fears and also helped her to build strong, positive habits.
One minute a day mindfulness doesn’t need to even involve a formal sitting, as people normally expect to do when approaching mindfulness or meditation. By the time you had tried to find a quiet place and then got into a comfortable position the one minute would most likely already be up. Instead one minute a day mindfulness is done wherever you are with whatever you are doing, thinking, feeling and experiencing.
So if you are sat at your desk working at your computer, sat on the bus or even bathing the kids — you bring your attention to the present moment. What are you feeling? How do your clothes feel against your body? Can you sense your breath? What thoughts are running through your mind? What can you hear? What can you smell?
You cannot do this wrong. There is no right way of doing this. You are simply bringing attention to the present moment.
Whatever you experience in that moment is just what it is. Accept it and don’t try to push it away or think you should feel or be acting in a certain other way. Just totally accept the moment. If you are feeling stressed, then just accept that feeling in that moment, even if it is uncomfortable or painful. Allow it all. If you are in some form of discomfort, feel it, allow it, don’t try and change it.
It is this ‘acceptance’ of the moment that is where the magic of even a one minute mindfulness practice really is. Nurturing the ability to be in the present moment no matter what you are feeling or experiencing and with a gentle, kind acceptance is the true gem of such a simple practice.
All the practice asks is for you to do this for a minimum of one minute a day. Of course you can do it for longer if you want to, but this discipline only requires one, single minute a day. It is important to build a feeling of success and achievement over a sustained period of time just through meeting our daily requirement before we attempt to increase our goals and risk setting off our fear or failure receptors.
Learning to accept the present moment without judgement and with compassion and kindness is one of the greatest and most simply profound gifts we can give to ourselves. It will help us in ways we cannot even begin to imagine — potentially providing greater focus, clarity, energy, creativity, motivation and an enhanced confidence in learning to deal with whatever appears in our present moment regardless of how challenging that may be. So once we get a taste of the benefits of such a simple practice we may naturally want to increase the time we spend doing this each day, and in turn we may want to learn and understand in greater depth all that meditation can offer us.
At the end of the day progress is progress. If you had failed at a regular practice before or never before practised mindfulness and present moment awareness then one minute is one minute more than you were previously doing. That in itself is a major victory.
Try it and see.
I’m going to dare to amend the original zen proverb now,
“You could sit in meditation for one minute every day — unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.”
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