Dear Friends,<\/p>\n
I had the opportunity to attend a meeting yesterday evening, and the talk turned to boredom, and the tendency that many people have to fill time by doing “stuff”. In the context of that conversation, Doris mentioned a talk she listened to by Gil Fronsdal, in which he suggested a practice of doing one thing at a time.<\/p>\n
This idea seems to fit in wonderfully with the topic of simplicity that we looked at yesterday, and it’s another great way to integrate an intentional practice into our daily lives.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure which talk Doris listened to, but I found a couple of\u00a0talks from Gil that are on the topic of doing one thing at a time:<\/p>\n
In both talks, he mentioned a story from his own experience, in which he was going to walk from one side of his small apartment to the other, with the intention of putting the wash into the dryer, and that simple task took much longer than necessary because he found that he was continually getting distracted – by putting away something, or looking up something, etc.<\/p>\n
Oh yeah, I can relate!<\/p>\n
So he suggests instead, when distractions pull at our attention, to make note of it and say “not now”. He also suggests many other ways to aid our focus, including turning off the “dings” and notifications on our phones and computers so that they won’t distract us as much.<\/p>\n
In the second talk, Gil mentions that you don’t have to do one thing at a time all the time, but even doing it for 20% of your day can have big benefits, similar to what you might experience on retreat.<\/p>\n
In the Q&A of one of the talks, he also reminds us to do this with a bit of lightness and curiosity.<\/p>\n
I know I have a tendency to do lots of other things when I’m eating breakfast and lunch, so I’m going to experiment today with just eating, and when the thought to check my email or read a book arises, I’m going to note that, and say “not now.”<\/p>\n
What do you think… is there something that would be a good focus for “one thing at a time” for you? What tools might you use to help you keep your focus? Feel free to share by email or in a comment below!<\/p>\n
With best wishes,
\nAndrea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Friends, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting yesterday evening, and the talk turned to boredom, and the tendency that many people have to fill time by doing “stuff”. In the context of that conversation, Doris mentioned a talk she listened to by Gil Fronsdal, in which he suggested a practice of doing one thing at\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[25,28],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jan-2017","tag-daily-life","tag-gil-fronsdal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}