{"id":274,"date":"2017-01-31T02:00:06","date_gmt":"2017-01-31T08:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/?p=274"},"modified":"2018-01-05T19:54:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T01:54:59","slug":"2017-01-31-month-end-recap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/2017-01-31-month-end-recap\/","title":{"rendered":"January 31 &#8211; Month end recap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Friends,<\/p>\n<p><em>Today is the last day of the 5 day retreat with Adrianne Ross, so I&#8217;ll be back to the land of technology later this afternoon. I thank you for your patience! Meanwhile, here&#8217;s a reflection for today! I look forward to catching up with your responses.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe we&#8217;re at the end of January! It&#8217;s been a busy month, with lots of opportunities for exploration. I hope you&#8217;ve found some practices that resonate with you.<\/p>\n<p>Today, I&#8217;ll briefly recap some of the key points and practices that we&#8217;ve covered.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Start with intention &#8211; we started (and ended) the month by exploring intention; it&#8217;s a great thing to reflect on &#8211; at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of a meditation, whenever.<\/li>\n<li>Complete the day\/meditation\/whatever with a review or dedication. It&#8217;s a way to affirm the skillful things you did, and to reconnect with our deeper intentions.<\/li>\n<li>Breathing is often a good focus for meditation, as it&#8217;s always present, and it helps settle the mind. Even taking one mindful breath anywhere in the day can help bring focus and attention back to the present.<\/li>\n<li>To strengthen daily practices, look for ways to reinforce the habit pattern &#8211; cue, routine, reward.<\/li>\n<li>Body scan is another meditative practice to ground oneself in the present. This can be done through formal guided meditations, or informal check ins through the day.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Choiceless awareness&#8221; is another style of meditation, in which you bring mindful attention to whatever is calling your attention &#8211; what&#8217;s obvious in that moment.<\/li>\n<li>Mindfulness can be done in any posture, including walking, which makes it a great way to bring mindfulness into daily activities.<\/li>\n<li>Notice and appreciate joy when it arises. By having your radar looking for joy, you may start to notice it more often.<\/li>\n<li>We explored a couple of ways to bring mindfulness into daily life. One is to\u00a0select a\u00a0short, repetitive activity (like walking through doorways) to start acting as a mindfulness bell. The other was to pick a longer chore (like doing the dishes) an try to sustain mindfulness for the duration of the activity. Do you remember what you said you&#8217;d work on[CUSTOM DATA]?<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s natural that your attention directed towards these tasks might have waned, so ways to help include re-connecting with intention, and exploring with a sense of curiosity.<\/li>\n<li>Putting the right amount of effort into daily life mindfulness is important. With too much effort, you might notice that you tire out too soon. Try a lighter touch. Just relax.<\/li>\n<li>Gratitude is another way to cultivate joy. Did you try doing the Gratitude Alphabet?<\/li>\n<li>When we come back to being mindful after\u00a0being lost in thought, that&#8217;s a great opportunity to start to learn how to recognize mindfulness. You can prime the pump with the question, &#8220;Am I aware?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Meditation isn&#8217;t always lotus blossoms and bliss\u00a0(or maybe that&#8217;s just me). Our minds will wander off. But we can have a welcoming curiosity with our puppy dog minds, and that will help us learn more about how our minds work.<\/li>\n<li>Kindness practices include the formal meditation with the traditional phrases, and informal practices like aiming your happiness ray gun at random people and secretly wish them well. Even strangers are &#8220;just like me&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Simplicity can be a great gift! Ask &#8220;is this necessary?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Another way to simplify and increase mindfulness is to focus on &#8220;one thing at a time&#8221; &#8211; at least some of the time.<\/li>\n<li>Through our practice, we start to get familiar with our patterns of reactivity. By learning these patterns, we can have a better chance of injecting choice to respond rather than reacting in our habitual way.<\/li>\n<li>Compassion is a way we can relate to suffering in the world, and\u00a0<em>tonglen<\/em>\u00a0is one type of practice to bring caring to the suffering we encounter in this world.<\/li>\n<li>Generosity is a natural inclination of our human species. It is important to notice our intention for and acts of generosity so that we can cultivate, appreciate, and take joy in these qualities.<\/li>\n<li>Generosity doesn&#8217;t have to be anything grand. Our time and presence can be the most profound gifts.<\/li>\n<li>Generosity is something we can direct towards ourselves; we can also practice receiving and noticing the generosity of others.<\/li>\n<li>We can bring mindfulness to listening and to our speech, through formal and informal practices.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can revisit all the previous emails\u00a0on the blog, so check out that resource too.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s a pretty full toolkit! Were there a few of those practices that particularly resonated with you? What will you continue to cultivate going forward? Share your thoughts with me or in the comments below!<\/p>\n<p>With best wishes,<br \/>\nAndrea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Friends, Today is the last day of the 5 day retreat with Adrianne Ross, so I&#8217;ll be back to the land of technology later this afternoon. I thank you for your patience! Meanwhile, here&#8217;s a reflection for today! I look forward to catching up with your responses. It&#8217;s hard to believe we&#8217;re at the end of January!\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/2017-01-31-month-end-recap\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/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":[47,62,82,58,25,98,6,69,84,41,94,83],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jan-2017","tag-body","tag-breath","tag-choiceless-awareness","tag-compassion","tag-daily-life","tag-generosity","tag-gratitude","tag-intention","tag-joy","tag-metta","tag-simplicity","tag-walking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","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=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}