Everyday Mindfulness

Hi! Im a new member of the forum and have been practicing mindfulness for 4 years now. I do ok with daily routines. For instance i can be very mindful in the shower, dressing, eating and so on. But when i get to work it all falls apart. I am an elementary school vice principal. I try to be mindful in conversations with teachers, interactions with kids, sending emails but most days my hectic 10 hour workday turns into a mad rush where i might go a full half hour completely forgetting my mindfulness. I drive home stressed and drained. About a year ago, i got a little black counter that i can hold in my palm. I carry it around giving myself a point everytime i do something mindfully. This has definitely helped but honestly the day is still a mad blur even with the counter. Id really like to use mindfulness to slow down the day and to enjoy the day more. Im good at my job and want to continue but i think ill burn out pretty fast like this. Thanks for any replies!

Hi Mtb324,
Welcome to the forum. Please feel free to make yourself at home here.
It would be useful to get some idea of your formal meditation practice before answering properly.
Thanks.
All good things,
Jon

Probably not so good. I did meditate for a couple years but since starting this new job, lifes been pretty crazy. I only have a couple hours of nonwork time daily and i try to devote that to my wife before i have to sleep. I do think about mindfulness all day and use the counter throughout the day. Still im sure im not the only person with an extremely stressful job to use mindfulness. Id be intrested to know how others slow down theit day.

My recommendation would be to get back to daily meditation, even if you can only manage 15 minutes a day. I'd recommend that you find time somehow to do occasional body scans and mindful movement.
Thinking about mindfulness isn't likely to make you mindful. Mindfulness is as much about body awareness as it is about mindfulness of thought.
This is a meditation-based practice. We cannot remove meditation from the equation and expect it to "work".
Wishing you all good things,
Jon

Hi mtb234,

I don't know if I understood you correctly, but to me what you write sounds like mindfulness has become somewhat of a thing on your all too full to-do list. If that's the case it will hardly be beneficial.

Maybe you need to lay the counter to the side for a while? At least stop giving yourself a hard time for going half an hour without thinking about mindfulness.

"At least stop giving yourself a hard time for going half an hour without thinking about mindfulness."

That is good advice.
Maybe it's a good time to reassess work/rest balance. If your life is so squeezed that you don't have time for a few minutes of meditation, something has to give.
Best,
Jon

Hmmm really? Ok ill start up the metitation again. Not sure about the counter tho...been using it for over a year and does help me have a great many mindful moments each day. On the rare days i dont use it, i am much less mindful. Appreciate the thoughts.

Hi Mtb,
I can totally relate to your problem. For me it's the same. If one's job requires a lot of problem-solving it's hard to be mindful. It's like that for me too. The only solution (for now) is compromise! What Jon said is very true: something has got to give! You need more time dedicated to mindfulness. I also recommend that you start doing formal meditations each day (in my opinion, doing less than half an hour is like doing nothing). People often try to convince themselves that they can do without it, by being mindful throughout the day. They can't; not structural! This is crucial! I also recommend that you keep the timer. I can totally understand that this is your only lifeline to mindfulness you currently have in your job. I use a timer too, so I can totally see the value of it. But I do recommend that you try to take real timeouts. Be alone (toilet or whatever) every hour close your eyes and do a three minute 'breathing space' meditation!
All this is fine for now, but you might think about doing your job differently. Create more space. Maybe by planning things differently; also planning the timeouts. Maybe working shorter hours, maybe a day less, etc I suspect that once you've gained clarity through your formal practice you know what to do!

Best of luck!
Peter

There's nothing wrong with using a timer, per se. Just as there's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of the thousand and one mindfulness apps, books and gizmos now cluttering the market.
However, unless any of this stuff is used in conjunction with a regular meditation practice, I doubt very much that it will make any meaningful difference to one's life.
Mindfulness isn't something that we "get", like, say, knowledge, and then put it to one side, simply calling on when we need it. Knowledge has to be remembered. The way we remember how to be mindful is to practice it. Try thinking of the meditation as the practice and the rest of your day as the meditation.
If I go a couple of days without practice (like recently when I was ill with shingles - for a few days I resembled The Elephant Man which was kinda interesting), the difference is obvious to me. Thoughts become stickier. Worries tend to linger. I ruminate. I feel much more remote from my own body sensations. When I'm practicing daily, which is most of the time, my life tends to be defined by something like quiet spaciousness - even quiet joy. Within that space I not only feel at ease with myself, I also find the room to manoeuvre so that I can respond to events unfolding rather than react to them.
We can't simply flick a switch in order to be wise. Nor can we simply set a timer and expect to shift into mindful mode. It doesn't work like that. An intellectual understanding of how mindfulness works is never enough. Mindfulness is an experiential practice. It needs to be practiced.
Peter says that doing less than half an hour is like doing nothing. This raises the important question of how much meditation we need to do for it to be in any way meaningful. My argument would be that, while ten minutes a day is much, much better than doing nothing, it's only when we stretch our meditation out that we properly come up against the resistances of boredom, irritation, physical discomfort etc. In five minutes, there's not going to be much opportunity to explore the edges of that resistance which is a vital part of the learning
Personally, I tend to vary things. One day I might do a 40 minute body scan, the next day a 15 minute sit, the next day a 30 minute sit...Sometimes I'll meditate to music (not Motorhead, though I have tried ). If I'm in the park with Banjo I'll do a short breathing space while he larks about, doing what dogs do. For me, it's vital to keep that practice fresh and so I try to vary it as much as I can. I'm also a voracious reader and a big part of my library is reserved for books on mindfulness, meditation, Zen etc. I find that it all feeds in to my practice. In a sense it's all practice. Or, to put it another way, it's all meditation.
Good things,
Jon

Mtb324 wrote:Hi! Im a new member of the forum and have been practicing mindfulness for 4 years now. I do ok with daily routines. For instance i can be very mindful in the shower, dressing, eating and so on. But when i get to work it all falls apart. I am an elementary school vice principal. I try to be mindful in conversations with teachers, interactions with kids, sending emails but most days my hectic 10 hour workday turns into a mad rush where i might go a full half hour completely forgetting my mindfulness. I drive home stressed and drained. About a year ago, i got a little black counter that i can hold in my palm. I carry it around giving myself a point everytime i do something mindfully. This has definitely helped but honestly the day is still a mad blur even with the counter. Id really like to use mindfulness to slow down the day and to enjoy the day more. Im good at my job and want to continue but i think ill burn out pretty fast like this. Thanks for any replies!

Welcome to this wonderful forum

I think you've found an oasis (I know I have). The guys on here are very helpful and experienced. A lifeline for me.

In my (humble) opinion. What I see (from your post) is that you become mindful when showering and eating etc, which I always find grounding and a way to connect with my senses, so that's great. Also, the black counter (am I right in thinking that this is a disk of some sort?) is a nice way to remind yourself to have a short three minute (or so) break and reconnect with your senses whilst at work. I think the fact that you are aware that continuing the way that you are (at work) may cause burnout is indicative that you are 'mindful' of this, I think that you already know that it would be in your interest to adjust the way you approach your job. Installing more mini breaks (even a trip to the toilet) if you can.

I think you've been given good support/advice from the experienced members and I am in no way qualified to offer any, but I do agree that the formal practice is important and how I see it is that it's time for me.

I'll stop waffling now.