How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [7]
You might want to do what we do at the monastery: we begin with the first mindfulness exercise and move through the year in order, practicing each one for one week. You could start a new task each Monday and finish reading or journaling about a task on the following Sunday. You can also skip around if a specific exercise or theme seems suited to the conditions of your life this week. Sometimes we continue trying the same mindfulness practice for two or three weeks if it continues to yield insights or we’d like to get better at doing it.
It’s fun to do these practices with other people, as we do at the monastery. You might form a mindfulness practice group that picks an exercise to use for a week or two and then meets so that people can share what they’ve learned. There’s a lot of laughter at our weekly discussions. It’s important to take our “failures” lightly. Each person has different experiences, insights, and funny stories to tell about his or her attempts—and failures—to do these exercises.
We began the practice of taking on a new mindfulness tool or task each week at the monastery about twenty years ago. The idea came from a man who had lived in a community that followed the teachings of the mystic Gurdjieff. He explained that it didn’t matter if you succeeded with the task or not. Sometimes not doing the exercise could teach you more than doing it, because you got to look at why you didn’t do it. What was behind it—laziness, old aversions, or just spacing out? The point is to live more and more in a conscious way. Gurdjieff called this “self-remembering.” In Buddhism we call it awakening to our true self. It is waking up to our life as it actually is, not the fantasy we often live out in our mind.
REMINDERS
Over the years, we have found that the most difficult part of our weekly mindfulness practices is just remembering to do them. So we’ve invented various ways to remind ourselves throughout the day and week. Often we stick words or small images up around the monastery where we are likely to encounter them. You can print out our simple reminders at www.shambhala.com/howtotrain. I’ve described these in the book, but please be creative and invent your own.
A MINDFULNESS PRACTICE NOTEBOOK
To help you get the most out of these practices, I recommend using a notebook to record what you experience and learn as you work with each mindfulness exercise. If you’re working through the book with a group, you can bring the notebook to your discussion sessions to remind you about the discoveries you made and the obstacles you encountered. Having a notebook on your desk or bedside table also helps as a reminder to do the practice of the week.
CONTINUING ON
We hope that once we use a mindfulness tool for a week, it will stick with us and become part of our ever-expanding capacity for mindfulness. Being human, however, we often lapse back into old behaviors and unconscious habit patterns. That is why at the monastery we have continued to use these mindfulness practices for two decades, and to invent new ones. This is one of the most wonderful aspects of the path of mindfulness and awakening. It has no end!
1
Use Your Nondominant Hand
The Exercise: Use your nondominant hand for some ordinary tasks each day. These could include brushing your teeth, combing your hair, or eating with the nondominant hand for at least part of each meal. If you’re up for a big challenge, try using the nondominant hand when writing or when eating with chopsticks.
REMINDING YOURSELF
One way to remember this task throughout your day is to put a Band-Aid on your dominant hand. When you notice it, switch hands and use the nondominant hand. You could also tape a small sign on your bathroom mirror that says “Left Hand” (if you’re right-handed). Or tape a paper cutout of a hand to your mirror, refrigerator, or your desk—wherever you’re likely to see it.
Another approach is