I'm Julianna Raye, and this is Pathways. This is a sample life practice lecture. For this week's training, have students come prepared with a pen and a paper.
Let's start by describing what we mean by life practice. Many people assume meditation has to be practiced sitting down. Of course, there's a value to sitting practice—you can more easily work with subtle experience when you're sitting because there are fewer distractions—and dedicating time explicitly for practice is an important part of strengthening your core skills.
However, most people start meditating so they can see the benefits carry over into their lives. And while sitting practice is meant to have a ripple effect that carries over, sometimes the effects of seated practice aren't felt during the day. Also, there are lots of missed opportunities when you only practice while seated. Once you understand that mindfulness develops a set of attention skills that have a cumulative effect, increasing your baseline of well-being, you’ll likely be motivated to practice as often as possible.
You can think of mindfulness as a better operating system for your mind. You want to be operating on that OS more often because doing so has a cumulative effect, continuing to increase your well-being. All the benefits and rewards that drew you to meditation get richer.
In addition to providing more opportunities to develop your core skills, life practice offers a lot of unique benefits. You can often see immediate results when you practice during the day.
And you can apply practice to specific life situations. Whether you struggle with procrastination, have difficulty in conversations, or spend a lot of time sitting passively in meetings and want to feel more productive, practicing in daily life can help you address those situations.
[By this time, you know your class, so speak directly to their relevant daily life situations.]
Life practice can interrupt patterned behavior, helping you to deconstruct negative urges. For example, if you are a smoker and you're trying to quit, when the urge comes up, you can use your practice—use a technique right on the spot to help release you from that negative urge.
Further, you can selectively attend to pleasant experience more often, noticing it and appreciating it. This improves your overall fulfillment because fulfillment is about going deep with any experience, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, and fulfillment is about what you choose to attend to. If you're spending more time noticing positivity, that's going
to improve your inner ecosystem. So throughout the day, when pleasant experience comes up, you can pay extra attention to it. By doing so, you’re making the most of that pleasant experience in the moment, and you're developing the skills that increase your baseline of fulfillment.
With life practice skills, you'll never have to worry about wasting time again. Every moment becomes a great opportunity to be productive: standing in line at the grocery store, sitting in a waiting room, waiting for your computer to boot. Even going online and looking at Facebook can potentially become an avenue for insight and to deepen your practice.
Another benefit of practice in daily life is that you can have quality over quantity. Sometimes people who are unclear about how to meditate do “half-assed” sitting practice. But when you really understand how to apply a technique and you are doing it right in the most challenging part of your day, it will yield that much more in terms of outcomes. Because the challenge level is so high, you're reaping the rewards of that. So you can look at it in terms of intensity over duration. In other words, three minutes of practice where you completely dedicate yourself to it in the midst of your day can be more valuable to you in the long term than a half an hour of sitting when your attention is drifting and you're not fully focused on your practice. Another way to look at it is that you are applying practice to a stressor, and the fact that the challenge is higher elevates your baseline of skillfulness that much more. You can work smart in daily life. You can outsmart the excuse, "Oh, I don't have time." You can outsmart that habitual way of writing off the value of your practice, and you can practice strategically, finding moments to actually use practice to work with challenges that you face.
What is unique about the Unified Mindfulness model for practice in daily life is that skill development is placed at the center of practice. Prioritizing the development of a set of skills—Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity—frees you tremendously, because now you're not being given a certain form like, "You must focus on the breath or you must do a body scan." You're freed to recognize that any experience you have is a window of opportunity for practice, and you have the structure, you have a framework to apply systematic practice in daily life. People may talk about being mindful throughout the day. But it's one thing to understand the value of it conceptually; it's another thing to have a clear, systematic framework for implementing practice in daily life, to understand how it works, and to know what your tools are. That is really empowering to you because you recognize that skills can be developed through any experience in any situation.
Unified Mindfulness identifies three types of practice you can do during the day to maximize your skill development of Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity.
The first type is formal practice. You're already familiar with seated formal practice. Unified Mindfulness defines formal practice as any practice period where you're applying the majority of your attention to the technique and practicing for longer than 10 minutes. That means that if you are exercising and you are at the same time doing the See Hear Feel
technique and using your spoken labels, and dedicating the majority of your attention to the technique, guess what?
That's a formal practice period, and it's equal to a seated period. Other good opportunities for formal practice during the day are eating, when driving. So there are these windows of time during the day where it's very easy to marry the activity with formal practice, and you might want to do spoken labels at that time, or if you're in public, you can mouth the labels or do mental labels, but in any case, those would be formal practice periods.
The second type is microhits. Microhits by contrast, those are any practice period where you're applying the majority of your attention to the technique, so just like formal practice in that sense, but it lasts either from a few seconds up to 10 minutes. Basically, what we're saying with microhits is it's a shorter burst of practice time, and it could be as little as whatever—10, 20, 30 seconds or something like that, and then up to 10 minutes. So you can pepper your day with six to 10 of these brief windows of practice, and when you do them though, you want to make sure that you give your full attention. Do spoken labels if your environment allows for that.
Really give yourself fully to the technique, 100% for that short window of time that you're doing it. And we recommend bookending as a good strategy before and after a stressful event. For example, let's say you have to make a difficult phone call. Just before that phone call, take a couple minutes. Do a microhit. Just after that phone call, take a couple minutes. Do a microhit. Bookend it so that you get the value of a little bit of momentum of practice going into the phone call, and then afterwards you can process whatever came up as a result of the phone call.
Our third type of practice in daily life is called background practice. Background practice is any period lasting any length of time where you're applying just some attention to the technique. Background practice can be going on all day in the background, or as much as you're able to in the background, and it means that there is only a portion of your attention on the technique and you're mainly attending to whatever activity it is that you're doing.
For example, you might do background practice while engaged in a conversation, while you're listening to someone else speak, or while you're engaged in a task that requires most of your attention sitting at the computer. You might keep some attention on your posture, for example, but most of your attention is focused on the computer. That would be an example of background practice. And when you do background practice, you're trying to split your attention so that maybe 10 or 20% is on the technique and the rest is on the life activity. When you try to do this, which we're going to do... We're actually going to do this practice today.
We're going to do all of them: formal practice, microhits and background [practice]. When you do the background practice, you may find that your attention toggles back and forth between what you're focusing on and what's going on in the background. That's totally fine. Over time, you'll get used to it, and you'll be able to split your attention. And once you get
used to it, then you have this permanent way to accelerate your skills that's built into virtually every situation.
Which technique do I do? Which do I do when? This opens up a really exciting aspect of this whole training for you. One of our objectives as we go through this eight-week training is for you to start to take authorship of your practice. We want you to get to the point where you recognize that you have different techniques that you can do and you are strategic in what technique you do when, and part of that is your experimentation. You have to discover what works for you. Part of what I'm doing in showing you these techniques is giving you choice because remember, all I care about is that you develop Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity.
If over the course of these eight weeks I give you a technique that you don't really respond to—it's not really relevant for you at this point—then fine. Don't do that technique. I want you to find what's going to work for you both in terms of what you're going to be motivated to practice and also in terms of how you can be strategic with it.
My recommendation, my general recommendation would be if you're going to do microhits, I'd suggest based on the two techniques that you know so far, so that's See Hear Feel and Feel Rest. Doing microhits, I say do the See Hear Feel technique, and then try Feel Rest during background practice. Then, now that you understand that the skills are at the center of practice, see if you can experiment now that you understand that as long as you're developing Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity, you can focus on anything, and see what happens.
What do you need to watch out for with this? Remember, there's a high degree of challenge in bringing practice into your daily life, so I want you to acknowledge yourself for any effort you make to do this because it's all good. Don't give yourself a hard time if you only did X amount during your daily routine and you feel like you should do more. I don't want you to develop a guilty relationship towards your practice, so recognize that it's a higher degree of challenge to bring it into life and acknowledge yourself when you manage to do that. Number two, because it's a higher degree of challenge, the rewards for doing it may not be as palpable, so you may be wondering, "Gee, I'm doing practice, but why aren't things going easier for me?" But meanwhile, your life may be in a very chaotic time, so it's not a silver bullet. Right?
It's a cumulative effect, although you may find generally that giving yourself a couple of minutes actually does help a lot dealing with specific challenges, but if it doesn't, just bear in mind the cumulative effect of practice overall.
Just as a recap, the benefits include quality over quantity, that in microhits, you're really devoting yourself fully to the practice. The fact that you are increasing the challenge means potentially greater rewards. The fact that you can get issues specific, that you can take care
of yourself anytime, anywhere, and it's a great way to increase opportunities to elevate your skills overall.
Now, we're actually going to spend some time brainstorming practice strategies during your day, and we'll start with a guided practice for a little while, then we'll get into that brainstorming and you've got a handout for that. But do you have any questions before we begin?
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