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Reacting to wellness stimulus



Meditating has been a roadblock in my path to well-being. Or at least that’s what I think but I met some useful advice today: meditation is not about keeping the mind from wandering, but letting it finish its wanderings and come back to the present, awareness of the physical state – breath most importantly, so much so, that it burns itself out of aimless buzz, for a time at least.
This is why they say meditate for at least 20 minutes, at least once a day. Doing this lets the mind run out of steam for the time as far as distractions are concerned. Once the clump of noisy thoughts is dealt with, what remains is, surprise surprise, a clear mind to deploy at the tasks of the day.
And goodness knows we have distractions. These distractions are closely linked to our insecurities. Is it Facebook notifications that I can’t keep from checking out – why am I so concerned with what people might be saying of me? Long term goal: learn to offer a wide berth to others’ opinions of me.
Is it messenger beeps that I have to answer as soon as they come in? Learn that people who need an answer would not mind waiting an hour to receive a reply. This cuts out unnecessary chatter to a later, less-fraught time. It puts one in a position to drive one’s work and leisure.
Having a list of things to do can get overwhelming, especially if it is high-involvement tasks like meditation and reading. But yes, they’re both on there, and journaling too. But the bite-size advice says that I stop reading once I find something moving/useful to my day, and write down a few thoughts on it. This is sure to help internalize the wisdom, and that’s what I’m doing here.

But you Internet, with your mind-boggling trends, make for a problem. There are hundreds of sub-standard advice columns dishing out wellness advice. And then there are those that do dispense good eggs of wisdom, but there are listicles which demand that you get to the very end of the article, and if you do not read all the way down, who knows what transformation you are missing out on? You can’t obviously stop after you find the first useful bit of insight. Here’s your portion of FOMO on a platter.

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