Tag: Meditation

Posted on

30-Day Challenges or How to Acquire a New Habit

The turn of the year is often used to make resolutions for the new year. The New Year’s resolutions. Drink less. Quit smoking. Sleep more. Decrease. More sport. And so on. We know where this is leading. Maybe you’re still motivated for a few weeks, but by March at the latest you’ll realize that it didn’t work out. The mistake is that you take on too much at once and get discouraged when things don’t work out the way you would like. The inner voices are already there that you are too weak to keep up with something like that. The trick is that you only do one thing for one month, commit yourself to it and don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work out for one day in this one month. Then you still have the rest of the month to get used to the new behavior. And after reading about this approach at Zen Habits, I found out that some of my colleagues have already tried so-called 30 Days Challenges: 30-day challenges don’t necessarily have to be behavioral changes. It can also be about acquiring a new skill. For example, I would like to learn to draw manga. And learn to speak Italian. Of course, I won’t learn Italian in a month. But I can build a habit of practicing Italian on certain days. I won’t be able to draw manga perfectly in a month’s time. But I can at least acquire basic skills if I practice every day for a month. Other potential 30-day challenges on my list:
  • Mindful Eating
  • Sports every day
  • No coffee
  • No alcohol
  • vegan diet
However, some of my 30-day challenges will be very personal, and I won’t be covering them. My first month kindly coincides with NaNoWriMo, so I’ll try to write a novella in November. At the same time, I got another challenge from elsewhere to meditate 5 days a week for 6 weeks. Right at the beginning, two challenges at the same time, as it is not really intended. But since the Search Inside Yourself seminar, I actually want to meditate every day anyway.
Posted on

Search Inside Yourself

At the beginning of the month, I had the opportunity to attend the seminar Search Inside Yourself. It was initiated by Meng, a software developer at Google, and the seminar can now also be attended outside of Google. Many seminar participants report that it has changed their lives, and some have taken completely new paths after the seminar. When I read something like that, I get skeptical at first, because it sounds very esoteric and anything but attractive to me. However, there is also scientific evidence that meditation and mindfulness exercises have a positive influence on the brain, especially on the ability to concentrate. It’s worth a try, I thought to myself. Unlike my colleagues in Mountain View, I had the seminar several days in a row and not individual days over several weeks. It was two and a half very intense days. I won’t tell you everything about the training, there is also a very good book about it, which is better in every way than what I can write here (by the way, the book I bought in 2012 had moved me to take the seminar). But there are also a few differences to the book, the most important of which is certainly that you can’t help but do the exercises during the seminar. I particularly remember one meditation exercise that has to do with the concept of “kindness” (most likely to be translated as kindness or charity). You sit opposite another participant, in my case it was a young colleague with whom I had never spoken before. We should memorize each other’s faces and then close our eyes. And then came sentences like:
  • Your counterpart has a body and a mind, just like you.
  • Your counterpart has feelings and thoughts, just like you.
  • Your counterpart has felt sadness, disappointment, hurt and confusion in his life, just like you.
  • Your counterpart wants to be free of fear, pain and suffering, just like you.
  • Your counterpart wants to be healthy, loved and happy, just like you.
  • Now we want to make a wish for your counterpart:
  • I wish my counterpart the strength, the resources and the emotional support to navigate through the difficulties in life.
  • I wish my counterpart to be free from pain and suffering.
  • I wish my counterpart to be happy.
  • Because my counterpart is a human being, just like me.
Then we opened our eyes. I can hardly describe the feeling I had at that moment. Here is Meng’s lecture at the United Nations, you can add German subtitles: And here are a few more links: