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Practice MindfulnessMindfulness is another tool for building positive thought – and making money your way. Martin Seligman notes that, “mindfulness begins with the observation that mindlessness pervades much of human activity. We fail to notice huge swaths of experience. We act and interact automatically, without much thinking.” “Mindful attention to the present occurs much more readily in a slow state of mind than when one is racing future-mindedly through experience. The Eastern practice of meditation comes in many forms (and examples are found in all spiritual traditions), but almost all of them, done regularly, slow the speeding Western mind. (They almost all are well documented to dampen anxiety as well.) This in turn supports a mindset that is attentive to the present.” And better able to help you focus on making money your way. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, now the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society, has said this about mindfulness and meditation in Bill Moyers’ Healing and the Mind: “It’s not anything exotic. Meditation just has to do with paying attention in a particular way.” He goes on to say, “You can train yourself to focus in the present moment the same way you train yourself to jump off the (diving) board, or lift weights, or do anything else. The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That’s the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life.” In the last decade, scientists from many disciplines working in association with the
Mind and Life Institute
have discovered that mental training in the form of mindfulness and other types of meditation -- can strengthen attentional ability, habits of thinking (e.g., optimism, compassion, patience), and emotional health . . . with powerful positive implications for our work and personal lives.
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