I use both a PC and a Mac, one is a desktop and the other is my laptop. I’ve used PCs for a long time, and you’d think that by now I’d be familiar with all the features of the Windows Media Player that I use daily to play music from my library of everything from classic rock to Broadway shows to Debussy and Beethoven, as well as a wide assortment of guided meditations and mantra chants set to beautiful music.
Well, the other day, I discovered a little trick with the “play” button that I hadn’t known was available. I had just pressed the button to start playing a meditation on accessing a higher level of consciousness, and my finger must have slipped on the mouse/cursor because suddenly I saw a little menu pop up: “Slow playback,” “Normal playback,” “Fast playback.”
What? I didn’t know I could choose the speed. Maybe this isn’t news to you, but to me it was very exciting. It instantly called to my paradigm that’s all about productivity and getting more things done faster. So, of course, I selected “Fast playback.”
That’s right: fast playback for a mindfulness meditation! But just think, my practical inner voice was saying excitedly, this means you can listen to two meditations of the same length in the time it takes to do only one!!!!
I’d like to be able to report that I instantly scolded that inner voice and carefully selected the normal speed. Nope, I couldn’t resist speeding things up, and I spent 10 minutes on a 20 minute meditation.
I had to laugh at myself, though, and I knew that it would be something to share with you. Because the thing is, it doesn’t matter how much time we spend on a particular mantra or guided meditation, it’s our engagement with it, and our attitude.
There are so many thousands of beliefs that reside in our individual paradigm (or mindset) which controls our behavior and thus our results. If I felt it was beneficial for myself to listen to two fast versions to expand my mind with the lessons, that’s fine and dandy. But if the whole point is to pat myself on the back that I managed a multi-tasking feat, then that defeats the purpose of the meditation itself, which is to go deeper into the right side of my brain and its connection to higher self and Source. The urge to do more in less time is totally a left-brain-logical-mind impetus.
And yet the whole topic leads me now to the reason I chose the title “How to Enjoy Rapid Mindfulness.”
We are living in a time of great transformation and change where more and more people are interested in how to access a higher level of awareness and a more expansive view of living at our potential instead of just scraping by in life and focusing solely on material advantages.
For many thousands of years, it was believed that you must study long and hard to be a spiritual advisor or scholar. We are still taught that, but it’s no longer true.
You can, if you wish, make a rapid transition from a frantic state of inner chatter to the peace and calm of mindfulness.
What it takes is a commitment to retrain your mind so that you are aware of your thoughts as much as you possibly can be during waking hours, and that you deliberately allow the negative or unwanted ideas to float past while you observe the loving and positive thoughts. By observing, we increase the power and the quality of the thoughts that come to us, so our mindfulness exercise can quickly lead to an improved state of being.
Being mindful means that we pay attention to what we are doing, and we enjoy living in the moment for the moment’s sake, understanding that these moments are what make up our life, just as a bead strung one by one on a string will make a necklace. It is up to us whether we create a beautiful necklace or an ugly one with knots in the string because we neglected the “now-ness” of life.
A sweet side effect of becoming more mindful is that we seem to have more time in the day to do those things that are most important to us. And, of course, we feel less stressed, frantic and hurried.