Encounter!

It is worth it

It is hard to practice meditation more than an hour per day. Similarly, it is hard to practice mindfulness for much more time. Both are solitary activities and both take our attention away from normal daily activity.

For the average person, it is also hard to take exercise more than an hour per day – walking the dog, running, cycling - although with exercise we can often be doing something else, thinking or having a conversation, listening to a podcast, perhaps.

With encounter, with making connection, with engaging fully with someone else, we can do this whenever we are in the presence of someone, and in a school environment, it is easy to be around people.

However, at first, we think that we are only productive if our mind is racing when in conversation with someone else and that having a quiet mind, placing all our attention on the other person makes us less effective. We think, if my mind is not active now then it will need to be active later, or I’ll miss something if my mind isn’t racing. But there lies the fallacy. Having our conscious mind quiet does not mean that our mind is quiet, far from it.

With a quiet conscious mind our unconscious can take in everything and is free to find patterns and connections, which lead to new knowledge, understanding and connection. We are more productive in this mode of paying attention rather than less.

In parallel to being more productive we are also doing the work that causes our red zone to fade away.

So why don’t we just do it?