The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life Master Any Skill or Challenge by Learning to Love the Process

by Thomas M. Sterner

We make a major detour on the road to happiness when we adopt an image of perfection in anything. This is because an image or ideal is frozen and stagnant, and limited by nature. An ideal implies that it is as good as a particular circumstance or thing can get. True perfection, in contrast, is limitless, unbounded, and always expanding. We can gain a much more productive and satisfying perspective by studying the life of a flower.

It is always perfect. It is perfect at being wherever it is and at whatever stage of growth it is in at that moment.

Do you think that a flower seed sits in the ground and says, “This is going to take forever. I have to push all this dirt out of my way just to get to the surface and see the sun. Every time it rains or somebody waters me, I’m soaking wet and surrounded by mud. When do I get to bloom? That’s when I’ll be happy; that’s when everybody will be impressed with me. I hope I’m an orchid and not some wildflower nobody notices. Orchids have it all … no, wait; I want to be an oak tree. They are bigger than anybody else in the forest and live longer, too”?

We consciously or unconsciously pick a point of reference in whatever we do and decide that nothing will be right until we get to that point. If you step back and observe your internal dialogue from time to time during the day, you will be amazed at how hard you work against yourself with this type of thinking.

I see someone who is irritated with the world for getting in his way and exhausted by the stress and strain that impatience brings to his body and mind when he lives in this state.

If you step back routinely during your day and observe where your attention is, you will be amazed at how few times it is where you are and on what you are doing.

develop a present-minded approach to every activity you are involved in and, like the flower, realize that at whatever level you are performing, you are perfect at that point in time, you experience a tremendous relief from the fictitious, self...

At any point in the day when you notice you are feeling bored, impatient, rushed, or disappointed with your performance level, realize that you have left the present moment in your activity. Look at where your mind and energy are focused. You will find that you have strayed into either the future or the past. You might be subconsciously focused on the result or product you are trying to achieve. Such feelings often arise in activities that produce a tangible product, which could be anything from painting the house to losing weight. I class this as a distraction into the future bec...

Nature knows what works because it does not have an ego to deal with. It is our ego that makes us create false ideas of what perfect is and whether we have reached

Remember, the reason we bother ourselves with a lifelong effort to gain a practicing mind is not to be able to say, “I have mastered the technique of present-moment awareness.” This is an ego-based statement. We work at it for one reason: it brings us the inner peace and happiness that we cannot attain through the acquisition of any material object or cultural status. What we achieve is timeless, always with us, and perhaps the only thing that we can really call our own.

Present-minded awareness can be and is a natural state when the circumstances are right.

When we are totally focused on the present moment and in the process of what we are doing, we are completely absorbed in the activity. As soon as we become aware of how well we are concentrating on something, we are no longer concentrating on it. We are now concentrating on the fact that we were concentrating on the activity. When we are practicing correctly, we are not aware we are practicing correctly. We are only aware and absorbed in the process of what we are doing in that moment.

In Zen, this state is referred to as “beginner’s mind.” When you are a beginner in any activity, accomplishing it takes all your concentration, and your mind is empty of chatter. As you become more adept at the activity, concentrating solely on performing it actually becomes harder. Remember when you first started learning to drive a car? You were totally absorbed in the process of learning to drive the car. You had a beginner’s mind. Now when you drive, you have lost that beginner’s mind.

This is also the true purpose of the martial arts. Hollywood has made the martial arts seem a form of acrobatics performed by superhumans whose goal is to take on any number of opponents and easily defeat them, but this is far removed from the original nature of the martial arts. The different forms of martial arts serve to teach the participants how to function in the present moment and to force them into this state of mind through a desire for self-preservation. The student diligently works at all the moves of the particular form he or she is studying. These moves are deliberately performed over and over again with intention and awareness, to a point of repletion. They become totally reflexive and intuitive.

They are aware of where they are in relationship to their opponent and what their opponent is doing. They observe each second as it comes at them and react instinctively to the motion of the opponent. When your mind wanders in a situation like this, you’re quickly aware of it (you get hurt). There is no time to think of anything but the process of both offense and defense.

We say it “captivates” us because it captures our attention.

Most of us find that we are very good at practicing properly during recreational activities. We perform these activities with all our attention in the present and on what we are doing.

Why do we find it so much easier to focus on something we consider play than on so...

I have found that the only difference between the two sorts of activities is that we prejudge them.

We make a conscious decision that if we enjoy an activity, it is not work. So we must temporarily suspend our definition of work as referring to our daily vocation.

We know that this prejudgment of whether an activity is work or play is not universal, because one person’s hobby is another person’s drudgery. Some people love to garden; others don’t even want to cut the grass.

The knowledge that we prejudge our activities and then place them into one of the two categories is very powerful. It demonstrates to us that nothing is really work or play. We make an activity into work or play by our judgments.

just don’t feel like doing this right now.” This implies that what you feel like doing is something else that you have defined as “not work.” You are not in the present but instead are in the future, anticipating another activity.

feel that a large part of what makes us define something as work is that the activity requires a lot of decision making, which can be very stressful and fatiguing.

When I started to examine why I was lacking in confidence about something in which I had proven my expertise over and over again, I realized it was because I wasn’t working in the present moment. I knew that I wasn’t really giving my full attention to what I was doing. I was thinking about something I was going to do later in the day that I had defined as “not work.”

You cannot change what you are unaware of.

A good instructor does not get emotional in response to the student moving off the path. That kind of negative emotion comes from expectations, and that is not the perspective we want to have if we are to be our own instructor. Expectations are tied to a result or product, to the thought that “things should be this way right now, and until then I won’t be happy.”

Everything we do is a habit, in one form or another. How we think, how we talk, how we react to criticism, which type of snack we instinctively reach for: all are habits. Even when faced with a circumstance for the first time, we respond to it from habit. Whether we observe our thoughts or they just happen in our minds is determined by habits we have learned. We may consider some habits good, others not so good, but all habits can be replaced at will, if you understand how they are formed.

We want something like being more aware of our thoughts to be just a natural behavior, not something that requires a lot of struggle.

Getting to this point is not complicated. It does take some effort, but the effort is minimal once we understand the process. What is required is that you are aware of what you want to achieve, that you know the motions you must intentionally repeat to accomplish the goal, and that you execute your actions without emotions or judgments; just stay on course. You should do this in the comfort of knowing that intentionally repeating something over a short course of time will create a new habit or replace an old one.

When I identified something in my behavior that I felt was holding me back or producing undesirable results, I would realize that I had already fulfilled the awareness part of the equation. I would then objectively decide where I wanted to end up and which motions would get me there. Next, I worked through those motions without emotion, knowing that many intentional repetitions over a short period of time would create the behavior I was after. There was no need to fret over it. I would just stay with it and know that I was where I should be right “now” and that I was becoming what I wanted to be, accomplishing what I needed to accomplish.

We must acknowledge here that emotionally laden encounters are among the most challenging ones in which to create new habits of response, because the old habits we want to change arise out of the emotions we immediately experience. Those emotions will still exist no matter what we do, so we need to get out ahead of them, if possible, so that we can consciously choose what to do next.

We notice when we are impatient because we experience negative emotions. When you are patient about something, life just seems fine.

Experiencing impatience is one of the first symptoms of not being in the present moment, not doing what you are doing, and not staying process-oriented.

If you force your mind to stay in the present moment and to stay in the process of what you are doing, I promise you, many of your problems will melt away.

Most of what we worry about never comes to pass. Thinking about a situation before you are in it only scatters your energy.

The first step toward patience is to become aware of when your internal dialogue is running wild and dragging you with it.

imagination takes you from one circumstance to another, and your different emotions just fire off inside you as you react to each problem your mind visits. To free yourself from this endless and exhausting cycle, you must step back and notice the real you, the Observer who just quietly watches all this drama as it unfolds.

Staying in the present and in the process is the first part of the perspective change that creates patience.

The second step in creating patience is understanding and accepting that there is no such thing as reaching a point of perfection in anything.

What you perceive as perfect is always relative to where you are in a...

The feeling “I’ll be happy when X happens” will never bring you anything but discontentment. There is an endless quality to life. There is always more to be experienced. Deep down, we know this and are glad for

Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything. When you stay on purpose, focused in the present moment, the goal comes toward you with frictionless ease.

As you work at the process of learning music, you spend time alone with yourself and the energy of music or whatever art form you pursue. It’s a very honorable relationship, really.

The real thrill of acquiring anything, whether it is an object or a personal goal, is your anticipation of the moment of receiving it. The real joy lies in creating and sustaining the stamina and patience needed to work for something over a period of time.

feeling. I would even go so far as to describe it as blissful. Anything you can do in a rushed state is surprisingly easy when you deliberately slow it down.

This doesn’t mean you will be able to control yourself all the time, though. That tempting mindset comes from slipping back into the “perfection” mindset that states, “Only when I can do this all the time will I have achieved my goal.” Accepting that this is a lifetime effort, and that in the beginning your progress may seem almost unnoticeable, is part of the lesson to be learned.

Equanimity is defined as even-temperedness and calmness. It would certainly seem to be a quality necessary for happiness in life. Equanimity is a virtue worth every effort to develop.

Judgment requires the process of evaluation, the process of comparison. This requires a point of relativity, an ideal. As I mentioned earlier in the book, judgments are always based on some preconceived idea of perfection. There is always an imagined ideal item, experience, or circumstance that allows us and even compels us to pass judgment. We compare the present situation either to an imagined ideal situation of the same nature or to a past situation of the same nature. When you are unaware that judgments are happening, they become self-perpetuating, and the “ideal” is always evolving.

Judgments are necessary for us to function in life, but they have a downside: They are not executed with a detached nature. There is usually some emotion involved, and the amount of emotion is proportional to the perceived importance of the judgment.