The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life by Thomas M. Sterner Page A

experience a tremendous relief from the fictitious, self-imposed pressures and expectations that only slow your progress. 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 because the product that you want to reach is pulling you out of the present and into the future. You want to get to “full bloom” and skip the rest of it.
    Sometimes, though, it is not a tangible thing that pulls us away from the present, but a circumstance. Imagine this: You are standing in your kitchen preparing dinner and your child or spouse is telling you about his day. Are you looking into his eyes when he is talking to you? Are you fully listening to what he is sharing with you in this present moment, or are you half listening while you anticipate going someplace after dinner or thinking of something you said to someone at work that day that you regret?
    Stop yourself during the day as much as you can and ask yourself, “Am I practicing flower-like qualities and staying in the present with my thoughts and energies?” 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 it. As I said earlier, true perfection is not finite. It is not a specific number, as in how much you weigh or how much you make. It is not a specific skill level that can be reached regardless of how long and how hard you pursue an activity. Anyhigh-level performers in any sport or art form will tell you this: Their idea of perfection is always moving away from them; it is always based on their present experience and perspective. When we learn this truth, we really get on the path toward true, authentic happiness. We realize that, like the flower, we are just fine or, rather, that we are perfect when we are where we are and absorbed in what we are doing right at that moment. With this perspective, our impatience to reach some false goal that will not make us any happier than we are right now fades away.
    We can learn so much from nature by simply observing how it works through a flower. The flower knows it is part of nature; we have forgotten that. 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. The stamina needed to pursue a present-moment attitude daily comes naturally when we realize that our current attitudes leave us longing for something we can’t seem to put our finger on. Despite all our achievements and acquisitions in life, we still feel a longing to fill the emptiness inside. We may not have even consciously admitted our emptiness to ourselves, but our need for answers is stillthere. If it were not, wewouldn’t be reading material such as this book.
    Present-minded awareness can be and is a natural state when the circumstances are right. In fact, we all have experienced this state of mind many times in our lives. The problem in identifying at what times we are functioning in this state is a paradox. When we are totally focused on the present moment and in the process of what we are doing, we are completely