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

Author:Sterner, Thomas M. [Sterner, Thomas M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781608680917
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2012-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

All the patience you will ever need

is already within you.

My mother, who passed on from cancer a number of years ago, once expressed to me an observation she had made about herself as she sorted out both her illness and her situation in her mind. It is worth passing on here.

During the time she was dealing with her illness, she was reading through books that served to both comfort her and make her more aware of her spiritual nature. This daily routine gave her a soothing perspective during what was surely a difficult time. Though she tried to keep up with this routine, there were times when, for whatever reason, she drifted away from both the reading and her thinking about what she had read. She told me one day that when she maintained her effort, her thought process was elevated and more evolved. She felt different about herself and life, and enjoyed increased clarity and perspective about her situation. But she also noticed that when she drifted away from her reading and fell into an “I don’t have time” or “I don’t feel like it today” frame of mind, she would feel herself slip back into attitudes and perspectives that she felt were not only unproductive but, unfortunately, very prevalent in the world today. Speaking about her reading, she said, “You need to keep reviewing these ideas so that you can hang on to their clarity and perspective. Otherwise, life steals them away.” Constantly reviewing new ideas creates, in a sense, a new habit of perceiving and processing our lives, a habit that brings us the sense of clarity we long for every day.

I took something from her words when I was writing this book. There are not that many ideas in this book; just a few, and they have always been there for us to discover. But they slip away from us in our daily lives so easily. They need to be studied over and over again from different angles so that they become a natural part of us. We are practicing learning them right now.

Sometimes I can’t read straight through a book because of my schedule. Instead, I might read two chapters today and another one three days from now. I have noticed that when this happens, I often can’t remember points made earlier in the book that, when I read them, I felt were very valuable. I wanted my book to be one that you could pick up at any time and open to any page and start reading. I wanted my readers to be able to remember its few ideas without much effort and without the need to flip back through pages to find them. I wanted you to realize that we keep coming back to the same few solutions to all the problems we feel we have, and to begin to understand that life isn’t as complicated as we had thought. Changing our experience of life is well within our grasp, but we must

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