Rethinking Intelligence by Rina Bliss

Author:Rina Bliss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Becoming Mindful

Given the overwhelming evidence of the benefits of mindfulness practices on cognitive health, emotional growth, and performance—and its relative accessibility to all—I’ve made mindfulness one of the core pillars of my intelligence paradigm. I want to encourage anyone interested in improving their mental performance to embed mindfulness into their lives.

The question then becomes—how do we do this in a practical way? The key is to approach your every interaction as an opportunity to become more present and attuned to your environment. This means starting at home base. How can you slow down, despite the rush to work or to care for others? How can you learn to return to stillness, to alertness, to openness to what the moment is providing you in your very own sanctuary?

I use three strategies at home: centering, breathing, and meditation. Focusing on the here and now is like flexing a muscle. The more you flex it, the more capable you are of maximizing your focus. So, when I begin a mundane task like cleaning the dishes or putting in the laundry, I practice centering myself in the moment. I activate my senses of sight, hearing, and touch so that I can better think about what I am doing and learn from my present experience. I take a task that would otherwise be mindless and make it into my personal mindfulness workout. This has helped me to see other opportunities in my day-to-day for centering and it has improved my overall ability to be present in what I do.

Centering is very important to me because breathing and meditation require downtime. But breathing and meditation are also important to me because they provide a more quieting form of mindfulness within which my brain can practice focusing. Luckily you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are many proven practices and modalities to choose from, such as box breathing (inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four, and exhale for four) or Zen meditation (count your breaths from 1 to 10 and repeat). I prefer guided audio body scan meditations in which a guide helps me to focus on the various parts of my body as a way of relaxing into a more attentive mode of thinking. Today there are plenty of apps and online audio files to download, use, and return to whenever you have time. And as we have seen, there are nonprofit mindfulness centers across the country (and the world) that also offer complimentary workshops and classes and bring together diverse groups of people to practice and discuss breathing and meditation interventions.

In the workplace, we can follow the lead of those Big Tech companies that have invested a great deal to change their work cultures. One of the earliest and most prolific examples is Google’s Search Inside Yourself program, which one Googler initiated in 2007.60 What started out as an internal series of meditation and compassion courses and lectures metamorphosed into an external stand-alone mindfulness institute that today services more than fifty countries around the world.

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