

In Fully Present, leading mindfulness researchers and educators Dr. Library Journal Mindfulness has attracted ever‑growing interest and tens of thousands of practitioners, who have come to the discipline from both within and outside the Buddhist tradition. Fully Present offers one of the clearest introductions to mindfulness in the field.” A good place to start is the 22 day meditation experience I’ve created for you here.“Excellent.

If you like the ideas you’ve read here, you might also like to explore meditation deeper. The key concept is that we want to shake things up just enough that we can achieve a new perspective. We could go on and on with these ideas, but I think these will get you started. Do this a few times a day, and you’ll begin to interrupt the “normality” of our everyday experience. Don’t alter your breathing pattern and don’t try to think anything just focus on your breathing. That’s it-very simple and it will only take maybe half a minute to do that. Read this paragraph, then close your eyes and bring all of your attention to your breathing… in… and out… for the next three breaths you take. Spend a few moments paying attention to your breathing.Simply being aware of the self talk and natural tendency to think “I am _”, and then to gently contradict that-this is one way to achieve powerful clarity and perspective. Particularly for traders, the flood of emotions can be overwhelming. You are feeling afraid, nervous, or angry, but you are not these emotions. This might sound touchy-feely, but it’s also an invitation to really understand where we fall in the dance that is life. Do it when you eat-there’s power in conscious eating-take a few moments to extend gratitude to the fish, animal, or plant that is no longer what it was so that you can eat. Do it when you leave the house and when you return.

I wrote a post on this recently, but I think there is great power in the little rituals of everyday life. (Nice when things are coherent, isn’t it?) You also might have a longer-term list of projects and things you are working on that will require days, weeks, or months to accomplish, but start with the daily list. Putting something on the list declares a clear intent for the day. When something goes on that list, you get it done, no matter what. Use two lists! One of the best pieces of time management advice is to start each day by writing a list of the three to five things you must do that day. Simply working with intent will focus the power of your will, and you’ll get things done that might seem impossible. I find that I focus much better if I declare an intent-for the day, for a specific task, or for an entire venture. In some ways, this is a framework for extending meditation to your everyday life, and here are some ways to do it. Second, it requires attention and a gentle patience to bring your attention back to the work when it wanders. You have to have a clear intent to be more in the moment.
FULLY PRESENT BOOK FREE
You are free to be your most powerful and successful self.Īchieving this state takes two things: first, you have to want to do it. You are free from emotional baggage and past mistakes. It’s a specific set of meditation techniques, not a way to sit at your desk and answer emails.) For traders in financial markets, being in the moment can be a powerful perspective: you can see with clarity. This different way of being and experiencing might be called “being in the moment.” (Be careful with the word “mindfulness”-it’s often applied to this type of work, but it really means something else. There’s a way to achieve a radically different perspective, and to bring different strengths of your analytical tools to every situation. This way of experiencing the world, frankly, makes us smart, but it also keeps us closed off from experience. Too many writers treat the “normal” human experience as something that is bad or something we need to change, but we’ve survived long enough as a species that it can’t really be all that bad! In many ways, it is actually very good because it increases the connections we have between datapoints in our brain. What is clear is that pretty much no one is “just seeing a dog”-the dog brings up memories, associations, and past experiences. We can think of simple examples: three people watching a person on a subway train with a dog will likely have three very different experiences-maybe one thinks fondly of an old pet, another has a phobia, and we can imagine many more perspectives. Everything we experience is filtered through our inner dialog and inner experience. What you think is happening is not what is happening. What you think you see is not what you see.
