Practicing Stoic Awareness
Meditation of St. Jerome by Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo
Over the last year, I have adopted a periodic practice where I set a breathing tracker on my watch for a mere two minutes. In these 120 seconds the goal is simple: focus on my breathing, pay attention to the thoughts that float by, and then summon up the courage to let them pass and float on. In this practice I am not seeking to block out thoughts and achieve an impossible state of mental clarity. Rather, my focus has been on trying to examine them, better understand them, and model the practice of letting things go.
Intrusions are Information
As I have engaged in this practice, I have come to the realization that stray thoughts are not an enemy I need to eradicate. Rather, they are impressions, with some holding more weight than others, not unlike floating clouds that may either temporarily block the sun or dump an impressive amount of rain.
In this practice, when a thought floats by—whatever it may be—I try to do three things:
Recognize it: Acknowledge the thought exists without reacting to it.
Understand it: Ask where it came from.
Release it: Let it adhere to its nature. If a thought is like a cloud, it is its nature to move. My job is simply to let it "float on by."
The Training Ground for Awareness
Marcus Aurelius wrote about the mind being a citadel, and in some ways being mindful in this practice is like standing guard at the gate of this citadel and checking the credentials of the thoughts that pass through. If I can practice this for two minutes, before the alarm on my watch buzzes, I am better prepared for when inevitable intrusions happen in the real world:
When a driver cuts me off.
When a meeting goes off the rails.
When the house is loud and I am tired.
By examining my thoughts in the quiet, I am sharpening my ability to focus in the chaos. I am learning that while I cannot control what pops into my head, I have total authority over which thoughts I allow to linger and how I will evaluate and react to them.