If you want to concentrate more, just meditate
The latest posts related to focus at work are well received by many and it seems to be an interesting topic to talk about.
As I've mentioned in those posts, many of my colleagues, friends, and family are often interested in how I can stay focused so deeply and for so many hours a day most of the time. As I always say, the answer to that is the regular practice of formal meditation that becomes my early-morning moment of mental gymnastics. I think that meditating and practicing formally is like going to the gym or playing a sport, but the difference is that you do it to train your mind and the thousands of thoughts that go through it every day.
There are many other ways to calm the mind, such as taking a walk in the fresh air, practicing a sport that requires a lot of concentration such as golf, paddle tennis, skiing, snowboarding or kitesurfing that have a combination of being with nature. To practice them, you need to be focused for practical and safety reasons but none of them are possible to do daily and forever and none of them are made to practice the rest of the mind firmly.
That is why the answer I found was to work with my mind through the formal practice of meditation, and when I say formal it is because it also requires the ritual of going to a quiet place to sit, and alone or guided by my teachers, make a meditation practice for a period of time and I will tell you how.
To be able to meditate you have to do a few things first. The first thing we have to do is put good things into practice so that it happens to others and to ourselves. We need to fill our minds with good behaviors, gratitude, and good intentions in order to reduce the mind to working against us and bring negative feelings like anger, envy, or other negative feelings to the surface.
It is very important that we concentrate for a while, for example scanning our body piece by piece or it can also be simply looking at a point and staying there for a while. Sometimes we can practice staring into the light of a candle for a while and then when we close our eyes we choose an anchor that will be the place or situation that we will return to whenever the mind shifts to somewhere other than that anchor.
The anchor can be many things, but the important thing is that it is ONE thing at a time. It can be the sensation of breathing in some part of the body, a sound, a mantra, a smell, a part of our body, like our hands for example.
During meditation, your mind will most likely shift and try to take you somewhere in the past and future, on your to-do list. The key is exactly to watch when that happens and bring her back slowly and gently, without judging or fighting this fact. Keep in mind and return to your anchor again and again. This is the focus exercise that I put into practice for my mind and that will later become an involuntary practice in my daily life, this is how I focus more on fewer things but deeper.
In summary and to finish, I leave you here a practice for you to try:
1. Sit in a comfortable position with a straight back, it can be in a chair or on the floor. Place one hand palm up and the other hand on top.
2. Gently close your eyes and try to relax all the muscles around you. Take a deep breath for a count of 5 and a full exhale for a count of 10, repeat this 3 times
3. Choose an anchor somewhere on the body. In this case we are going to use the hands as an example.
4. Continue to breathe normally and notice the sensations in your hands, notice hot and cold, dry and wet, tight and smooth areas, notice each finger, palm, and back of palm.
Stay there and notice, if your mind shifts to a thought, welcome it but simply tell it that this is not the right time and gently return the feelings into your hands. Repeat this every time your mind wonders, you will see your thoughts start to come more slowly and the more you practice this step, the longer and longer it will be until a new thought arises.
At first they will come more than one per minute but in the end you may spend many minutes without any thought coming then that is when your mind begins to experience true rest. In this way we practice focusing the mind and meditating, both are part of the same process since one cannot happen if these steps are not happening in that order.
I hope you have found it useful and I wish you good practice.
I can't say for sure that I ever will, but there are plenty of good teachers and trainers on the Insight Timer app if you'd like to explore and join a teacher for a guided meditation practice.