do all the exercises in Undoing Perpetual Stress.

This is not one of the exercises in the book, but I thought I’d mention it here, because I find it interesting.

In the last chapter, O’Connor gives “Twelve Easy Steps to Rewire the Brain.”

Here I want to say something about number eight:

8. Think with your whole mind.

This means to think with both logic and intuition, intuition informing logic, logic checking intuition.

This past week I noticed two instances of this at work. During the marking of papers, I used this to check my addition. After I had given all the ticks, I wrote down the mark, then I glanced at the answer again, to see if the student’s knowledge matched the mark they got. This was a surprisingly easy and effective check.

Yesterday at the factory I was curious about a pile of recently-soldered parts, and I bent over then to look closer. I happened to be mindful at the time, and I noticed that I was holding my hands clasped behind my back. This was my intuitive mind keeping my curious logical mind from making me reach out and touch something that was hot.

I’m not procrastinating on this, I’ve lent the book to someone else!

Exercise 8 goes very well with 43Things. In it one examines the reasons why one cannot do the things you’ve always wanted to do.

Exercise 6 is writing a biography in a mindful way. I’ve done it.

Exercise 6 is writing a biography, using mindfullness as a guide.

I have to say at this point that these exercises are really exercises that can be repeated from time to time, and not just simple workbook problems.

Exercise 5 is an introduction to mindful meditation.

Exercise 1 is a list of questions that makes one think about the quality of one’s life.

Done Exercise 4. It is a little exercise in observing the mind thinking.

The book Undoing Perpetual Stress by Richard O’Connor has a number of exercises that one can do to improve mindfulness, his term for the opposite of mindless existence.

I think he really has some very good ideas. One has defences to protect the self from the effort of change, and reading the book and agreeing with it but not doing the exercises is one of them. So I’m putting this up as an achievable goal.