by Dawn King • In our busy lives, sometimes the day seems chaotic. Chores, cooking, meetings, phone calls, texts, child care, traffic jams, emails, sounds that irritate us, and even more bombards us. Our attention is demanded from all sides.
If we can remember to consciously take a deep breath, inhaling the life of Spirit and realizing the temporary nature of this ever-changing life, we win! This is when we embrace the advice of Paramahansa Yogananda to “…Stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds.” Our spirit remains strong and is untouched.
An article I read recently told of a young man’s six-week sojourn in a Buddhist temple. He described being invited one day to tea by the abbot. He ascended the stairs to an upper story, only to find the abbot absorbed in concentration over his task at hand, and observing a focused silence. He cleansed each article used in the tea ceremony with full attention, as though nothing else existed at that moment. Ultimately, tea having been served, the abbot turned the same full attention on the young man.
When we focus the mind completely on the moment, whether in meditation, or while carrying out an action, we bring peace to our minds, hearts, and nervous systems. The distraction of phones and other electronics is especially disruptive to this process of being here now. We make ourselves ill by attempting to deal with everything at once.
Studies have now proven that multitasking can reduce your cognitive functioning. Your brain isn’t really doing more than one thing at once, it is jumping back and forth between tasks, and needing to try to remember where it was each time it returns to the earlier one.You lose valuable productivity time in completing tasks, make mistakes, and memories are harder to recall.
Entrepreneur Andy Hill writes: “Multitasking is just a fancy word for being unfocused.…When we multitask we can’t give ourselves to the present. Instead, we sacrifice now for later with the hopes of future happiness.…Imagine what we could hear, learn and share if we were 100 percent present in a conversation. …We’d be more focused, apt, adaptive and therefore better decision makers. The better we can solve problems, the more productive. More successful. Happier. And isn’t that the point?”
To the words of psychologist Michelle Fung: “…By simply focusing on one thing at a time you will instantly improve the quality of your work,” I would add “and your life.”