Being boring?
What do you do when you are bored? Do you often find yourself helplessly slipsliding into the feeling of restlessness? Have you in the past weekend found yourself roaming around the shops in Orchard Road aimlessly, yet only too sad to find that the weekend was too soon over.
It is a strange paradox. We often also claim that we are too stressed, too busy to meditate, to volunteer, to practice yoga. Yet when we have a spare hour on the train or one precious free afternoon on Saturday, we scour the papers for movies to watch, call our friends and spend 2 hours talking about where to have dinner. The harder we try to have fun, the less fun we seem to have. . .and then its over. Is this our life?!
What is happening here? I have wondered at this for many years, since the stressful days at school, the tiring days at work. Even when I started teaching yoga, the inevitable sense of restlessness revisits as soon as there is time to spare, one afternoon, one hour, one minute. In fact, I saw the mental process happening with even greater clarity after my training in yoga and meditation. Believe me, it gets a lot harder before it gets simpler. Because when the material world loses its appeal and your selfish desires are under management, that boredom, that restlessness, has more room to expand into!
Is there no hope for us then?! Are we doomed to live in perpetual cycles of boredom and stress? Something shifted in me while I was reading Eknath Easwaran’s writings (see previous blogs). Hang on, hang on, these bored/restless periods are not obstacles to our freedom and happiness, they ARE our freedom and contains potentially the keys to our lasting happiness.
Easwaran says that the secret to happiness is not to dwell on yourself: your selfish ego and all its whims and fancies, whining and woes. To put it in the positive way: happiness is when we are entirely engrossed in what we are doing (so much that we lose our ego-centricity). So I realised that those episodes of boredom/restlessness are there for a purpose. We can use them for this practice. There are some good ways of detaching from the ego in these opportunities. I’ve tried them extensively in the past 2 weeks or so. They work.
One way of not dwelling on yourself is to dwell on others. Fill your time on weekends with volunteer work. To call it “work” is a little bit inappropriate. It was a joy to help others on a worthy mission and each thing you do no matter how mundane becomes an action removing your boredom which stems ultimately from a lack of purpose. You channel the power you dissipate endlessly through your restlessness into meaningful actions which have a positive effect on the lives of others. So your boredom and restlessness is lost AND you generate a whole lot of good for others. This is what Karma Yoga is. Selfless action is a form of yoga practice because it directs your mind and you abide in happiness through your work losing your attachment to your ego. Believe me, 4 days of volunteering at the Metta Welfare Association booth for charity has got me scouring the internet last night for more opportunities to practice Karma Yoga. An interesting by-product of this for me as a yoga instructor is that I have discovered a hidden store of energy and strength from the experience. Instead of feeling tired and depleted at the end of the day of volunteering (standing and walking around for hours without sitting), I found energy to even go back to OmIm and teach the evening class of yoga. It is in indulging our selfish desires that wears us down. It is in selfless action that we are renewed.
If we can't learn to master our minds when we haven't got much on our hands, how can we hope to master our minds when faced with crisis or danger? Another way of using those odd minutes or hours when you are commuting or waiting for your bus, your friend, your doctor, etc. is to meditate. People tend to think that they have no time to meditate. They picture themselves in flowing robes, climbing to some inaccessible rock on a picturesque mountain to do this. Where got time?! I am of the belief that tiny drops of water make the ocean. Be very “giam” with your bits of time. Hoard each precious drop for meditation instead of tinkering with your sms. Even a minute spent observing your breath flow performs wonders for your frame of mind. Instead of letting your mind have free rein to flit from one thought to another, invoking the associated emotions, master your minute moments.
I will be doing more types of meditation techniques in yoga class so you can experiment on them and find something that works best for your purposes. For me, I find counting the breaths effective and elegant in its simplicity. Close your eyes and observe your breathing. With each inhalation and exhalation, count one, inhale, exhale, count two, three. . . count up to ten breaths. . .then start with one again. Whenever a stray thought comes in to interrupt your counting, please humbly start from one again. Another easy way of meditation which is great for those stray moments (like when you are on the escalator or lift) is repetition of a mantra. This does not have to be anything religious. A yoga student at my friend’s challenging class on Sunday said that she kept finding herself thinking “I will survive” (yes, the song) during the class. That got her through it and prevent her from sinking into thoughts of giving up or tiredness. So when you are stuck in traffic and late for work: think “I will survive, I will survive, I will survive, etc.” or whatever works for you. Keep it short and positive. The repetition prevents the mind from undirected meandering and helps to fill in all the gaps where boredom or restlessness could creep in. So we lose our ego centricity and become what we meditate on, in this case, a survivor rather than a victim.
“As we learn to do this (meditation), boredom disappears. Many serious contemporary problems can be traced back to acute boredom, which is intimately connected with a lack of purpose.”
“If we look with some detachment on the moments when we were truly happy, we will find that it is not when we were at a party or watching a movie. It is when we were so quietly, completely absorbed in something that we forgot ourselves altogether. This is the secret of happiness. In forgetting about ourselves – our problems, our needs, our quirks and prepossessions – we become happy, just as in dwelling on ourselves we make ourselves miserable.”
– Eknath Easwaran
It is a strange paradox. We often also claim that we are too stressed, too busy to meditate, to volunteer, to practice yoga. Yet when we have a spare hour on the train or one precious free afternoon on Saturday, we scour the papers for movies to watch, call our friends and spend 2 hours talking about where to have dinner. The harder we try to have fun, the less fun we seem to have. . .and then its over. Is this our life?!
What is happening here? I have wondered at this for many years, since the stressful days at school, the tiring days at work. Even when I started teaching yoga, the inevitable sense of restlessness revisits as soon as there is time to spare, one afternoon, one hour, one minute. In fact, I saw the mental process happening with even greater clarity after my training in yoga and meditation. Believe me, it gets a lot harder before it gets simpler. Because when the material world loses its appeal and your selfish desires are under management, that boredom, that restlessness, has more room to expand into!
Is there no hope for us then?! Are we doomed to live in perpetual cycles of boredom and stress? Something shifted in me while I was reading Eknath Easwaran’s writings (see previous blogs). Hang on, hang on, these bored/restless periods are not obstacles to our freedom and happiness, they ARE our freedom and contains potentially the keys to our lasting happiness.
Easwaran says that the secret to happiness is not to dwell on yourself: your selfish ego and all its whims and fancies, whining and woes. To put it in the positive way: happiness is when we are entirely engrossed in what we are doing (so much that we lose our ego-centricity). So I realised that those episodes of boredom/restlessness are there for a purpose. We can use them for this practice. There are some good ways of detaching from the ego in these opportunities. I’ve tried them extensively in the past 2 weeks or so. They work.
One way of not dwelling on yourself is to dwell on others. Fill your time on weekends with volunteer work. To call it “work” is a little bit inappropriate. It was a joy to help others on a worthy mission and each thing you do no matter how mundane becomes an action removing your boredom which stems ultimately from a lack of purpose. You channel the power you dissipate endlessly through your restlessness into meaningful actions which have a positive effect on the lives of others. So your boredom and restlessness is lost AND you generate a whole lot of good for others. This is what Karma Yoga is. Selfless action is a form of yoga practice because it directs your mind and you abide in happiness through your work losing your attachment to your ego. Believe me, 4 days of volunteering at the Metta Welfare Association booth for charity has got me scouring the internet last night for more opportunities to practice Karma Yoga. An interesting by-product of this for me as a yoga instructor is that I have discovered a hidden store of energy and strength from the experience. Instead of feeling tired and depleted at the end of the day of volunteering (standing and walking around for hours without sitting), I found energy to even go back to OmIm and teach the evening class of yoga. It is in indulging our selfish desires that wears us down. It is in selfless action that we are renewed.
If we can't learn to master our minds when we haven't got much on our hands, how can we hope to master our minds when faced with crisis or danger? Another way of using those odd minutes or hours when you are commuting or waiting for your bus, your friend, your doctor, etc. is to meditate. People tend to think that they have no time to meditate. They picture themselves in flowing robes, climbing to some inaccessible rock on a picturesque mountain to do this. Where got time?! I am of the belief that tiny drops of water make the ocean. Be very “giam” with your bits of time. Hoard each precious drop for meditation instead of tinkering with your sms. Even a minute spent observing your breath flow performs wonders for your frame of mind. Instead of letting your mind have free rein to flit from one thought to another, invoking the associated emotions, master your minute moments.
I will be doing more types of meditation techniques in yoga class so you can experiment on them and find something that works best for your purposes. For me, I find counting the breaths effective and elegant in its simplicity. Close your eyes and observe your breathing. With each inhalation and exhalation, count one, inhale, exhale, count two, three. . . count up to ten breaths. . .then start with one again. Whenever a stray thought comes in to interrupt your counting, please humbly start from one again. Another easy way of meditation which is great for those stray moments (like when you are on the escalator or lift) is repetition of a mantra. This does not have to be anything religious. A yoga student at my friend’s challenging class on Sunday said that she kept finding herself thinking “I will survive” (yes, the song) during the class. That got her through it and prevent her from sinking into thoughts of giving up or tiredness. So when you are stuck in traffic and late for work: think “I will survive, I will survive, I will survive, etc.” or whatever works for you. Keep it short and positive. The repetition prevents the mind from undirected meandering and helps to fill in all the gaps where boredom or restlessness could creep in. So we lose our ego centricity and become what we meditate on, in this case, a survivor rather than a victim.
“As we learn to do this (meditation), boredom disappears. Many serious contemporary problems can be traced back to acute boredom, which is intimately connected with a lack of purpose.”
“If we look with some detachment on the moments when we were truly happy, we will find that it is not when we were at a party or watching a movie. It is when we were so quietly, completely absorbed in something that we forgot ourselves altogether. This is the secret of happiness. In forgetting about ourselves – our problems, our needs, our quirks and prepossessions – we become happy, just as in dwelling on ourselves we make ourselves miserable.”
– Eknath Easwaran
