The practicing mind
by Thomas M. Sterner summary
Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment. Its internal dialogue is always firing off thoughts filled with emotional content and pulling the individual out of the present and into the past or future. But individuals raised in Western culture are becoming increasingly aware of their overall sense of mental exhaustion, their lack of discipline and their inability to focus on demand. They are willing to expend the energy necessary to experience inner peace and a quiet mind that is waiting to follow the direction of their will. They are realizing that the endless struggle to fulfill the insatiable appetite of instant gratification is fruitless and tiresome at best. They are ripe for a new path in life and eager for a new set of instructions.
Whether you're seeking to improve your career or your intimate relationships, increase self-esteem or create harmony within yourself, this inspiring prescriptive guide will help you master anything you choose and achieve success in all areas of your life. In Mastery, you'll discover:
Key Takeaways from the book
- Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything.
- Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life’s difficulties.
- Habits are learned. Choose them wisely.
- You are going to find that buying the car is much less satisfying than working for it.
- So few people are really aware of their thoughts. Their minds run all over the place without their permission, and they go along for the ride unknowingly and without making a choice.
- When, instead, your goal is to focus on the process and stay in the present, then there are no mistakes and no judging. You are just learning and doing. You are executing the activity, observing the outcome, and adjusting yourself and your practice energy to produce the desired result. There are no bad emotions, because you are not judging anything.
- The feeling "I'll be happy when X happens" will never bring you anything but discontentment.
- We think too many thoughts at once, most of them the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. We are impatient with life, and anxious.
- The skill is practicing the goal, not having the goal.
- Education: when school funding is determined by how many high test scores we put out, what students actually learn is merely a footnote.
- If your mind races off, you're like a chariot without the reigns. Take the reigns and be in control of your mind.
- The greatest part of entrepreneurship is breaking down your limiting beliefs. It has nothing to do with money.
- Zen concept of Beginners Mind. It's harder to concentrate as you advance in skill level.
- A habit is the “natural way we do something.
- Make time to just sit. You need relaxing time.
- The problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them.
- One study states that repeating a particular motion sixty times a day over twenty-one days will form a new habit that will become ingrained in your mind.
- Without this, your life is incomplete.” Automobile commercials are particularly amusing in their overemphasis on these messages. They present ownership of their particular car as some sort of euphoric experience. In reality, we all know that cars are terrible investments that depreciate faster than anything else, and that when we purchase a new one, we spend most of our mental energy worrying that it will be stolen or damaged in the local mall parking lot.