Distraction

I should have posted a blog a week and a half ago (yes, I did promise a weekly blog!). But there was so much distraction: my house was undergoing renovations, I went on a trip… things kept coming up. Finally I resigned myself to the fact that taking care of myself was temporarily more important than keeping my promise to myself and my readers. But I didn’t like it one bit.

We can get so easily distracted. Before you are aware of it, you aren’t doing what you’d planned to do but something else entirely. When I sit down for a mindfulness session, I suddenly find myself thinking up this blog text. I gently let the thought go – “Not now, later.” But in the 20 minutes that I sit there, I have to let the thought go at least 10 times.

However, this is exactly what mindfulness is about. If your goal is to empty your head, you can get pretty frustrated in no time! The goal is to observe yourself with a friendly attitude, to witness that you get distracted, and to gently bring yourself back to the exercise. And by practicing this loving attention, you become aware of the fact that you are not the person who lets himself get distracted, you are the person observing this, the witness.

So today I finally sat down to write the blog, without distractions.

How often do you get distracted in a day? Are you aware of it?

Images to accompany this blog