The Magic of Mindful Self-Awareness – BionicOldGuy

This is an excellent book I recently read by Matt Tenney. The title, and the message of the book, are reminiscent of Thich Nhat Hanh’s classic The Miracle of Mindfulness. The magic, or miracle, happens when you spend more of your time paying 100% attention to what you are presently doing. This make you spend less time worrying about the future or reliving painful moments from the past, and more time in the present. This is something I’ve been working on for some time but it is admittedly difficult to do on a regular basis.

This book gave me motivation to try harder. There is an amazing story at the beginning where Matt discovered this. He had made a bad error in judgement which led him to a very distressing place (he attempted to commit fraud and ended up in prison). After a couple of years there he noticed that instead of ruminating about how bad his situation was, if he just paid full attention while brushing his teeth he felt a lot better. The same thing happened while walking or doing other routine activities. He decided to try do this all the time, and essentially re-framed being in prison almost to being on a long retreat. He has spent his life since then serving others and trying to pass on this message.

So can those of us whose day to day life is not as bad as being in prison do the same transformation? It is worth a try!