Mindful Changes

I recently watched a lecture by Mary Pipher, called the Green Boat.  In this lecture, she described how her personal coping style in the face of tragedy is to act, to choose action.  I tend to be a relatively pragmatic person that engages in similar coping strategies.  Often I find myself thinking, “If I try harder, things will improve.”  While hard work is critical for self-transformation, strategic hard work is more effective.  So how can we choose to act, and yet, act with purpose?

The first element of self-transformation is mindfulness.  We must learn to be mindful of the choices we make and the way we behave.  Our schedules are packed and our days are rushed, which encourages easy solutions and careless decisions.  We throw away recyclable materials, eat fast food or candy bars and overspend on luxury items.  Being mindful of the things we throw away, eat, buy, care about, ask for, disregard, avoid, or treasure must all be considered.  There are two fundamental reasons for monitoring our mindfulness: to learn more about ourselves as individuals and to monitor our choices.

I am a big supporter of attempting to use my time very efficiently, so I like to review my choices and actions when I am washing the dishes, grocery shopping or driving.  I like to use this time to think about the choices I have made that week and how I can improve.  For instance, how many ounces of water did I drink today?  How can I fit more outdoor time into my schedule this week?  What new recipes can I try that reduce water intensive products like beef and corn in my diet?  Did I exercise as many times this week as I intended?  What are some of my favorite activities?  How can I eliminate one bag of trash from my weekly quota?  Have I been adding money to my savings account?  Did I exclusively use the eco settings on my washer and dryer?  Have I kept up with family and friends?  Being mindful is a sure way to expand our self-awareness and it is the first step towards self-transformation.  It is not easy to remember to be mindful, so it must be routinely practiced.  Practice makes perfect.  When you find yourself not thinking about anything, decide to think about who you are, your choices and your goals.  Make a habit of mindfulness.  Don’t be overly critical or judgmental of yourself; just be self-observant.

Mindfulness is crucial for self-examination, which is critical for self-transformation.  So I challenge you to be mindful this week.  Consider things about yourself and your environment that you are satisfied with, want to improve, change or eliminate.  Lack of mindfulness is a fundamental pitfall of humanity.  The human race has created the Anthropocene through our methods of deforestation, hyper-use of fossil fuels, toxic emissions, biodiversity loss and mismanaged freshwater resources.  Structural institutions have permitted politicians, lawyers and financial power players to prevent environmental progressive technologies from reaching the market.  Klein described Ontario’s extensive plan to eliminate coal in favor of green energy technology.  Yet, without much public outrage, Ontario’s impressive energy plan was determined illegal by World Trade Organization (WTO) trade laws.  Losing such an innovative energy program is crushing… particularly because there was very little global awareness or scrutiny of this loss.  We must be aware and we must be mindful.

Being mindful requires more than simply observation; we want to strive to enlighten our perspectives.  Western ideology promotes the belief of mastery over nature.  The human race has become the imperious and relentless master that forcibly exploits from his slave.  The earth is not a slave or a machine; it is our home.  We consider “our home” to be where our house is located.  The earth supersedes houses as deserving the name “our home.”  The earth is a gem in the midst of millions of planets that cannot sustain life.  Our planet needs us to be mindful.  Mindful of ourselves and mindful of our home.

We manage what we monitor.  So choose something in your life you want to monitor.  For instance, this week I will be monitoring the amount of trash I produce.  When I go grocery shopping this week I am going to focus on getting food products that have minimal packaging.  This excludes can foods, packaged meats, cereal boxes, bottled beverages etc.  By monitoring what food products I purchase (which is a large portion of my household trash) I will have a much easier time reducing my weekly trash by 1 bag.  I also want to increase my daily water consumption, but always seem to forget to drink more water.  A friend from college complained that she ate and drank too much sugar, but did not feel like she could tolerate a “diet.”  I suggested to her that she log every item she ate that contained any sugar on her phone.  This is not a strenuous exercise.  She wasn’t going to count calories or transform her diet.  She simply needed to read the ingredients list on food products and jot down the name of the food she ate that contained any sugar for a week.  By the middle of the week she was already eating less sugar.  She managed her sugar intake because she was monitoring a problem she wanted to change.  After a few weeks of using this strategy, she was subconsciously monitoring her choices and no longer required documenting her sugar intake.  She was habitually monitoring her food choices and felt like she managed her issue.  Boom! Self-transformation.  Many people could use sleep monitoring.  Be aware of your nighttime choices and how it will affect both the quantity and quality of your sleep schedule.  Keep a simple sleep log that monitors how many hours you slept and how energized you felt the next morning on a scale of 1 to 5.  Keep this log for a month and soon the benefits of a healthy sleep schedule will be revealed.  Discovering the benefits of self-transformation is often the biggest motivator to keep changing for the better.

Let’s be honest.  Self-transformation isn’t easy.  We are changing things about ourselves that likely require self-control and perseverance.  But there are tips of the trade that can make self-transformation more manageable and successful.  In my next post, we will begin examining strategies of motivation and habit formation.  Don’t forget to monitor and be mindful!