Frank Diaz draws on several decades of mindfulness scholarship, practice, and education to answer the big question: what is mindfulness? Through guided exercises and discussion we explore what constitutes a serious mindfulness practice, how it relates to music performance and deep listening, and how to realize the benefits of a mindfulness practice in your day to day life.
Maybe the problem wasn’t you. Maybe the problem was you weren’t designed to be the first chair of so and so, and that’s okay! There are other things worthwhile in life.
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Actionable Advice
- One of the problems with mindfulness is we use the word ‘mind’. For westerners ‘mind’ means brain and thought. But ‘mind’ from the conception of the folks who developed these practices is an embodied practice as well. The mind is the body, the body is the mind, the mind is the environment.
- One of the things we often don’t notice about ourselves is things in our attention seem very different depending on our emotional state. When you notice that your emotions are in a particular state you have a chance to decide if that emotion is an accurate or useful depiction of what’s going on right now.
- None of the benefits of mindfulness matter if you don’t have an intention for doing it in the first place.
- It’s not that you always have happy thoughts and feelings and you’re just this blissful Zen guy. It’s that you get to look at your life and decide “this is what I want to do with this moment.”
- The quest for finding a solid sense of self that never changes based on anything sounds reasonable, but when you look at your own experience you realize that isn’t there. What you can choose is a set of values to live by.
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