Reflect on the three best and three worst choices you’ve ever made. Lower values demote us toward anxiety, depression, and suffering. Higher values propel and elevate us toward happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. Our teachers at the ashram explained that there are higher and lower values. Contemplating monk values may help you identify your own. The next step is to decide what your values are and whether your choices are in alignment with them. Now look at your discretionary spending.ĭoing a self-audit tells you the values that have crept into your life by default. Exclude necessities like home, dependents, car, bills, food, and debt. Like time, you can look at the money you spend to see the values by which you live. What we do with our spare time shows what we value. No matter what you think your values are, your actions tell the real story. What are the values behind that decision? Are your earnings from your job ultimately serving your values? You’re deciding to spend time on something that doesn’t feel important to you. That’s a sign that you need to look very closely at that decision. Say the amount of time that your job requires exceeds how important it is to you. If this is the case for you, then set your own definition of when you are officially” at work and make extra work” one of your categories.) The areas where you spend the most time should match what you value the most. Work, in all its forms, can sprawl without boundaries. (Note that we’re leaving out sleeping, eating, and working. Spend a week tracking how much time you devote to the following: family, friends, health, and self. When we tune out the opinions, expectations, and obligations of the world around us, we begin to hear ourselves. Finally, get involved in something that’s meaningful to you-a hobby, a charity, a political cause. This can be anything from visiting a park or library you’ve never been to before to taking a trip. Second, once a month you can approximate the change that I found at the ashram by going someplace you’ve never been before to explore yourself in a different environment. First, on a daily basis I recommend you sit down to reflect on how the day went and what emotions you’re feeling. There are three ways I suggest you actively create space for reflection. For monks, the first step in filtering the noise of external influences is a material letting go. Observing and evaluating are key to thinking like a monk, and they begin with space and stillness. Put a checkmark next to each value that you truly share. Write down some of the values that shape your life. The more we are absorbed in celebrity gossip, images of success, violent video games, and troubling news, the more our values are tainted with envy, judgment, competition, and discontent. Without them we are swept away by distractions. Values make it easier for you to surround yourself with the right people, make tough career choices, use your time more wisely, and focus your attention where it matters. The foundation of virtually all monastic traditions is removing distractions that prevent us from focusing on what matters most-finding meaning in life by mastering physical and mental desires. Not only is our self-image tied up in how we think others see us, but most of our efforts at self-improvement are really just us trying to meet that imagined ideal. The monk mindset lifts us out of confusion and distraction and helps us find clarity, meaning, and direction. We can elevate to the monk mindset by digging down to the root of what we want and creating actionable steps for growth. We’ll simply seek more and more, a circuit that leads to frustration, disillusion, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and exhaustion. Fame, money, glamour, sex-in the end none of these things can satisfy us. Our culture and media feed us images and concepts about who and what we should be, while holding up models of accomplishment and success. They developed practices around these ideas long before modern science could show or validate them. The monk teachings talk about forgiveness, energy, intentions, living with purpose, and other topics in ways that are as resonant today as they must have been when they were written.įor millennia, monks have believed that meditation and mindfulness are beneficial, that gratitude is good for you, that service makes you happier, and more that you will learn in this book.
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