Davenport - Peace of Mindfulness: Everyday Rituals to Conquer Anxiety and Claim Unlimited Inner Peace

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave,
find your eternity in each moment.
Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.
There is no other land; there is no other life but this."

~ Henry David Thoreau

I know you've just started reading this book, but stop for a moment and mentally review your day. Think about some of the specific activities you engaged inbrushing your teeth, making coffee, driving to work, talking with a coworker, going for a run. What were you thinking about during these activities? Can you remember anything that occupied your mind during the day? If you remember any of your thoughts, how many were focused on the past or the future, or were related to some negative incident or anxiety you replayed in your head?

If you can't remember where your mind was during the activities of your day, you aren't alone. Nor are you the only person whose thoughts simmer in anxious negativity and pain much of the time. Some estimates suggest we have around 45,000 negative thoughts a day, which is about 80 percent of our total daily thoughts. Most of these negative thoughts are repeats from the day before, and the day before that, and so on. We are training our brains to dwell in distress.

Every day, we fall down the same mental rabbit hole, and quite often, that rabbit hole is a dark and painful place. Our thoughts send us on harrowing journeys through regret, guilt, shame, and self-doubt. They propel us to scary and unpredictable futures, and lead us through mental wastelands and mind-numbing reveries, as our thoughts drift into fantasy, fiction, and other nonsense.

We may not be consciously aware of the unpleasant odysseys our thoughts take every day, but we are aware of how we feel, if not directly, then through the symptoms and consequences of our feelings. We may notice stress, physical tension or pain, sadness, anxiety, or irritability. We might snap at our kids, be distracted and preoccupied with our spouse, or lose focus on an important project. Our behaviors starkly expose our emotions, sometimes in destructive or self-sabotaging ways.

Our thoughts, and the feelings those thoughts produce, create our realities. If most of our thoughts and feelings are negative, then much of life is as well. Our thoughts cause us deep suffering through emotional or physical pain, loss and impermanence, and ego attachments. However, this suffering is unnecessary. Why? Because most of our thoughts simply aren't real or true. They feel real because of the way we attach and react to them. Fortunately, we have the power to change our perceptions and end much of the suffering in our lives through the practice of mindfulness.

The purpose of this book is to give you some tools to win back control of your thoughts and emotions so that you can release anxiety and fear to enjoy a richer, healthier, more conscious life. You don't need to live in a monastery or go on a month-long retreat to practice these skills or enjoy the myriad of benefits they afford. You can live your life, manage your obligations and responsibilities, and maintain your daily activities with little or no real disruption to your routine. All you need is a commitment to mindfulness and an understanding of how to incorporate it into your day.

Many of the techniques presented here are quite simple and take very little time. Some involve more time and deeper instruction, but you will find they provide profound and abiding rewards. The exercises I cover in this book aren't the only methods for practicing mindfulness. In fact, as you'll learn, you can practice it in everything you do. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide how you want to make mindfulness a part of your life, but the practices outlined will help you get started and give you options to open your mind to mindfulness. Hopefully you'll come to see mindfulness as the only way of life.