The mindfulness quote below from Steve Jobs is in many respects absolute “tosh”! Well that won’t win me many likes or new followers to my site, but read on and I’ll try and convince you:

“If you try to calm the mind, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline, you have to practise it.”

Steve Jobs

It is my absolute belief, and my experience, that attempts at living a life of mindfulness without a supporting cultural environment AND an ethical based belief system is doomed to frustration and failure! You cannot achieve and sustain a life of mindfulness if you are a slave to your phone, twitter, facebook, Instagram, tv dinners, yada yada. People walk around town, cross the street, wait in line for coffee ……. while texting, tweeting, reading emails etc. One of the classic non mindful examples is of folks in a gym, on a bike or treadmill, with earphones in! Think about it …… isn’t this a time to be completely mindful of your body, your heartbeat, your breathing? Shouldn’t you be paying attention to those things? Isn’t that what mindfulness is, paying attention?

Each of those examples I have given typifies the cultural environment in which ALL of us inhabit in the Western World; the need to keep up with social media, to be on-trend, to keep ahead of the emails, to create a desirable body shape but be distracted from the pain of achieving it, to shovel down dinner while catching up on the latest Soaps so as not to be “behind” tomorrow morning in the office gossip. It’s incessant.

Having spent many months across my life in Kathmandu I know just what it’s like to live in a different cultural environment, one which is slower, one which is more spiritually driven rather than being driven by the need to keep up with and via technology. Nepalese people eat family meals together, “the old” are respected, engaged with and cared for, different religions are seamlessly tolerated, the whole pace of life is so much slower…….. walking, working, thinking ….. This is an environment in which mindfulness is in-built, so much so that you don’t even notice it ….. or is that a non sequitur?

Categories: Buddha

Tags: Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist, calm, culture, Kathmandu, life balance, mindful, mindfulness, Nepal