From SmartBrief on Your Career … “You'll be much happier at work if you just focus on one thing at a time and do it well,” Darrell Etherington writes. “The difference between really exceeding in the task, and just doing a 'good enough' job, is all about attention. If every time you set out to do a task, you set higher standards for yourself than you did last time, you'll have an easier time maintaining focus and avoiding a wandering mind,” he writes.
This is mindful of the discussion we had in our small church group just yesterday, when we shared the 10-minute Jesus Prayer meditation exercise. Minds wandered, as ours often do. Minds race over a map of our own making, traveling wildly divergent roads. And yet in the quiet, with practice, you can stop the wander. It is in fact all about attention to prayer and Jesus,
I feel this when I pray sometimes: I am focused on the words and then they are gone, almost without my realizing it, replaced by random thoughts. So I start again and focus more on the end result of the given prayer. Again my thoughts may wander and I lose the thread, and realize I do. From our discussion, it seems this is pretty common ... what is that telling us about our mind?
Today at work we watched an interesting video from TED.com, of a scientist speaking about the two sides of the brain and her experience of her stroke. Instructive ... and her "Nirvana" may not be so different from what we look to experience in our own prayer life, sans the stroke. If you want to check it out, here is the link:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
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