Utilize even a single breath to help shift your mental state and wake you up to whatever was mindlessly owning you the moment before.
When meditating, get curious about physical discomfort and the thoughts it provokes, viewing it mindfully without getting caught up. This develops the ability to handle difficult sensations, but move if you are truly about to get hurt.
Use meditation as an inner technology to see the constant ‘yammering’ voice in your head, especially its negative, repetitive, and self-referential nature. This mental exercise allows you to dis-embed from it and prevent it from owning you.
First thing upon waking, check your state of mind, resettle your body, and remember your purpose (e.g., to end suffering). Allow yourself to be infused with compassion, presence, and wakefulness for 5 minutes to an hour, even while staying in bed.
Meditate inside the life you have; for example, do walking meditation when moving through a concourse instead of hurrying mindlessly. This helps regulate your nervous system and drops you into presence.
Develop a ‘mind of not knowing’ and curiosity to be open to perspective-taking. This expands your subjectivity to include others’ views, leading to true depth of field.
Turn towards your own suffering, experiencing it mindfully without pushing it away or indulging it. This opens your capacity for compassion and helps you understand universal suffering, making you more useful.
Bring contemplative practice into relation with social action and responsibility. Internal transformation is necessary to effectively engage in external work and address structural violence.
Strive to develop a good heart and a clear mind, integrating wisdom and compassion. This is essential to shift society towards a viable and generative future.
Actively practice the Brahma Viharas: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity. These natural states of mind, when cultivated, can transform your life and disposition.
Be mindful of your biases, such as favoring one person over another, and strive to hold all beings in equal regard and value each life. Simply seeing these biases clearly, without self-flagellation, has a healing value.
Maintain a varied media diet by listening to smart people across the ideological spectrum. This helps you identify your own biases, preventing you from being drowned by them and leading to wiser conclusions.
Explore the edge of moral outrage, distinguishing between unprincipled, chronic outrage and principled outrage. Use the energy related to injustice to transform social fabric, rather than letting it become a corrosive state.
Be aware of the risks of pathological altruism (harming yourself or others while trying to serve) and empathic distress (secondary trauma from too much fusion with another’s feelings). Strive to avoid these toxic states for your well-being and effective service.
Recognize that everyone is called to contribute to a better world, not just through grand gestures. Address personal consumerism, consider environmental impact, and raise children with appreciation for inclusivity and diversity, finding your own scale of effectiveness.
Do not strive for constant perfect balance; instead, accept that you will encounter rough times and periods of imbalance. These experiences can lead to humility and growth, preventing perfectionism from hindering your full potential.