Actively resist the deadening effect of habit and routine by cultivating awe and wonder in your life. This practice can lead to improved mood, reduced stress and anxiety, increased creativity, open-mindedness, immune function, and cardiovascular health.
Minimize judgment of reality, yourself, situations, and other people, as wonder cannot coexist with judgment. A significant portion of suffering stems from judgment and resistance to reality.
Engage in a constant practice of outwardness by focusing on things larger than yourself, which is the essence of wonder. This helps combat self-involved states like depression and shifts mental focus externally.
Strive to meet reality on its own terms, without suffering over how you wish things were different or succumbing to ’the tyranny of should.’ This approach, exemplified by science, leaves no room for opinion or resistance to elemental truths.
Consecrate and train your capacity to pay attention, as wonder is essentially a training of attention. This focused attention serves as a portal to experiencing meaning in life.
Calibrate your relationships by ensuring a healthy ratio between wonder and judgment, favoring wonder. An imbalance, particularly too much judgment, can lead to self-delusions and prevent the experience of real love.
Cultivate the purest form of love by seeing another person as a wonder in themselves, rather than as a means to meet your needs or fulfill desires. This clarifies the relationship and honors the individual.
When wonder is difficult, such as during annoyances in relationships, practice tenderness towards your own feelings and the situation. This prevents using temporary frustrations as evidence that a relationship is fundamentally flawed.
Maintain a daily meditation practice to begin the day with openness and awareness, without viewing it as a self-improvement tool. This practice fosters an expansion of being and a deepening of the inner self.
Spend time outdoors, particularly walking, to clear your head, anneal thoughts, and create contemplative space. Motion can help discharge kinetic energy, allowing for better focus and deeper thinking.
Decouple the legitimate practical benefits of meditation from the idea that those benefits are its sole purpose. Approaching meditation with a fixed purpose can detract from the pure gift of being and its inherent expansion.
Acknowledge and work with your inherent agendas and desires in meditation, rather than trying to eliminate them immediately. This gradual approach, like giving the mind ’enough data,’ can lead to non-transactionality and letting go.
Regularly remind yourself that other people’s behaviors, choices, and attitudes are often not about you. This practice helps to check the human impulse towards certainty and reduces self-referential thinking, which can cause problems.
Practice tolerating discomfort, as learned in meditation, to counter the illusion of certainty. Life is profoundly uncertain, and this practice helps manage the discomfort of not knowing outcomes.
Read widely, especially fiction, to cultivate empathy and challenge your own certainties. This exposes you to infinitely many kinds of lives, offering perspective and showing that your pain is not unique.
Make plans but practice non-attachment to the outcomes, remaining willing to change course. This aligns with the ‘middle path’ and helps manage the fear-driven need for certainty about the future.
Cultivate spontaneity and reduce over-planning in your daily life to discover what you genuinely want. Over-planning can preempt genuine desires by imposing ‘shoulds,’ making it difficult to know your true wants.
Utilize meditation to quiet the ’tyranny of shoulds’ and more effectively hear what your body and mind truly want. This practice aids in the difficult task of discerning genuine desires from external expectations.
Focus on doing fewer things but making them excellent, rather than attempting many tasks quickly. This approach, as advised by Joseph Goldstein, encourages deeper engagement and higher quality in your endeavors.
Manage your expectations by understanding that anything truly worthwhile is likely to take a long time. This perspective encourages patience and sustained effort over quick results.
Develop vigilance towards anything that feels like a compulsion, using it as a litmus test for potentially unhealthy behaviors. Even seemingly productive actions can be driven by an unhealthy internal compulsion.
Actively choose and magnify joy, wonder, and curiosity in your life, consciously doing less of everything else. This preempts the ’tyranny of shoulds’ and fosters a more fulfilling and authentic existence.
Identify and consciously broaden your personal ‘portals to joy,’ revisiting them frequently. This practice helps sustain joy and makes life’s challenges more bearable.
Utilize meditation to recognize the ‘inner menu’ of thoughts and feelings, consciously choosing to focus on joy and gratitude despite other mental content. This provides agency and freedom in managing the mind’s constant activity.
Cultivate optimism not about specific future outcomes, but about your willingness to show up and give your best, regardless of what happens. This offers an empowering and realistic stance in the face of uncertainty.
Remain open to possibilities that extend beyond the limits of your current imagination for how situations or projects can turn out. This allows for unexpected gifts and creative fertility, even when desired outcomes don’t materialize.
Be aware of and challenge the human tendency to dismiss anything you don’t understand or are not literate in. This impulse limits your world and prevents new discoveries and perspectives.
Explore the intersection of different fields, such as poetry and science, to find new perspectives and foster wonder. This approach can provide coherence between the search for truth and the longing for meaning, as wonder is the meeting point of reality with feeling.