#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation Mindfulness in Practice
It’s really hard for a person to stay mindful constantly, even for just an hour a day. You often have a flash of inspiration or a burst of energy, wanting to do something, but a short amount of time passes, and it all flips upside down. You make decisions based on your new state, which is often not a good one.
I've seen endless situations in my life where people attend an event, training, or program, read a book, or meet someone, and they’re like, "This is awesome! I need to do this 100%! This is my insight! I’m definitely starting tomorrow! I’m going to do this right now!"
In my videos, I think many people experience a clear understanding of what they need to do, but then some time passes (two weeks, a month, or a year), and the person looks back and realizes: not only did they not get closer to the insight, but they’ve actually moved away from it and regressed. Why does this happen?
Often, when a person has an insight, they’re happy about the event, that a small opportunity has appeared, but they don’t give a solid assessment of the final opportunity.
Neutral Perception of Events and the Illusion of Cause and Effect
Recently, a friend of mine, a pretty close person, went through something bad, and it got resolved. She called me 3-4 hours later, in euphoria, telling me how great everything turned out and how wonderful life is, that it gave her the chance to experience this event. I told her: “That’s not how it is. You’re building some illusion now, thinking you understand the cause of this event and how you managed to get through it, what good things you have. You’re building an illusory perception.”
The most important thing during a surge of energy is not to fall into your own egotistical delusion, the negative state of thinking you understand what this insight is; or thinking you understand what this good event is; or thinking you understand what this good action is.
I told her: “The most important thing you can do right now is neutrally observe the past 24 hours. What exactly happened to you? A very bad event occurred, you got help resolving it, and you’re now in your current state. Treat the bad event neutrally, with the same level of perception. Observe it a bit from the side.” She had been preparing for this event for four months. I basically told her to take all four months, condense them into one day, and look throughout the day at what happened, and make normal, healthy, understandable conclusions.
Most people build some kind of illusion right at the moment of insight. They read a book and say they know everything. Or they go to some coaching, hear one phrase, and say: “Wow, what a result this will be!” We watch some video, and someone after it says: “I get it, what a great result this will be!” Or, on the contrary, a person has a different state: they watch a video, say it’s nonsense, and close it; they read some book and say: “This is garbage, I know everything works differently.” Some event happened during the day, and the person says they won’t deal with it, it makes them sick. This is all the other side of positive reflection, or a positive insight. This all happens because the person is actually jumping around in their head, mindfulness – they’re not mindful over a long period.
What Long-Term Mindfulness Looks Like
So, what does it mean to be “mindful for an extended period”?
Someone asked me about three or four of my favorite books. It’s a very abstract question: no book will allow a person to build their life over an extended period, but this concept is present everywhere. If you plan to die in two days and say, "I need to find the right action right now, what I need to do here and now to live these two days in maximum benefit or harmony"; or "…do something necessary, something I need, maybe read some book and act on it." But overall, you plan to live for a long time. In this framework, your life itself and your state in which you will live matter. So, when I look at books, teachings, or certain teachers, I say it’s important to approach this quite mindfully. This means that if I study an author, I’ll read dozens of their books: I’ll engage very seriously in the study to try to understand the broader complex of everything happening, so I develop a chain of insights or different states, which I will observe over a long time: how I react to them, make decisions, so that within my spiritual system, I develop a state of calmness, freedom, a sense of balance, harmony, firmness. The same applies in business.
Simple Answers to Complex Questions
I have a partner who says, "Sasha, you know, your content can’t be perceived by many people. You say there are thousands of tools in business, you know how to do tens of thousands of tasks. There’s no single step, two, three solutions, you do it for years, and it’s not certain it’ll work. People don’t want to hear that, they want to know the one ‘golden pill’: ‘Here’s the rule for financial accounting, implement it and you’ll be happy.’ This system is a certain manipulation. Sometimes I also say that there are five best rules, signs, but if you listen to a huge amount of my videos, there are a lot of these ‘best’ ones. Because there are many points of support that a person can create for themselves so that this support becomes unnecessary at some point, so they don’t ask themselves every day: ‘How can I be happy? How can I stay in a state of harmony, goodness, calm, quiet, peace? How to live through conflicts, joy?’
I watch some authors who teach others, and they tell themselves, ‘In 2024, I set a goal to dedicate 80 or 90% of my time only to the things I love doing every day.’ What are you talking about? Wait a second. The whole last year you were telling people how a person should feel awesome inside, how everything will be great for them, how they’ll do specific actions, and everything will be resolved, and now you’re setting a goal to do a lot of things you just want to do. Is it about actions or about what you want to do? So, is it a specific list of actions or is it your inner state about doing it freely?
I gladly wait while they set up cameras, eat lunch freely, happily pick up my kids from school, go to the store for groceries because my wife can’t drive these days, call two partners, check reports, clean the grill because it rained last night, and I forgot to cover it; freely, happily hang the curtain rod because I want to do it myself, play chess, read a book, maybe go into a state of tens and hundreds of different events that aren’t all that positive. It doesn’t mean I’m just smiling endlessly in incredible happiness with sunshine all around me. Joy is when I live through different events: both sorrow and peace, problems, and some good, exalted states of happiness, but I go through them in a neutral state, in a state of observation, joy, when I look at each event neutrally. I record a video and understand how difficult it can be to convey information to someone, but I try to stay neutral. Things will be as they should be.
Joyful State of Neutrality
I record a video and understand how interesting, incredibly cool content I’ve shot, but I stay neutral: I understand it could go either way. I stay in a state of observing my current space: bad weather, kind wife at home or she’s angry in the evening, or something inside me ignites and happens that some fire of negative emotions wants to burst out, where I want to do something unimaginably incomprehensible to other people. What’s going on?
Calmly, with joy, sit behind the wheel, plant flowers, cook dinner, be with one, two, three, four kids, perceive the closing of a business, start a new business, make money, lose money, be in long solitude.
Focus of Attention and the Next Step
When we’re not in a state of seeking endless insights, revelations, when we’re in a state of work and our own attention, where it’s important for us to direct it now, where our real next step is (and in each area there are dozens of ‘next steps’) – this is the key to not losing the state of living through what you planned ahead.
When you told yourself that in two weeks you plan to transition to a state of observation from the point of view of your body, you won’t consume gluten, and you calmly continue to do it; or in three weeks start paying attention to your child, and not constantly say, "How do you manage with four kids? We can’t even handle one with a nanny." All this is in the internal state of living. Many people find it hard to stay in a space with themselves, with one child, with five children, with sixteen other people – it’s always hard to be anywhere, no matter what happens. At that moment, you’re not a bad person, just someone who is in that moment. You can spend your whole life searching for the answer to that question, or you can move towards finding a state of joy in something – there’s nothing wrong with that.
Honest Relationships with Yourself and Others
A person's life doesn't depend on how great you feel, what benefits you’ve received, or how much money you’ve earned. It depends on how you act every day toward other people. You don’t need to be rich, healthy, or calm – you just need to start doing. To genuinely, truly project love outward, you need to have your own love inside. You can have this when you project love outward every day, when you act honestly, valuably, and sincerely toward other people. No matter how we answer any question from the perspective of good books, tips, or searching for some individual values, we’ll always come to the conclusion (at least I do) that the foundation always lies within you and your relationship with others. How do you act toward others in any given moment? How do you listen to them? Do you allow yourself to listen to these people? How do you feel them? Do you allow yourself to feel people? Do you observe them? Do you allow yourself to observe these people, instead of yelling at them with your entire internal system? Do you allow your thoughts to live inside you a little before they come out to these people, instead of immediately trying to impose your own thoughts on another person? How do you try to understand another person’s world and help them in some way? Even when they’re wrong, do you help them make this wrong move because it’s necessary right now? Or do you categorically refuse to do what another person asks because you know it’s a lie in life? In this lie, you won’t move under any circumstances, even if it threatens your own life.
In fact, our entire life is based on such principles. The more we develop this state within ourselves, seeing a truly spiritual person, the more we’ll see how all the events happening around us in the social world, profession, business, and family will develop and move with incredible speed, more richly. This is far more important than, for example, the amount of money.
I try to give a person the opportunity to find and see their next step, to scale and grow. Inside, a person may ask themselves: “How did you live through this? How did you come to this state?” Even if you know my path to this state and apply it to yourself, you might die. Or it might be ineffective for you. I always say it’s important for a person to find their own next step. There’s no such thing as a ‘golden pill.’ Any of your questions about how I personally came to this only show that you’re looking for a ‘golden pill’ and want to know the sequence of actions. But a series of actions in finding inner freedom, finding yourself – that’s an illusion.
You can find different actions, states, places, teachers, different versions of yourself in other places, various books. You can see something different yourself: in countless combinations, steps. People are very similar, but everyone is very different. The main thing: a person differs not by the amount of time lived and experience, but by their spiritual component – so much so that a person often can’t even imagine it. If they did – it would tear their ego apart.