4 Minute Meditations

Good morning and welcome to your nineteenth meditation. How well do you think you take rejection? Does it hurt or are you inured to it? Do you crumple or does it only make you try harder to get what you’re after? Maybe being rejected makes you feel like you have suffered an injustice; you become bitter and resentful. But perhaps it makes you consider how you might improve; or it inspires you to alter your approach, or even to move the goal posts altogether.

Good morning and welcome to your eighteenth meditation. Do you ever think about space? No, not that extra room you wish you had in your home to store stuff, but the incomprehensible vastness of outer space. You may be thinking, “isn’t there enough to worry about right here on Earth? Why should I spend my time contemplating what I don’t understand and what doesn’t affect me?

Good morning and welcome to your seventeenth meditation. Has anyone you love ever expressed views that are anathema to you? Views that run contrary to what you understand to be your most basic moral principals?

Good morning and welcome to your sixteenth meditation. On a scale of one to ten, how adaptable do you believe yourself to be? Over the past year, around the globe, we have all been forced to adapt, in one way or another, to a new reality.

Few would contest the assertion that, of the five senses that we humans use to engage with the physical world, society tends to value sight over all others. We’re all familiar with the cliché that “seeing is believing”. And indeed, we tend to regard sight as the most authoritative sense when it comes to determining what we understand to be reality.

Good morning and welcome to your fourteenth meditation. Have you ever heard the expression “we know more than we know we know”? Think about those words for a moment. What do you suppose they mean? We harbour vast stores of knowledge in our minds and in our bodies that we rarely consider.

Good morning and welcome to your thirteenth meditation. When you set a goal how do you do it? Do you just tell yourself privately that you are going to do something? Do you write it down? Do you tell a friend in order to have someone to whom you’re accountable? Do you develop a timeline and a plan for carrying it out? Unsurprisingly, the more effort you put into conceiving the “how” of your goal the more likely you will be to achieve it.

Good morning and welcome to your twelfth meditation. Do you have a hard time saying no? If you answered ‘yes’ to this question, you are definitely not alone. Saying no can be difficult for many different reasons, not all of which are bad. Indeed, the problem often arises from a keen sense of empathy and a desire for others to be happy. And this wonderful altruistic impulse can go uncelebrated in a world that honours individualism and tends to reward uncompromising behaviour.

Good morning and welcome to your eleventh meditation. How many times have you told yourself you’d like to learn another language, or take up piano? Most of us fantasize about learning new skills, yet never seem to get around to doing it.

Good morning and welcome to your tenth meditation. How much time do you spend outside? Do you make a point to get out every day or is it just something you do now and then. Or maybe you typically only leave the house if something demands it, like work, or exercise, or taking a class. Amid all the busyness of life, amid all the things that constantly need doing, it can feel hard, or even pointless, to dedicate that precious time to such an apparently non-productive activity as simply being outside.