Dr. A. Sood is a physician at the Mayo Clinic. His book "Mindfulness Redesigned for the 21st Century" does a good job at showing that developing mindfulness is valuable but not very popular. He has developed an alternative program that can be easily learned and practiced in ten minutes a day. Research by him, the Mayo Clinic and others supports the elements of his program of developing deliberate gratitude, compassion, curiosity and directed attention.
At one point, he writes that if we wait for spectacular news to be grateful for, we will wait a long time. The truth is that virtually everything is spectacular. I am and so are you. The fact that we can both use our hands as well as we can is amazing. Our minds, our memories, our experiences are unique. Nobody can fully duplicate what happened in the last ten minutes. When I try to re-experience the last ten minutes, I find I can't. Yet I know I lived them. I can make another ten minute period that is very similar but I can't actually re-do the last ten minutes.
For convenience and to keep the home fires burning and the accounts balanced, we tend to think we have seen our lives and we know how to live them. In simple, everyday terms that is true. But when we wake up, stand up, balance these complex bodies and walk, cook our food, brew coffee beans from far away, communicate with friends and strangers as well, we are participating in unbelievable miracles steadily. It can take a second or even a third look and a string of thoughts and questions to open the obvious and everyday and see the astounding in us, around us, between us, above and below us, in our recent past, our distant past, our fictions, our achievements and our lucky failures, whatever they are.
