Control your thoughts better with tips from mindfulness guru Cory Muscara
Useful advice on how to be more present and less stressed from the University of Pennsylvania lecturer and former Buddhist monk
Mindfulness is a buzzword around so much of our lives. We can end up paying a small fortune for someone to help us be mindful, and still be none the wiser. Cory Muscara hopes to make mindfulness more accessible and comprehensible. He is a mindfulness teacher, a frequent guest of the Ten Percent Happier podcast with Dan Harris, and a professor whose online meditations have been heard more than 10 million times in more than 50 countries.
In his early 20s, he spent time ordained as a Buddhist monk in Myanmar in 2012. He has taught mindfulness-based leadership at Columbia University, and currently serves as an instructor of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his graduate work.
He released his first book, Stop Missing Your Life: How to be Deeply Present in an Un-Present World, in December 2019. In it, he describes a workshop where he encouraged hundreds of Fortune 100 executives to sit silently and listen to a bell ring three times. This exercise is meant to help people focus on the present moment. The exercise led to a lot of the executives feeling calmer and less consumed by their thoughts.
Muscara argues that it’s important to be intentional about our thoughts and where we direct our attention, as this can help us combat worries, fears, and negative thinking.
The following is an excerpt from his book:
I’ve done this exercise more than 500 times, and there are usually common themes in people’s responses, but the one response that always comes up is an increased sense of calm.
It could be that the bells are very pleasant to listen to, or that the room is quiet, or that they’re not immersed in emails – but it seems that when we make the intention to pay deeper attention to one thing (in this case, the bells), we’re less prone to falling into the dominating stream of thoughts and stimuli that typically consume our attention and create extra agitation.
You know those thoughts, right? The judgments, the worries, the rumination, the thoughts about the future and the past. Not only do they create agitation and stress, these pesky little critters become the filter through which we experience our life.