| | Hi Aziz
Well, a simple definition of "mindfulness" which I like is "keeping something in mind" as in "remember what I'm doing".
While writing a thesis is much more than operating a word-processor, the word-processing part at least offers quite a few opportunities for training mindfulness in the form of "stop exercises", i.e. "stop and review what's going on here" whenever something specific happens. Choose a "trigger" and try to be mindful of as many of these as possible.
Examples: to keep TSV at bay I set up a "typing break" software to alert me every so often to relax my wrists etc. After the break, I try to keep in mind that I'm now working again. This gradually slips, of course, and during my next break, I try to remember the moment when the fact that I was working slipped from my mind, i.e., I backtrack to the last moment of "mindfulness of working". Or, I decide to be aware whenever I save my work (maybe initially just the instances when I make "big" copies to some external medium like an USB flash memory or a different computer system).
Come up with your own. Alan Chapman describes an exercise where he tried to be aware of his right arm as often and for as long as possible.
Cheers, Florian |