[newbie] How to build awarness effectively in a monotonous job?

[Hansu]

I tried to find this topic on search, but nothing really satisfied my questions so im creating a new thread.

My background: I grasped the importance of awareness about a week ago, and ever since i have been trying to focus on the present moment, every day with varying success. Walking in the forest gives me immense awareness(in the quantity that i can realize), but everywhere else its a little harder. Whenever i get an emotion, i try to focus on the emotion and be aware of what my consciousness reveals about the emotion, aswell as i try to be aware what is going on in my process of being aware of the emotion. The amount of happiness i have gained through the short moments of fully forgetting past and future have lead me to wanting to hone and extend my awareness. So i have been listening to the book "Power of now" by Ekchart Tolle and trying to grasp its wisdom.

Yesterday i started working on an assembly line style job and my job is very monotonous collecting and packaging of plastic items for 8 hours every day. Previously i would have dreaded such monotonous job, but now i take it as a chance to really improve my consciousness and improve my skill of awareness while making few bucks to survive until next semester starts.

But today i noticed that trying to build awareness even in such a monotonous situation is hard, and trying to be aware of the feelings on my body, sight, breathing and sense of touch all at once for 8 hours straight probably will make me more bad than good at the level of awareness i am now, so i was wondering if there was a technique developed for just the kind, or similiar kind of situations?

[How to be wise]

@Hansu The reason you can’t look upon reality without thoughts is because you’re attached to thoughts! So to unattach yourself from those thoughts, you need to inquire into them. Once you’ve inquired into thoughts for a few months, your mind will naturally let go of them. Then you can live the rest of your life in the present moment.

[Space]

1 hour ago, Hansu said:

But today i noticed that trying to build awareness even in such a monotonous situation is hard, and trying to be aware of the feelings on my body, sight, breathing and sense of touch all at once for 8 hours straight probably will make me more bad than good at the level of awareness i am now, so i was wondering if there was a technique developed for just the kind, or similiar kind of situations?

Don't try to maintain present awareness for your whole 8 hour shift. It won't work and you'll burn yourself out, get demotivated and quit. In the beginning, quality is more important than quantity. So try doing 5 minutes at a time where you're super aware of all the little sensations in your experience. Try taking things slower if the job allows for that. But ensure that those 5 minutes are super high quality meditation. One of the most important things to do is, if your mind wanders, calmly bring it back to the present. This is key if you want to become more present and aware. Try to be very alert, focused and disciplined throughout the 5 minutes. Then over the weeks, increase the 5 minutes to 10 minutes and so on. To make it easier or to just mix it up a bit, you could try focusing on a particular aspect of experience, such as just sounds. So apply the same process but just focus on all the little sounds going on around you. It's good to use different focus ranges. 
 

[Arman]

I had a tedious factory-hand job years ago and I would do mantra repetition during the tasks. So when I was wiping or sanding - 'Ram... Ram.... Ram.... Ram...' with the intention of maintaining a focused and embodied awareness. Also during lunch breaks I would take a few minutes to sit elsewhere and do some kriya pranayamas. Taking even just a few minutes by yourself to do breath-work can be really re-energizing. On a practical level I highly recommend doing some kind of breath-work. 

What you want to get out of your day is going to come down to your intention 

The most powerful and important thing you can do is to simply set your intention in the morning before you go to work and then to evaluate how you did before you go to bed. The specific exercises, techniques or behaviors that you need to adopt in order to grow or achieve your end goal will become realized naturally and over time once you are firm in your intention. Intention sets cascading levels of priority and focus which automatically asserts itself as long as you hold the intention in mind. Your intention must be meaningful and important to you.

'building awareness' may be a bit too vague, but if it's meaningful to you and you have a clear idea of what that means, then it can work. Once you set your intention clearly and re-establish it every morning, you'll find youself discovering appropriate techniques that will help you achieve your aim.

Once your intention is strongly set and routinely revisited, everything else becomes placed within a certain context and it becomes a lot clearer which behaviors are going to set your compass in the direction of your aims and which aren't.

The intention itself is more important than the actions. You can practice good techniques, but if your intention becomes vague, automatic or fuzzy then you will think you're practicing but really you are just going through the motions.

Some examples of intentions are:

Be kind to people and/or to be of good cheer
To seek to become mindful of boredom and penetrate it at its source
To increase awareness of negative emotional patterns
To place more awareness into my body
To devote my fruits of my work-labour to a higher power (god, society, an avatar, to your own goal)
 

Edited June 19, 2018 by Arman

[Hansu]

40 minutes ago, Arman said:

 

'building awareness' may be a bit too vague, but if it's meaningful to you and you have a clear idea of what that means,

Mm, i have a distant memory of sentence "you are unaware of how unaware you are" or something similar between those lines. Then again, i have experienced this state of being in the present which i felt in a forest  Basically i was listening to one of Leo's videos where he talked about surrendering and forgetting future and forgetting past, and focusing on the now, and immediatly i imagined three boxes with the past, now and future, and first i thought what happened in my past, and then i saw the box cut off, slowly drifting into nothingess, then i saw the ridiculousness of time and predicament of future, and then the future box also faded away, and i was left with now. Suddenly all the trees had this new, much farther depth and a new "glow" kind of look on them, not glow in traditional sense but i interpreted it as a glowing sensation, and i was walking in the forest with a big ass smile, tens of mosquitos biting on my neck, legs and hands. I don't know why i wrote this, but i think it was because of my eagerness and want to share my experience somewhere and to get back there, to build my life around that sensation

Setting daily intentions sounds very good at general. I was setting goals and reading goals for a month, but every time i wrote daily goals i would really focus on the daily, small goals rather than the big ones and in the end, i would end up with a few weeks of effective work, then huge dip and frustration as i no longer got anything done, especially if i had written it as a goal in the morning. But an intention of focus sounds flexible and simple enough to try do for a few months. I never really thought of this option and i always went with the techniques, not end goal in mind

 

Thank you. I think joining the forum and finding the passion to seek awareness are the two best changes in my self actualization journey so far