The Single Sentence I Use to Be More Mindful

An alternative to a traditional meditation practice

I have a bit of a problem: Inside my mind, there is a monkey wearing a silly hat and carrying two enormous cymbals. This monkey enjoys nothing more than to clash the cymbals incessantly. Contrary to the expected sound of ringing metal, these cymbals produce something completely different. These cymbals sound like:

“What am I going to eat later? What does my week at work look like coming up? What should I write about next?”

My mind is constantly bombarding me with thoughts; they can be thoughts about food, work, relationships, activities, or just about anything else. Naturally, I recognized that I could benefit from a meditation practice, so I began attempting to meditate for short periods in the morning immediately after waking up.

I quickly realized that I am absolutely terrible at meditation. When I sit down for one of these sessions, most of the time it feels as if I am setting my mind-monkey loose as usual, except that I am sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed.

This honestly makes the problem even worse: Not only have I failed to restrain my mischievous mind-monkey, but I’ve added a sense of failure to the equation. So now I have my distracted thoughts exacerbated by my frustration.

I think this is a problem that is not unique to me — many folks associate “mindfulness” with the act of literally sitting down and meditating like a Buddhist Monk. Many of these folks, like me, find this direct approach very challenging and frustrating. However, this is not the only route to mindfulness.

How to Meditate (for terrible meditators)

During a podcast where he was promoting his book “Stillness Is The Key”, the author Ryan Holiday talked about how he doesn’t traditionally meditate but incorporates mindfulness or “stillness” into organic moments in his life.

This process is a much better option for people who struggle with the traditional approach to meditation. Throughout your day, stop and take a moment to slow down and immerse yourself in what you’re doing. This can happen when you’re just sitting and enjoying a view, cooking, reading, exercising, eating — or doing literally anything else.

The goal is to bring intentional mindfulness to your daily activities. The problem is that you have to remember to do this and refrain from allowing your mind-monkey to get too carried away with its barrage of incessant over-thinking.

A Single Sentence to Trigger Mindfulness

The author Sam Harris has a meditation app that I used for a while. There was one phrase he repeated often in his guided sessions that stuck with me:

6 words. It’s very simple, but this leads to a profound shift in perspective for those of us who struggle with mindfulness. We, overthinkers, tend to spend far too much time caught up in the future. We go from place to place never truly being present because as soon as we’ve arrived we begin thinking about where we’re going next.

This happens with day-to-day events as well as with larger cycles of our lives — we think about our next vacation, our next career move, where we want to be in 5 years, and so on and so forth.

It’s important to have goals, structure, and plans for the future — but it can’t happen at the expense of being present in our lives. The moments we experience on a day-to-day basis are not some preliminary act to the main show. There is no show coming — this is the show. It’s happening right now.

When I catch myself living in the future, treating my days as if they are nothing more than some preliminary step toward where I want to be, I say these 6 words to myself. Doing this helps me shift my perspective and realize that the journey is the destination. The journey is a process that must be experienced and lived to the fullest.

This thought, more than anything else, allows me to incorporate mindfulness into my daily life. It is a trigger to shift my perspective and see these everyday moments as more than meaningless preliminary tasks. This inspires me to slow down and approach these moments with mindfulness and gratitude.

I’m not perfect, of course, and I still fail at this all the time. I spend plenty of time living in the future, and I still get frustrated in traffic and in long lines at the grocery store. But remembering this sentence helps me be a little better a little more often.

If you struggle to maintain a traditional meditation practice but feel a need to increase the mindfulness in your life, you may find it helpful to use this reminder. The next time you find yourself living in the future, pause for a moment and tell yourself: This is not a dress rehearsal. Your life is happening right now, and it's worth taking a moment to appreciate.