Enjoy it!

Matt

PS, If you liked this podcast, please bookmark it on Digg, Stumbled Upon, Twitter, etc. I would really appreciate it

SC

— If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Twitter, etc. I’d really appreciate it!

Just a quick post to let you know the main home of Tortoise HQ has now moved to it’s new, shiny (and hopefully permentant home. To view it please go here: www.tortoiseknowsbest.com

I hope you like it. It is still in it’s early stages at the moment, so there are some tweaks and changes that are need, but please do give me your feedback.

This podbean site is not going anywhere and all the old blogs/podcasts/videos will stay here for you to view whenever you want (and for me to link  back to), but from now on it will be used to post podcasts and video blogs to only (they will, of course still be listed on iTunes and YouTube as well).

If you have subscribed to this site via RSS and want to continue to receive the feed of the written blogs as well as the media content you will need to re-sign up on the new site.

This site will undo a cosmetic change in the next few weeks, with a new skin to more closely match the new site and some of pages will be moved or deleted as they are moved to the new site.

I think that is about it! There will be a new podcast put up tomorrow hopefully and normal service will continue from now on. If you have any questions or would like to know more, please do no hesitate to contact me by clicking here

SC

I am very aware I haven’t written anything for well over 2 weeks and that is a lifetime in the blogiverse. And it has been a month, yes a MONTH since my last podcast.

But I am going to have to ask you to be patient a little bit longer. I have a new shiny site in the final stages of being set up that should launch later this week or early next. Once that is up and running I will be back and post regularly. I promise.

In the meantime why not join me on facebook here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Slow/48126654774?ref=ts

Or follow me on twitter. I know, I know, I have been a bit mean about twitter in the past, but after a change of heart I thought I would experiment to see if it can be used in a Slow way and to spread the Slow message. It is early days so far and I still haven’t got my head round it all just yet. So give me some support and follow me here:

http://twitter.com/theslowcoach

Speak to you all again very soon by some medium or another! SC

Be back when I am better…

I have to admit, over the last couple of weeks to have totally fallen off the slow wagon (those of you that have been listening to the slowcast’s may have got an inkling of that…) and have ended up in a totally disorganised heap, with all the plates I have been spinning come crashing down around me.

That’ll teach me not to take my own advice!

I am away next week teaching another NLP Practitioner, after that I really need to sit down and sort myself out. I have no idea where it has all gone wrong, but I am sure I will figure it out and normal service will resume soon…

I should be back firing on all tortoises on the 8th May, please excuse the break in transmission until then.

SC

PS, check out this fantastic peice of research:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090423.wsleep0423/BNStory/Science/

The people over at Slow Down London have just launched “Living Life in Real Time” Week from today (24th April) until the 4th of April.

I urge you to get involved if you can, or at least check out the website:

www.slowdownlondon.co.uk

Go to the events page to find details of “Living Life in Real Time”.

SC

I know, I know, to some people the word “meditation” sends shivers down their spin, and they conjure up images of tie dye hippies all sat round chanting, but don’t panic! Meditation is nothing like that (unless you want it to be – I am, I have to admit, a bit of a secret hippy…).

Essentially meditation is about creating mental discipline by which you can get beyond the reflexive, “thinking” mind into a state of relaxation or awareness.

Meditation often involves turning attention to a single point of reference and the easiest point of reference is your breath. The great thing about using your breath as a focus when developing mindfulness is that is always there! So you can do a spot of mindfulness meditation whenever you have a spare few minutes, I often to do whilst stood in a queue waiting for something.

Remember though that mediation is not an end in itself, it is about practicing mindfulness so you can use it all of the time. The secret, really, is to ALWAYS be meditating, and I will get onto that in much more detail in later posts, but right now, I want to talk you through a very basic mindfulness mediation so you can start creating a habit if doing it every day. It is a great habit to get into and you will find, with practice, you will become calmer, more focused and energised is a very short space of time.

To begin with, you only need to dedicate 5 minutes to this and slowly build the time up to 20 – 25 minutes (maybe add a minute a week? There is no rush, it is better to build slowly – those are the most powerful habits).

So, what you do is very simple, you don’t need to get yourself in any complicated posture, or burn incense or anything (although you can if you want to, I find it does help – creating a “ritual” around your practice) just sit in a nice firm chair (not a sofa!), make sure your feet can touch the floor, sit forward a bit on the chair so that you are supporting your own back and it has its natural curve (people often find the correct posture the hardest to create  - listen to the recent podcasts to hear about how to relax, breath and improve your posture), then  just breath! Don’t try and force your breath or change it, just breath. And as you do so, start counting the breath, start at one and go to ten, when you reach ten start at one again (breath in, “one, breath out “two”, etc), if you get distracted by thoughts or whatever, lose count or accidentally go over ten, just draw your attention gently back to your breath and start counting from one again.

Do this for five minutes and see how you get on.

SC

Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment, to do that we need to build our concentration levels; something that is being constantly eroded in our modern society. To build our concentration we need to see how little we have at the moment.

So, just sit down and do nothing. See how long it takes before your mind starts racing with things you really SHOULD be doing instead of being sat there, see how long it takes for you to start getting twitchy and notice itches, aches and pains in your body, before you start becoming bored?

The first stage of Yoga (often the only one we do) is about being able to hold you body still for long periods, it is essential for mindfulness that we still the mind, so that we take our attention outside of our heads and start paying attention to what is out there rather than to our thoughts, ideas and feelings.

So, find yourself a nice quite spot and sit still for 5 minutes. See what happens, pay attention to any thoughts and feelings that arise.

SC

PS, Lotus position is optional! You can just do it slouched in a chair…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/5164648/Mobisodes-short-films-and-series-for-mobile-phones.html

About how “mobisodes” or short TV episodes sent directly to our mobile phone are the new “big thing”.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems a tad absurd to me. Not to mention unnecessary. Can our attention spans get any shorter? Why and when would you want to watch a programme on your phone??

We are going to create a society of people with ZERO attention and concentration span, like goldfish swimming round a bowl. That just can’t be good. Can it?

SC

Mindfulness comes from Buddhist philosophy but has been picked up in the last few years by modern western psychology, mainly by someone called Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness is attracting increasing interest among western clinical psychologists and psychiatrists as a means of dealing with stress, anxiety, and depressive mood states.

But it is not limited to only helping in those conditions, by becoming mindful you will find you will have more energy, concentration, less worries and concerns (therefore more relaxed) and appear to be able to act more spontaneously and relevantly in a given situation (hence increasing your confidence).

So, what is mindfulness?! It is simply paying attention to what we are doing NOW. Very few of us actually pay conscious attention to what we doing.

Our brains are designed to ‘habituate” repeated experience. What this means is when we do something over and over again, we stop paying conscious attention to it and it becomes an automatic unconscious habit.

It is thought that we do this for survival purposes, our conscious minds have limited attention, so our habituation means we stop paying attention to what doesn’t change (we don’t need to) and only pay attention to something that changes (which can mean danger).

But where it works against us is that much our day is spent doing the same things and having the same stimuli. We stop paying attention and start sleepwalking through life. Our lives begin to appear mundane and we yearn for something new to stimulate us.

If we saw a sunrise once in our lifetime we would consider it one of the most beautiful sights we have ever seen, because we see it almost daily, we stop paying attention, we miss the beautiful richness of “every day” life.

Slowing down is about paying attention to that daily richness, to appreciate the beauty that is all around us.

Luckily we are not stuck with the results of our habituation and can reset the process so that we can live richer and fuller lives a process of ‘mindfulness’, or deliberately paying attention to every day habits.

A lot of mindfulness exercises are in the forms of meditation, where we sit and focus on something (often our breathing) for long periods of time. Although this is very, very powerful it can be quite overwhelming for a beginner and the power of mindfulness is to use it every day life, not to be able to sit for hours on end.

So I have developed a series exercises, experiments and activities to help you bring mindfulness into your every day life and start to build towards a meditative practice.

I will begin those exercises tomorrow and run a short series of them for the next few posts.

SC

PS, a new slowcast will be up tomorrow.

I must start with a quick apology, totally failing to take my own advice, I have been running round like a totally disorganised idiot for the last 2 weeks, not resting, sleeping or eating properly and stressing out running a training course. This ended up with me being knocked on my back by a nasty cold all over Easter. Which is a real shame as I love Easter, it is my favourite festival, all that chocolate mmmmm.

Anyway, I am back now, although still feeling a tad under the weather, so there will be a new podcast this week and hopefully the blog will return to normal service.

What else is going on? Well, I am working a full book on how to Slow Down and have just commissioned someone to build a new shiny website which will be up soon I am sure, as well as new audio programmes and a series of seminars and talks that will be announced very soon.

So lots going on here (who says Slow isn’t busy?!).

I have just looked back through the blog to find what it was I was talking about and found my last real post was about the Mentalist (excellent show) and Slowing Down can make you appear psychic. It was a jumping off point to disuss a key area of the Slow Philosophy which is Mindfulness. I will do a full and proper entry about that tomorrow, must go off an get a tissue.

Oh look, chocolate….

SC

He will be back when he is better.

Have a good Easter!

The Slow Coach is off teaching an NLP training. He will be back next Thursday (9th April). Why not subscribe to be told when he has returned?