Webinar: Mindfulness Practices for Greater Habit Success

In this webinar, I shared mindfulness practices for greater habit success and I answered some awesome questions.

I’ve broken this webinar recording into two parts:

1. Part I – My Talk: Mindfulness Practices for Greater Habit Success (See notes)
2. Part II – Questions & Answers: I answered questions on maintaining focus during meditation, keeping mindfulness working in the present moment, how to best set up one’s environment in advance, and more!

Part I: Leo’s Talk (with notes)

You can download this video here, or download just the audio. Or watch above.

Here are the notes from my talk (video is below the notes):

Mindfulness Practices for Greater Habit Success:

I’ll share some mindfulness practices that have helped me and many others get better at creating changes in their lives.

Start with: Openness meditation – Notice bodily sensations, then all sensations.

In this month, we’re deepening our mindfulness practice, wherever we are. We’re starting with that for the year because I’ve found it to be a foundational practice for creating changes in our lives.

It helps with all of the most common habit problems:

• if you are struggling, you can work mindfully with your narrative about struggling, and your emotion of frustration.
• If you are rushing through the habit, you can instead slow down and be with the activity of the habit (running, writing, eating healthy food) with gratitude, which turns the habit itself into a reward
• If you want to exit from the habit because it’s uncomfortable, you can mindfully refrain from indulging in your habitual pattern of exiting, and instead be with the energy of wanting to exit

Let’s practice with a few of these:

1. Drop into bodily sensations when you’re stressed, angry, sad, etc.
2. Let your heart be broken by the beauty and sadness of the world.
3. Practice relating to your experience with gentleness & relaxation.
4. Break your habitual patterns.

Two more:

1. Put yourself mindfully into greater groundlessness
2. Drop the ego regularly

Part II: Questions and Answers

You can download this video here, or download just the audio. Or watch below.

Questions answered in this video:

• Can you talk a bit about how to maintain focus during meditation?
• How can we keep mindfulness working in the present moment?
• How to best set up one’s environment in advance to stay mindful & with our habits even when very fatigued, to balance relaxation at one’s bedtime and not get distracted.