Just 10 Minutes

Just imagine waking up each morning with a zest for life, Just imagine starting each day with creative spring in your step. Imagine spending your days fully engaged and productive. Imagine having more time on your hands. Imagine what live would be like when you stop pushing water uphill and go with the flow, with opportunities turning up at your door when you least expect them.

If this sounds like a utopian and inaccessible pipe dream, think again. Accessing this blissful state doesn’t involve taking recreational drugs, juicing everything in sight or joining some sort of cult. To access this state, all you need to do is to spend at least 10 minutes a day meditating.

Many people start meditating to reduce stress and anxiety, and some to find spiritual enlightenment. Ex-BBC TV engineer Tom Evans advocates daily meditation for a different reason as he is a proponent for practical applications of mindfulness meditation. Tom did indeed start meditating in his mid-40s to reduce his stress and blood pressure levels. He quickly discovered a myriad of real-world uses from meditation.

In his latest book, The Authority Guide to Practical Mindfulness, he explains how we change the subjective passage of time when we enter and stay in the meditative state during the day. Not only do we get more done with less time but external events seem to happen, just at the right time. The book also explores how to enter the Whole Brain state where both sides of our brain work in harmony and synchronism. This sets up the conditions for aha moments to appear and Tom explains how to experience them on demand.

Tom says, “The reason our creativity soars when we learn to meditate is that the normal human mind is only capable of experiencing one thought at a time. So if you think about an angry conversation from the day before or what you are having for supper, your attention will drift from what you are working on at the time and, as a result, your efficiency will drop.”

So 10 minutes of meditation each day is a short term investment as we quickly find we get this time back easily by having smoother and more creative days.

After just a few weeks, you will begin to get medium term return on your investment in ‘Me Time’ as you become more creative, luckier, more productive and generally happier in what you are doing.

There is a long term return on investment to be had too. So many scientific studies have confirmed regular meditation reduces the ravages of time and delays the onset of dis-eases that plaque so many in their elder years. It is estimated that every single minute you meditate increases your longevity in proportion. As it improves your general well being, it gives you the ability to live weller for longer. It’s a kind of madness not to meditate.

Being an engineer, Tom doesn’t just write about the theory, his new book is accompanied by ten 10 minute guided meditations which introduce the most common ways to meditate. There is one meditation for chapter in the book so can can read about the theory and instantly experience what Tom is talking about. So there is no need to sit in a cave or join an Ashram for several years. In the comfort of your own home, by taking 10 minutes out of each day for ten days, you will discover a whole new way to be. These days, your meditation master can come to you!

Note that the meditations are included in the audiobook version and accessible to all readers of the print and ebook version via Tom’s web site. Note too that Tom is a master at bending time and, as a testament to the techniques he writes about, the whole book was written in less than two weeks.

The practice of mindfulness meditation has many other spin offs too, as the benefits are what Tom describes as being ‘nicely infectious’. When you maintain a calm demeanour, it helps reduce tensions around you too. You will find the worry lines drop away from your face. People might ask if you have had treatment. You will become more attractive in all senses of the word.

You will find, as Tom explains in the book, that mindfulness practices can be scaled up to work across teams in the workplace. When we become mindful of our own state of mind, we become empathetic and supportive of the states of minds for others. Tom shares some simple techniques to reduce meeting times and how to reach consensus more quickly and harmoniously. You will also learn how to be more mindful of your emails and more judicious in your use of social media.

Tom is the author of 13 books, the creator of the world’s first time management programme based on mindfulness called Living Timefully and the host of the Zone Show podcast. He is also an expert at clearing creative blocks, one of the meditation guides on the Insight Timer app and a philanthropist.

More at www.tomevans.co