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senses
    Take another two minutes to do this short exercise. As before, stay sitting exactly as you are right now. After putting the book down in your lap, gently focus on one of the physical senses, preferably sound or sight at this stage. I’d recommend using background sounds and closing your eyes, but as sounds can be a little unpredictable at times, you might prefer to keep your eyes open and gaze at a particular object in the room instead, or perhaps a point on the wall. Whichever sense you choose, try focusing on it for as long as possible, but in a very light and easy way. If you get distracted by thoughts or other physical senses, simply bring your attention back to the object of focus and continue as before.
    How did you find it? Were you able to focus on it quite easily, or did you find your mind kept wandering off with other thoughts? How long did it take before you got distracted? Maybe you found you were able to maintain a vague sense of awareness but were thinking about other things at the same time. As unlikely as it may sound, for many people focusing on an object for even one minute is quite an achievement. When you think how long you need to focus on your work, or looking after your family, perhaps listening to a friend, or even driving a car, only being able to focus for such a short period of time can be quite a worry.
    Hostage to technology
    As if we didn’t already have enough ways of avoiding what’s going on in our minds, we now have e-mails and social media routed to our mobiles so we can be truly distracted all day. As convenient as that may be, it means that now even the slightest feeling of boredom or restlessness is a trigger to get online and keep busy. Take a moment to think about it. What’s the first thing you do each day? Is it checking your e-mails? Perhaps sending messages on Facebook, interacting with friends or work colleagues through Twitter? And what’s the last thing you do at night before going to sleep? If the research is accurate, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be doing at least one of these things at either end of the day, if not all of them. It’s pretty hard to switch off when you’re permanently plugged in.
    I read a story in the newspaper about a man who’d become so addicted to technology, so terrified that he might miss something important or perhaps offend someone by not replying to them, that he’d taken to sleeping with his smartphone on his chest. Not only that, but he also took his laptop to bed with him and slept with it by his side – actually in the bed. This is a married man (at least at the time of writing) who shares the bed with his wife. The irony is that he had such a flood of electronic data flowing into his life, that despite taking his computer to bed, he still managed to somehow miss an e-mail in which he was offered $1.3 million for his company that he’d put up for sale. This may be an extreme example, but pretty much everyone I know complains of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of electronic data in their life. When I was living as a monk I used to think ‘well just turn it off, don’t use it’. But living out in the world and having now to embrace all these things in my own work, I can see that it’s not as simple as just turning it off or ignoring it. So instead of trying to stop or change it, we need to look at how we can relate to it skilfully and not feel overwhelmed.
    Fundamental principles of training the mind
    That idea brings us back to the fundamental principles of training the mind. Mindfulness doesn’t require you to change anything. In becoming increasingly aware of your own mind you may find you choose to make some changes in your external life, but that’s entirely up to you. There’s no need to give everything up, or radically change your lifestyle in any way. Dramatic changes like this are rarely sustainable, which is what makes a mindful way of living so achievable. You can keep living as you always