Learn to focus and concentrate!

Have you been teased for getting distracted easily?
Teased for not being able to focus or concentrate?

Here are some interesting insights from Dandapani, a Monk on how to concentrate.

According to him there are two reasons why we couldn't...

1. We were not taught how to concentrate.
2. We did not practice concentration.

How can you do something if you were never taught how to do it? And how can you be good at something if you don't practice it?

Learn how concentrate and practice it over and over again. Once you practice you become good at it.

And why do we get distracted? We hear excuses that we get distracted by many things such as technology, phones etc., That's a mere excuse and need not be true.

Learn how the mind works and this can help you concentrate.

Because, you can't concentrate or focus on something you don't understand.

Here is the Monk's view on how the mind works and how we can get it to concentrate and focus on what we are doing.

There are two things to understand; Awareness and Your Mind.

Now imagine the awareness as a ball or light and mind as a vast area with different sections for happiness, anger, sad, excited or something like a wedding, movies, friends etc.,

You can take your awareness to any part of your mind, every day.

When you recall a happy moment the awareness lights that area.

And then you take your awareness to a different part of your mind and you are distracted.

Now we have to realize that we allow someone or something to take our awareness to different parts of our mind willingly or unwillingly.

The art of concentration is the art of keeping your awareness, the ball of light at one thing for an extended period of time.

Everytime the ball drifts away we bring it back, again and again to what we were doing.

And by constantly practicing this everyday we can learn to focus and concentrate of one thing at a time.

Do not multitask but try to do one task at a time and stay focused.

Life is a manifestation of where your energy is flowing. 

And if you can't concentrate your energy the things that you can't manifest in your life becomes very very challenging.

Check out the complete talk and a small exercise on proving that awareness and the mind are 2 different things.