The Way Forward Is Simple: Choose Something, and Then Commit
Sage advice from meditation teacher Jeff Warren
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I’ve been enjoying Tamara Levitt’s guided 10-minute meditations over the last couple of years, but this morning I wanted to try something a little different.
Right next to the Daily Calm in my Calm app was the Daily Trip, with author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren.
I’ve heard about Jeff for years, but until this morning, I’d never tried one of his guided meditations. Today’s episode was called “A Conscious Choice.” That sounded good enough for me. I clicked on it, settling into my seat.
A couple of minutes in, he dropped the first bomb of wisdom.
Choose something, and then commit.
To be fair, he was talking about finding your focus for the session, but for me, it had a much deeper meaning.
In order to help get the listener grounded, he offered a couple of options for where to place your attention.
One option was to zoom in on a single aspect of your experience (a sound, feeling, sensation, etc.) and to use that as your home base, coming back to it whenever your attention shifted and you got distracted. Another, equally valid option, was to approach the session wide open, with no single point of focus. You could just sit there and “notice what you notice,” as Jeff put it.
Either way was perfectly fine. All you had to do was choose something — and then commit.
I suddenly felt that his instructions were about much more than this session itself. His words stopped me in my tracks.
Choose something, and then commit.
The words hit me like a ton of bricks.
Wasn’t this the key to success in every area of life?
In marriage, you choose someone, and then commit to loving them and going through life together. In business, you choose something (a service or product idea), and then commit to building it and sharing it with the world. In the arts, you choose an art form (like writing or painting), and then commit to practicing it day by day, slowly improving and expanding your reach over time. In investing, you choose where to…
