Planning

Sometimes the mind is very focused on the past, maybe even obsessed with things that have happened in the past. At other times, the mind seems to wanna look forward, searching for things in the future, what could be, what might be, what may be. Very rarely do we spend time simply being present with what's happening right now. And it's the mind which is looking to the future. There's the planning mind. It's really important to say at the beginning planning is not a bad thing. We need to be able to plan. If we didn't plan, our life would be chaos. The world would be chaos. So it's not that all thinking and all planning is bad. Absolutely not. It's just recognizing the planning which is productive and helpful and the planning which is unproductive, unhelpful, and at times, perhaps even unhealthy. And by that, I mean, it's the kind of planning where we already know what we're doing during the day. We know what we have to do. It's as though the mind is just sort of, it's an hour or two or maybe a day or two ahead of us, and it's just constantly churning away, thinking about what's gonna happen, what you're gonna do, what you're gonna say, what you're gonna buy, what, and we're not, in living in the future, in planning so incessantly, we're not really even planning in a very constructive way. It's not even a way we can really engage with. It's just an idea of the future that we're playing over and over in the mind. So as with any Headspace session, when you see the mind, doesn't matter whether it's disappearing backwards to the past or leaping off, planning into the future, when you see that tendency, and within the framework of the exercise, it doesn't matter whether it's productive or unproductive within the exercise, when you see the mind going in that direction, we let it go. And we come back to the focus. Outside of the exercise, when you see that planning kind of train getting going in the mind, if it appears productive and it's conscious and there's intention, and you know very clearly why you are having to plan and what you're planning for, then great, absolutely engage with it. It's important, it's necessary. But if it feels like just that background chatter, just sort of the incessant planning which can go on in the mind, then it's at that point we say, "Okay, that's thinking," and we let it go, and we just come back to whatever we're doing at the time. And if we're not doing anything, it's over, we're just, I dunno, sitting for a bus, waiting for a bus or sitting on a train or something, then simply bringing your attention into the body and being sort of more present with either the contact with the feet on the floor or the body on the seat, whatever it might be, but...