While training Taiji ball this week, something occurred to my mind. I remembered something that Shifu said to us. He said something like this “The quality and the results of your training depends a lot on how much focused you are on what you’re doing. You should always be focused on your life activities, that way, instead of taking 3 hours to do your homework, write your thesis, etc, you can spend half of the time, because you are concentrated.”

That made me think that maybe we should change the way we live our lives. In meditation, no matter what type of meditation you are training, focusing in something which is always a pre-requisite for reaching your goal. For example, the meditation that I’m training now, requires total focus on the upper dan tian (brain), until I can find this center. This focus, will gradually bring my mind to this center and way from scattered thoughts. Only if I’m fully concentrated on that place, I can gain the benefits of conserving my energy and accessing my subconscious mind.
If we live our lives with the same attitude as in meditation, always focusing every single moment, being there fully, maybe we can improve the efficiency of our daily tasks, and also reach higher stages of understanding.
How many times in our lives, we are studying and at the same time watching TV, or training and thinking about what we have to cook for dinner, or thinking about the girlfriend/boyfriend that is mad or sad, or thinking about other tasks that you have to do? Many, many times. I can say that probably 99% of the people on earth do that daily, in most of their activities. I believe that if we can maintain this focused mind at least 70% of our time, we will have many benefits on our daily activities.

We must not forget also that, sometimes that concentrated mind allow us to have access to deeper stages, and by that, access higher knowledge or memories that can take us out from that concentrated state. This is also positive, even though we are getting out of that state. We should always analyze this thoughts because they may have some importance unknown to us on that moment. With time, you will also be able to access this information without getting out of the meditative state. When you reach that stage, you will then fully obtain the benefits of meditation or just a concentrated mind.

To make you remember the power of focus, let me give a simple example. A laser in simple terms, is just electric energy converted to light and concentrated into a light beam, increasing it’s power so much that it can even cut metal.