6 Lessons of inner Peace – Lesson 5

Cultivate mindfulness

This notion of “mindfulness” has been used for several years for therapeutic purposes. Develop your attention to yourself, to what you think, to what you do, but also to the world, to the sounds, to the smells, to the silences that surround us …

One track: practice the art of haiku.

In three lines and seventeen syllables, these short Japanese poems sound like “an invitation to capture the simplest pleasures, those that one attains when one takes the time to stop and look”, writes Pascale Senk in the preface of the art of haiku. “Remembering a haiku – better yet, trying to write it – can silence our mental chatter and our desire to master everything, via the famous discursive thought praised by Descartes.”

A  Haiku poem example for the 5/7/5 rule: 

“The Old Pond” by Matsuo Bashō

An old silent pond

A frog jumps into the pond—

Splash! Silence again.