The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you "make time" for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.
Simple Strategies to Strengthen Self Control
Witness the role of willpower in your daily life: From the moment the alarm sounds in the morning, it’s only by sheer determination that you rouse yourself from the warm sheets into the still-dark morning. You grit your teeth when the barista takes 6 minutes to fill your coffee order–never mind those $200 shoes you talk yourself out of buying or the fries you force yourself to leave on your plate at lunch. It’s no wonder that by the time 6 pm rolls around, you’re waging World War III on your husband for forgetting to pick up the milk on his way home. Again.
Our lives are full of temptations that tax our self-control and drain our willpower, but a new and growing body of research says you can make it through the day without losing your cool–and it isn’t as hard as you think. First, you need to realize that doing anything you don’t want to do–suppressing irritation at your mother-in-law, fighting an impulse to do something you shouldn’t, completing a task when you want to quit–draws on the same storehouse of willpower. But help is here: According to Roy Baumeister, PhD, director of social psychology at Florida State University, willpower functions like a muscle. It can be fatigued by overuse, but it can also be strengthened to make you more productive, less stressed, and happier. All you need are a few healthy habits to keep your willpower tank on full.
Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra.
When Dr. Baumeister monitored workers in Germany, he was surprised to find that people spent between 3 and 4 hours per day resisting desires, the most common of which were urges to eat, sleep, take a break from work, and have sex. But Dr. Baumeister also found that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did. At first he was puzzled. If self-control is for resisting desires, why are people who have more of it using it less? Soon the explanation emerged: They’re better at proactively arranging their lives to avoid problem situations. These are the folks who take the car to the shop before it breaks down, give themselves enough time to finish a project, and steer clear of all-you-can-eat buffets. They play offense instead of defense–which means they set themselves up so they have a realistic chance of succeeding.
“Mindfulness” is the spiritual practice of being aware of your present moment. World famous Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh has developed the use of a bowl-gong in a practice he calls the “mindfulness bell.” When you hear the sound of the mindfulness bell, you are invited to take a moment to breathe in and out and center yourself in the present. This practice allows the sound of the bowl-gong to periodically connect you to the peace and tranquility that resides inside you right now. This delightful practice reduces stress and improves your overall health.
The Zen Timepiece can serve as a mindfulness bell in two ways: it can be set to strike on the hour (providing an hourly moment of stillness), or it can be set to strike at a programmed interval, such as every 20 minutes, or even every three hours.
The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you "make time" for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.
Now & Zen – The Gong Meditation and Alarm Clock Shop
1638 Pearl Street
Boulder, CO 80302
(800) 779-6383
orders@now-zen.com
Posted in Meditation Timers, Meditation Tools, mindfulness practice
