The 4 Habits Taught By Buddhist Monks That Will Transform Your Life Forever

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I have been lazy throughout my life. Even though I have been working on a 10–7 job (it’s a 9-hour working day in India), I have always been lazy and very unproductive for years. This is until I stumbled upon a book by Jay Shetty, “Think Like A Monk which literally changed my life. It talks about habits that we need to incorporate into our day-to-day lives.

Here are the four habits that we need to do on a daily basis that will absolutely transform our lives. 

Thankfulness

It’s so important to find time in our day, to be genuinely thankful and grateful for what we have, what we’ve received, what we experience and sometimes being thankful and grateful even the moments in our life that in the beginning we felt pain and challenged by. And thankfulness means,

deeply feeling gratitude in our heart for those moments, for those people, for those experience, for those things, where we pause for a moment and acknowledge how fortunate we are to have those moments in our lives.

Thankfulness becomes powerful when it becomes our mindset throughout the day, but we can start by beginning our day with what we’re grateful for, and ending our day with what we’re grateful for. When we do this at the beginning and the end of our day, we start doing at the beginning and the end of every activity. Eating food, sending an email, having a phone call, whatever it may be, that is the first habit we need every day to transform our lives.

Inspiration

We all need to read or consume something insightful and inspiring that we can try and turn into an application. The source can be anything like a book, movie, YouTube video or even a medium article. When you absorb something new every day and try to put it into practice, you can start to feel the benefits of applying that inspiration in your life. 

Start reading a paragraph every day book a book, or maybe listen to a podcast while you cook, or listen to it while you work out, so you can find just one line that can transform the way you think, the way you believe in and how you function throughout the day. So the second habit is to find time for inspiration and insight. It can be one paragraph, and it can be one line, it can be one chapter, whatever it is, it just needs to be something that you strive to start applying into your life every day.

Meditation

Meditation is spending time with yourself, spending time by yourself, finding an activity that brings you joy when you do it, doing something that helps you feel more connected with yourself, that makes you feel like you’re understanding yourself better. It can be sitting there and aligning with your breath. It can be sitting there and visualizing what are you trying to create and who you’re trying to become. It could be sitting there and repeating affirmations that are rewiring your brain and your mind to be the script that you want to live. 

We always think we’re ahead or behind, only repeat, “I am exactly where I need to be”, we’re reminded of the power in the current moment. Meditation is the practice of silencing the thoughts in your mind to achieve awareness or an alternate state of consciousness. Meditation can help reduce stress, boost immunity, increase concentration, and improve sleep quality — all of which are beneficial to highly successful people.

Exercise

The most important habit of all. Movement, whatever it is, it may be dance, it may be cycling, it may be swimming, it may be a sport, anything that gets your body moving. There’s a great Buddhist statement that says,

“What movement does to your body, 
meditation does to your mind.”

So our mind needs to be still and our body needs to be moved to be expressive. There has been one study which showed that workday exercise, not only improves well-being but participants noted a 72 per cent improvement in time management and workload completed on days when they exercised.


It is often debatable that the way of the Happy Life has to be complicated else everyone would have achieved it but to be honest, it is as simple as incorporating these basic habits in our lives.

If you look closely to all the habits, it also creates the acronym TIME, where

T stand for Thankfulness
I stand for Inspiration
M stand for Meditation
E stand for Exercise

So make time for these four things every day and every single day will be sublime.


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