Live a life that you will appreciate looking back.

Everyone wants to do it, but very few actually know how.


Introduction

First of all, you need to be able to drive yourself to where you want to go; if you were asked to do a breathing exercise which entailed focusing wholly on your breath, you might be surprised that though you set yourself to do it for 15 minutes, you find your mind in the next moment dreaming about the past or future, what is for lunch... The ability to set one's mind to doing something and not be affected by distractors - called presence... - is vital to shaping the life that you want to live. This makes sense, but how do we go about intentionally being present?

  1. To begin with, conciously establish with yourself what you are doing. You may think that you are already subconciously doing this, but bringing it into the concious realm is the key.
  2. Do what ever it is at a calm pace; when we are not present stress arises and we speed up, so it is important to conciously do things calmly, an indication to the brain that everything is ok. In this state we think the clearest, so do not worry that you will be "less productive" if not calm.
  3. When you notice that your mind has been distracted, lovingly bring it back to what you are doing. This could be stress-scratching, dreaming about a previous holiday you went on, or anything of the sort. This occurs because the brain is wired to put in the minimum amount of effort required, which is not a mindset that allows us to live at our best. That is why we bring the mind back to the present when it drifts.
Now that you have a strong ability to drive yourself, even more importantly you need to reflect that you are "driving" in the right direction. This is called consideration: "Is this what I would have wanted myself to have done?", "Am I loving this person or offending them?", "Am I helping those in need?".
These two ingredients, presence and consideration, are the essentials for a happy life.
The organisation has two parts which support this:

Circle Discussion

Quite simply a caring and supportive community you can join. Circle Discussions give the group a consistent space to:

  1. Discuss an excerpt of a book chosen by your group; this gives the opportunity for each person to share what they found interesting, and relate it to their experience. Each time someone different can pick the excerpt and come up with some discussion questions from the book; you don't have to agree with everything.
  2. Help others work through anything they would appreciate a second opinion on; most often just by saying the issue aloud you see the solution to it.
Typically meets every one to two weeks.

Unity Breathing

This is the gym for strengthening presence. Though intentionally being present definitely helps, meditation, which Unity Breathing is, centers all of your energy on your presence, rather than, say, writing an essay. In this way, it is a powerful manner to strengthen your presence:

  1. In a group, as well as a bell or something that sounds (or you can clap). You can also do this solo, but it is more effective with a group.
  2. Each person takes turns leading the breathing meditation. The leader signals "in" and "out" for the breaths and strikes the sound every 5 breaths.
  3. Every 20 breaths the leading gets passed on to the next person.
This may all seem very simple, but try it out for a month and you will see what a large difference it makes.

Q and A

Who started this initiative?
This organisation is called Humanity because by practicing the two elements that are core to the organisation, we are expressing humanity. The extra y in the domain is there because "humanity.org" would cost millions and "humanityy.org" was $7.50. This is an initiative started by students at Imperial College London seeking more meaningful lives.
I don't know of any local group, what can I do?
Reach out and our volunteer team will see if there is a local group active we can link you with ([email protected]).