This is Optimal Living Daily. Four Ways to Live Each Day with Intention by Shelley Levitt with

LiveHappy.com, and I'm Justa Mollick. And we'll jump right into today's post as we optimize your life.

Four Ways to Live Each Day with Intention by Shelley Levitt with LiveHapy.com.

I want to move through life with energy and a sense of discovery, achievement, joy, and engagement.

That is my intention. My hope is that living according to it would be the antidote to the

uneasy feeling I often have at the end of the

day when I flop into bed filled with self-reproach and wonder where my time went. My intent is to be

guided by purpose instead of feeling that I'm spending my time haphazardly succumbing to whim or

distraction. According to expert Malika Chopra, creator of the website Intent.com, and psychologist

Elliot Birkman, head of the social and effective neuroscience lab at the University of Oregon,

setting intentions can function as a kind of internal north star lighting the path to greater

fulfillment and life satisfaction. These are the changes I've made in the few weeks since setting my

intention. Number one, I meditate almost daily. It has taken me years to commit to a meditation

habit, but the 10 or 15 minutes I spend doing a guided meditation on the Calm app has been transformative.

The turning point was a workshop I took

with Zoceste Norman Fisher, a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. When people say they don't have time

to meditate, he said, I asked them, how do you have time to not meditate? With a regular mindfulness

practice, he went on, you'll have fewer accidents, you'll lose things less frequently,

your focus will improve, making decisions will become easier. Remarkably, I found all these things

to be true, and when I'm feeling stressed, I summon the image I visualized during my meditation.

I imagine my breath as a long string of pearls, and it helps me reconnect with that experience

of stillness. Yet as good as meditation makes me feel, I'll skip it unless I keep to a schedule.

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