Spoon Task

This task is generally at the bottom of the totem pole of tasks for your thinking-will and the body will justify with reasons not to do it – like why bother.

Firstly, it needs to bother and simply do it because you have asked or said it to be done, since the body-will tends to assign hierarchy to tasks and will try to get away from this work if it can with some excuse or other. This task is basically reinforcing your inner will as the master and body to only follow it.

Thinking-will (ego usually attached) wants to do work only if a great purpose is attached and isn’t interested in the daily grind and mundane tasks. Larger purpose we all know is achieved only through the daily grind and mundane jobs done over long periods of time.

Spoon task is meant to detach this ego/larger purpose approach towards task and simply do it because you’ve asked your body to do, then it must be done.

Secondly, this task will activate and fine tune your inner-mind signals giving you the alarm to do the task (as you haven’t sent any external alarm). You can check your watch though at times and can become alert as it approaches your designated time. In a few days, you may not need to check your watch too.

This antenna strengthening process will help in your T2A moments not only for simple ones from day to day but also more long haul T2A from professional or personal space (imagine Gandhi going on the Dandi march) or career change, major professional or personal decisions and so on.

Thirdly, a sense of duty even to the mundane (detaching feeling and thought) and rather approaching such task with sense of duty invoked repeatedly for 4 times (maybe 6 times but more than this can get quite exhausting mentally)

Fourthly, the objective is to build thinking-will ability to focus and unfocus repeatedly, as this will help in improved decision making quality by see the big picture, creative thought flow and new solutions that can emerge during the unfocussing times.

Lastly, create movement intermittently, as many times in modern lifestyle, we get stuck in chairs, couches, work stations and when movement is curbed, procrastination forces are slowly strengthening themselves.

Other points to remember

No alarm to be set to remind you that it’s time for polishing, rather let the signals come from within your inner-mind. It’s ok if you miss it at times initially and 2 min of polishing is good enough.

Here the intent is not the polishing quality or duration but to wake up to the inner mind signal, sense of duty, focus and unfocus and create or stir movement from time to time to keep the will-forces active. It’s preferable to keep same object or same type object.

Post the camp i.e. once the spoon process is established, you can replace spoon with something from your work front (simple task but important) that needs constant and regular attention during the day.

Spoon task – tips

One of the earlier boot camp participant had formed an interesting personal routine around the spoon task. Every time he got up for the spoon task, he would take 100 steps and drink 2 glasses of water, then polish the spoon and get back to his work.

Capt. Preetham Madhukar