One technique that we encourage is getting more body awareness going in your life, which then helps bring down your stress and helps brings down your restlessness as well.
Something else that's very important is to be aware of what we call the Four Great Efforts. This is the main subject in the Day 8 evening talk of our regular retreats, which Rosemary gives. There's the effort to prevent unbeneficial things. There's the effort to let go of unbeneficial things. There's the effort to develop beneficial things. And there's the effort to maintain beneficial things.
When you are looking at restlessness, in particular, you are looking at the unbeneficial side. You are looking at the effort to prevent and the effort to let go. If you are always working just on letting go of restlessness, letting go of restlessness, letting go - then it always keeps coming back, right? So the letting go isn't enough; you need to learn how to prevent it.
Now, in order to prevent restlessness in your normal life you have to be careful with your eyes and what you look at. You have to be careful with your ears and what you hear. You have to be careful with what goes into your head which includes: television, movies, videos, books, magazines, and whatever else. Your computer, does your computer ever suck you in? Yeah, you know, people get lost in space cyberspace. Imagine that you've gone online and you're looking up one bit of information that you need, maybe for your work or something, you look for one bit of information, and three hours later you can't remember what it was that you were looking for. Has this ever happened to you?
So, if you are more careful with what you're putting into your eyes and into your ears, in particular, then you won't get as restless as the average person will.
Now, letting go of restlessness is what I was talking about this morning, the stress growing, you being mindful and then it lowers and so on. That's very good for letting go. It's also very good for preventing. If you could be mindful twenty-four hours a day - perfect! Then, of course nothing unbeneficial is going to come up. But we can't do that and even, they say, enlightened people can't do that, except the Buddha. They're not mindful twenty-four hours a day either. However, they're not going to have restlessness the way we have restlessness. So the effort to prevent is very important to balance restlessness, and also the effort to let go in the similar ways to what I mentioned this morning.