Mindfulness - A Stress Management Strategy
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention that originated in Eastern meditation practices, where your complete attention is brought to the present on a moment-to-moment basis. It can occur whether you are meditating, washing the dishes, watching television, or running a marathon. It is the opposite of mindlessness, where you feel out of touch with your self and the present moment.
You don’t need to sit near the top of a mountain meditating to be mindful. In fact, I like to try to take mindfulness into everything I do (with try being the operative word here!). Many of my clients become happier by becoming more aware of their behaviour in the present moment. A guide like Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements gives them encouragement to simply watch without judgement how they behave. They then find themselves feeling much more content, without months of therapy.
Mindfulness exercises encourage you to attend to the experience inside your body, occurring each moment, such as sensations, thoughts, and emotions. Or you can pay attention to aspects of the environment, such as sights and sounds.
Thoughts of the past and the future disappear as you focus on the present. Nothing is evaluated as good or bad, true or false, healthy or sick, or important or trivial. Mindfulness is a non-judgmental “watching” of the ongoing stream of distractions as they arise.
Mindfulness can play a significant role in stress reduction. Research suggests that mindfulness can help with many conditions, including pain, stress, anxiety, depression, and disordered eating.
Each person has a unique way of being mindful - and regular meditation practice will help you to find yours. Lots of mental and emotional activity goes on beneath the surface of your mind, draining your energy.
When the mind is dominated by dissatisfaction, it’s difficult to feel calm or relaxed. Instead, we feel fragmented and driven, wanting everything, right now. This mind state affects our ability to see situations clearly.
Mindfulness is not the answer to life's problems, but we can see more clearly through a mindful focus.
Foundations of Mindfulness Practice
The skill of observing ourselves, almost from outside ourselves, in a compassionate, non-judgemental way takes practise and education. Jon Kabat-Zinn outlines some important attitudes of the mindful observer in his book Full Catastrophe Living (1990):
1. Non-judgmental
The first thing we need to become aware of is our automatic thoughts, so that we can recognise our prejudices and fears. Start by simply noticing them, rather than judging them. Develop an impartial witness - an observing ego - to your experience, and become aware that you are judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences.
Let's say you are focussing on your breathing. At some point you might find your mind saying "this is boring" or "this isn't working". These are judgements. When they come up in your mind, simply suspend them and watch whatever arises, including more judgemental thoughts, without doing anything. Just continue to concentrate on your breathing.
2. Patience
Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we can understand and accept that sometimes things must unfold in their own time. A child may try to help a butterfly to emerge by breaking open its chrysalis. Usually the butterfly doesn't benefit from this. The butterfly emerges in its own time and the process cannot be hurried.
You don't need to feel impatient because you find the mind judging much of the time, or because you are tense, agitated or frightened, or because nothing positive seems to have happened. Treat yourself as well as you would treat the butterfly. Why rush through some moments to get to other, 'better' ones? Each moment in your life is important.
3. Beginner's Mind
Present-moment experience is rich. Most of us take ordinary moments for granted and don't enjoy them. We need to cultivate 'beginner's mind', and be willing to see everything as if for the first time, truly present to ourselves and to our day.
An open, beginner's mind allows us to be receptive to new possibilities. No moment is the same as any other. Each moment is unique. Beginner's mind reminds us of this simple truth.
Cultivate your own beginner's mind in your daily life as an experiment. Try viewing your partner, friends or family with fresh eyes, as if you've never met that person before. Try it when in nature. Are you able to see the sky, the stars, the trees and water with a clear and uncluttered mind? Or are you seeing them through the veil of your own opinions?
4. Trust
Developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings is an integral part of meditation training. It's best to trust in your intuition, even if you make mistakes along the way. If at any time something doesn't feel right to you, honour your feelings. Trusting yourself and your own basic wisdom and goodness is very important in all aspects of mindfulness practice.
It is impossible to become like somebody else. Teachers, books, DVDs and CDs can only be guides. Be open and receptive to what you can learn from other sources, but live your own life. The more you cultivate trust in yourself, the more you can see the basic goodness in others.
5. Non-striving
Almost everything we do is for a purpose, to get something or somewhere. But in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle, because meditation is a non-doing. It has no goal other than for you to be yourself. The irony is that you already are. This sounds paradoxical. But you will be trying less and being more by cultivating the attitude of non-striving.
If you sit down to meditate and think "I am going to get relaxed, or get enlightened, or control my pain, or become a better person", then you have introduced an idea into your mind of not being OK right now. "If I were more calm or more intelligent, or a harder worker, then I would be OK. But right now, I'm not OK".
Mindfulness involves paying attention to whatever is happening. If you are tense, then pay attention to the tension. If you are in pain, then be with the pain as best you can. If you are criticising yourself, observe the activity of the judging mind. Just watch.
6. Acceptance
Acceptance means seeing things as they actually are in the present. If you have a headache, accept that you have a headache. If you are overweight, accept it as a description of your body at this time. Sooner or later we need to accept things as they are. Often acceptance is only reached after we have gone through very emotion-filled periods of denial and anger. These stages are part of the healing process.
When we deny or resist what is already a fact, we are trying to force situations to be the way we would like them to be, which leads to more tension, and prevents positive change. We may be so busy denying and forcing and struggling that we have no energy left for healing and growing.
If you are overweight and feel bad about your body, it usually doesn't help to wait till you've achieved an "ideal" weight before you start liking your body and yourself. it's best to like yourself at your current weight, and then begin to work on healthy eating. Remember, now is the only time you have. By mindfully cultivating self-acceptance, you create the possibility for healing.
Acceptance does not mean that you have to take a passive attitude towards everything and abandon your principles and values. It doesn't mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they 'have to be'. Acceptance simply means developing a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life, no matter what is happening. If we keep our attention focused on the present, what we are attending to in this moment will change, giving us the opportunity to practice accepting what emerges in the next moment.
7. Letting Go
In India there is a particularly clever way of catching monkeys, where hunters cut a hole in a coconut just big enough for a monkey to put its hand through. They drill two smaller holes in the other end, pass a wire through, and secure the coconut to the base of a tree, put a banana inside the coconut and hide. The monkey puts his hand into the coconut and grabs the banana. The open hand can go in but the fist cannot get out. All the monkey has to do to be free is let go of the banana. But most monkeys don't let go!
Our minds catch us in the same way. Cultivating the attitude of letting go, or non-attachment, is fundamental to the practice of mindfulness. When we start paying attention to our inner experience, we discover that there are thoughts and feelings and situations that the mind wants to retain. If these are pleasant, we try to prolong them. Similarly we try to prevent and protect ourselves from unpleasant, painful and frightening thoughts, feeling and sensations.
In the meditation practice we just let our experience be what it is and practise observing it from moment to moment. Letting go is a way of letting things be and of accepting things as they are.
If we find it particularly difficult to let go of something because it has such a strong hold over our mind, it sometimes helps to direct our attention to what holding on feels like. Holding on is the opposite of letting go. We can become an expert on our own attachments, whatever they may be and their consequences in our lives. Being willing to look at the ways we hold on can show us a lot about the experience of its opposite. So whether we are successful at letting go or not, mindfulness continues to teach us if we are willing to look.
Letting go is not such a foreign experience. We do it every night when we go to sleep. We lie down on a padded surface, with the lights out, in a quiet place, and we let go of our mind and body. If you can't let go, you can't go to sleep. So if you can go to sleep, you are already an expert in letting go. Now you just need to practice applying this skill when you are awake.
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