1.1.12 Mindfulness Meditation and Mental Health
The goal of mindfulness meditation is know the functioning of your mind, and as a bonus you will feel better.
Mindfulness makes everything better, the positives become more pleasurable, the negatives become less painful, and that which seems boring and neutral becomes interesting and reveals previously unknown treasures.
An antidote to suffering and boredom and a road to more happiness and peace of mind, are all the side effects of mindfulness and mindfulness based meditation.
The following Problems are helped by the proper and regular use of mindfulness meditation:
1. Being on auto pilot caught in automatic thinking, feeling and body and relationship problems that you are not only not aware of but are perpetuating and making your problems worse.
2. Spending too much time living in the past and or the future, and unable and unwilling to stay in the present to properly and completely evaluating the problem
3. Trapped in the thinking-doing mode when thinking and doing is no longer effective to help your problems
4. Reacting to feelings by avoiding them, indulging in them, resisting them, turning them into something physical, handling them by excessive thinking, or acting them out in self destructive patterns in work, play, and in relationships to people and things.
5. Being unable to see the true reality of your problems seeing them for what they really are with their connections that cause and perpetuate them.
6. Having the inability to fully concentrate on your problems because you are too easily distracted.
7. Not having the mental discipline and effort to work on your problems.
8. Not having the stability and calmness of mind to focus on your problems.
9. Not being able to get to the deeper sources of self healing available in the unconscious mind filled with unlimited resources of wisdom , power and health.
Mindfulness is present moment awareness that accepts and allows reality for what it really is without changing it with thinking processes and emotional reaction. Prolonging and sustaining mindfulness on anything turn it into meditation.
There are six basic steps to mindfulness meditation:
1. Being mindful and sustaining it.
2. Developing concentration by mindfully focusing on something over and over without distraction.
3. Sustained focused mindful concentration leads to a stable calm and flexible mind.
4. This stable and calm mind develops equanimity, that is the ability to handle the positive, negative or the neutral equally. Not following the good, avoiding the bad or ignoring what seems neutral.
5. Reality testing and wisdom, that is seeing the deeper meaning of all things develops and with it the pleasant feeling associated with true reality. Especially seeing knowing and experiencing the impermanence and changing nature of all conditioned things, most specifically of the self or ego. Suffering if you don’t experience this reality and happiness if you do.
6. As reality testing and wisdom grow there is deep understanding of the inter-connectiveness of all things, with growing feelings of love, kindness, joy and compassion, towards self and all others.