How Mindfulness Can Help You
Mindfulness Meditation using Breathing- How it can help you with anything when Thinking is no longer useful.
Read on and see, and try some meditation yourself, to convince yourself.
How the thinking-dong mode of the mind works and why it may not help emotionally charge issues?
Your usual thinking-doing mind handles problems, especially emotionally charged issues, by more thinking and more emotional reacting , usually by avoiding negative emotions, wanting more of positive ones, and ignoring what it finds neutral, not so interesting. It at the same time pulls you out of the present moment of experience before you have even got to know the problem for what it really is, and starts to use past experience and future needs to help with the problem. This is fine when it works but when it doesn’t it may make the problem worse by fueling the issue with more emotions, making it worse, and more likely to occur again and again.
Could a Different approach help?
These kind of issues may benefit from a different approach that, 1. keeps you in the present moment, 2. uses experiencing without thinking by sensing-feeling of the emotions and bodily sensations, & 3. that is not emotionally reactive. Also it would be helpful if can be used over and over again for these problems that are usually re occurring and or episodic in nature, often too emotional for logical thinking-doing approaches alone. For these mindfulness used with breathing or mindful breathing is ideal.
How Mindfulness Can help!
Mindfulness handles problems by keeping you in the present moment only, not using past experience or future wishes, expectations, or planning. It doesn’t use thinking at all but only the direct experience of emotions and bodily sensations of a problem to help it, and rather then reacting to emotions it treats everything the same . It uses equanimity or emotional even mindedness which means it doesn’t avoid or resist negative feeling, or want more or give in to positive feeling, or ignore the neutral or less interesting, but accepts them all equally , allows them to unfold in their wave like nature, as it feels-senses the emotions and bodily sensations involved with the problem.
How can Mindfulness help me and my mind?
Mindfulness by itself and used with breathing has great usefulness in any issue of daily living and for mental health maintenance and its problems, for prevention, for general and specific therapy. It has effects in maintaining mental health by fostering a calm emotionally stable mind, a relaxed body, a concentrated, attentive mind with better memory , less anxiety, depression, with control of all emotions, with more intuitive awareness, less emotional overflow to fuel mental and somatic problems. It can be used diagnostically to help one be more aware of what the source of one problems may be especially when the person doesn’t know “what is wrong”, because it tunes you into your thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations in a new and powerfully diagnostic way, and therapeutically for specific syndromes like anxiety, depression, anger and impulse control, addictions, somatic emotionally charged issues like headaches, skin rashes, stomach-intestinal problems, pain syndromes, trouble with sleeping.
Do you want more satisfaction, less suffering and boredom? Try being mindful and practice mindful breathing and meditation!
Much of these helpful effects are based on its general properties, that anything that is mindfully experience can be helped. Whatever is pleasurable becomes more satisfying because you are satisfied with what you have in the present moment, not wanting more, thus less likely to result in over indulgences and addictions, the negative become associated with less pain and suffering because your not avoiding it and adding resistance make it worse, and what is perceived as neutral because you don’t ignore it and give it mindful attention becomes more interesting less boring a source of unexpected and new satisfaction. It generally enhances the positive, diminishes the negative as it stabilizes any mental state.
How can mindfulness do these things?
It is the awareness, the accepting, the allowing, the non interfering nature and direct experience of feeling-sensing without thought, without emotional reactions, that causes mindfulness to be so useful, powerful and helpful especially if sustained by concentration from mindfulness based breathing. Mindfulness is easy to describe but hard to do because we are often not even aware that the thinking mind is doing because we are on auto pilot, and doing it very quickly, and as it works it tend to make us more emotional rather than less, with more and more thinking causing mental noise an interference in a sense, and cognitive-emotional distortion with resulting experiential tension and anxiety, as it pulls us further and further away from the present moment experience which is where we should be, or may want to be to help solve the problem.
How does applying mindfulness to breathing in and out of meditation help make it more powerful?
By applying mindfulness to breathing , we can help these problems of the thinking auto pilot mode of the mind, decrease the tension and anxiety, clarify and reverse the distortions, resulting in diminished problem formation, enhancement of the positive, while stabilizing the mental state. It does this because the mindful breathing slow the mind, makes it more alert, relaxing the body as it builds concentration, and calms the mind, making it less emotional and quiets the mind, making the thinking quieter and quieter, keeping the thinking and the emotional reactions to the thinking in the back ground of the mind, as it keeps the problem we want to help in the front of the mind so we can stay focused on the one thing, the problem, without distraction, & if we do it helps us deal with them, & then allows us enough time to really get to know & help the problem in a new way by no thinking, no emotional reactions, but by feeling the emotions & bodily sensations of the problem.
An Amazing fact, do just one thing, mindfulness meditation using breathing and your life can change!
An amazing fact is that even if one only did mindfulness based breathing meditation everything that could be helped would come in the process, and be helped because it would come up as distractions and difficulty to the process, without doing anything else special. With practice anything a problem or special issue, that could be experienced a thought, feeling, bodily or any other sensations could be the object of mindfulness and thus be helped with more specificity.