Theoretical Discussion of Mindfulness Meditation Q and A
Theory of Mindfulness Meditation-Mindfulness Psychology
What are two parts of mindfulness meditation and what can they help?
There is the part that builds concentration by focusing on one thing like breathing over and over, called the concentrative part. The second part or the mindfulness -insight or the “knowing” or the “being aware” part is what makes this form or meditation more useful, powerful, and difficult to learn, but is worth the effort to learn because of its added benefits. You just don’t concentrate for the sake of concentration and calm, but do it noticing and staying aware, moment by moment of the fact that your are concentrating. It is this knowing or noticing that makes all the difference.
What about the concentrative part is it useful alone?
This concentrative meditation alone can improve attention, concentration, relax the body, decreases anxiety, improve depression, stabilize the mood, and slows down thinking. This can make problems less intense and more manageable. As you are learning to do meditation and your concentration is improving these issues will improve, if you want more improvement , want new ideas or insights, and literally want your symptoms to decrease and be eliminated then add the mindfulness part
What does the mindfulness part do and add?
The second part is the “knowing” part, also called the insight or mindfulness part. Mindfulness adds two things, resulting in not only the new ideas or insights about the problems because you will see connections that you were not aware of before , but also secondly if applied over and over, it can literally burn away the energy fueling the feelings and sensations that are driving your problems, make them weaker and weaker, until they gradually go away. These two parts concentration and mindfulness work together to help each other. Mindfulness is the more important of the two, be mindful and concentration will also increase.
How does the concentrative part work to help?
The concentrative meditative state is based on the fact that if the mind can stay relaxed and focused on one object such as the breathing, at the exclusion of all others, over and over again, it induces further relaxation and focus. With the body relaxed, the mind calm, alert, concentrated, it is more able to sustain mindful knowing and thus becomes more open to direct experiential, pre-conceptual awareness [meaning not using words or logic-the intuitive mode of the mind]. This mindful understanding and its insights will lead to lasting change in emotions and thinking. Secondly the increased concentration gives the mind staying power it needs to stay focused to experience the powerful feelings and sensations that are fueling your problems so that their energy is gradually burned away.
That is a complicated explanation, what does it mean more simply?
What it means is that though concentration part of meditation is helpful in itself and is worth practicing in itself, for mindfulness meditation it is also a tool so you can hang in there longer with being mindful, that is staying aware only in the present moment, not thinking, not emotionally reacting, but having the staying power to feel and sense the powerful thoughts, body sensations, and emotions that are driving your problems, make them weaker, or until they go away, and at the same time get new ideas about them when you leave the mindful mode and go back to your usual thinking-doing mode or your mind.
What is this mindfulness and why is it important?
As stated above mindfulness adds the insight and change component to meditation. Mindfulness must be experienced to be understood, but can be described as purposeful here and now paying attention , a mirror like awareness, a direct experience of all things that enter the mind as they are in reality, before the mind changes and distorts them by responding with thinking, feelings, past memories, fantasies and future planning. It can be simply described as the first moment of any present experience that is sensed-felt and accepted for what it originally is, before the thinking mind changes it based on its emotional judgments.
How does the psychology of mindfulness help problems?
The psychology of mindfulness is based on reversing the effects the thinking-doing mode of the mind. The thinking-doing mode of the mind sensing pleasure or pain in a reality, reacts with attraction or aversion, if it feels positive you want more, if it feels negative you want less or avoid it all together, if it seems neutral, it is ignored. After this emotional judgment the mind begins to think based on past experience and future concerns making changes and thus distorting the original reality of an experience. Doing this habitually, quickly, automatically[often unconsciously being on auto pilot], sometimes instantaneously to pull the mind away from the present experience , not giving one a chance to see things the way they really are and then based on the a new distorted reality caused by thinking becomes attached to the wanting, or the avoiding, or to the ignoring. One powerful way this is acted out is the minds insistence of wanting health, avoiding sickness, and ignoring anything it finds neutral which if was further known may in fact be harmful or hurtful. This causes a constant fear of losing the pleasure gained by the thinking, or a fear of not being able to successfully avoid the negative, and a generalized anxiety or sense of fear of the unknown, because there is so much we don’t give ourselves a chance to know. This sets up a state of chronic tension, fear, frustration and general un-satisfaction. Mindfulness sustained and repeated counteracts these effects allowing the original awareness to be known, as it peals away layer and layer of distortion and the experiential tension or anxiety with relief of suffering caused by the attachment. This is best accomplished by practicing mindfulness meditation and allowing the problem issues to occur as distractions or making them new objects of meditation.
Again a very complicated discussion, what does mindfulness do practically and more simply?
Mindfulness in conscious and intentional so first it pulls you off auto pilot , brings you to and keeps you in the present moment, so you can be aware of what is going on. You have to be aware of what is happening before you can help anything. Secondly rather than reacting to emotions good, bad or neutral, mindfulness treats all of these equally, accepts them for what they are, allows them to be, as it continues to keep you in the present, and so that your reactions to these emotions don’t drag you to the past, to get you off focus, or pull you to the future to get you off focus in another way, but keeps you focused only on the present as you accept what is happening and allow it to unfold so you can get to know it accurately, and not jump to any conclusions about it based on that initial emotional charge. And if the charge is neutral mindfulness wont allow you to ignore what ever it is, but again give you a chance to know it, and to see if it could be helpful or not. Thirdly mindfulness doesn’t use thinking, not in the present, not from the past, or the future, but uses only direct experience to notice, observe, understand, and make changes. This direct experience is the ability to feel and sense those parts of emotions, thoughts, and body sensations that can be felt and sensed. It is this direct feeling and sensing, with acceptance, and allowing without using thought, or emotional judgment, that leads to insights and makes the changes that weaken and can eliminated your problems.
How does meditation help mindfulness?
The concentration and calm one gets from the meditative process makes mindfulness more powerful and stable, and thus more useful. Let me illustrate, mindfulness like a muscle gets stronger and develops endurance the more it is used in and out of meditation. Using mindfulness during meditation the calm alert focus cause the mindfulness to grow exponentially, that is without meditation practice 10 + 10 + 10 = 30, vs. with meditation 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000. This exponential effect increases the pre conceptual “intuitive” believability and certainty that results with mindful “insights” and increases the chance of healing effects when you apply direct experience. Simply meditation makes the mindfulness the knowing more stable, powerful, and you as the practioners will literally feel and sense the truth with more conviction, of what you are observing and what is happening, and feel and sense the changes it is making to your body, mind and emotions.
What is the goal of meditation?
The goal of mindfulness or insight meditation is to sustain through concentration uninterrupted mindfulness to purposively experience here and now reality of mental phenomenon in and out of the meditative state.
Is mindfulness like any other kinds of therapy?
Mindfulness is analytic like psychoanalysis in it tries to breakdown down complicated problems and processes to their origins, and like cognitive therapy it deals with emotional and mental distortions that cause, amplify, and keep fueling problems, but it does these things not by changes induced by logical thinking and reflection, but by accurately directly experiencing the problem, and that experience itself changes the problem.
How does mindfulness make changes?
It is based on a similar principal in quantum physics that just the process of observing a thing causes the thing to change. The experience itself results in the change. Three factors need to be experienced by mindfulness to have this change, knowing what the experience is, knowing its intensity, and its duration. Notice that the content of a thought its story line is not one of the factors. A thought is treated like a vector with direction[an emotional charge] strength and duration , with its actual content or meaning not needed to be experienced or understood for mindfulness to make changes through direct experience. Mindfully experiencing what was previously unknown directly reduces fear and gives one the option to act on the new knowledge.
What are the deeper insights associated with mindfulness?
Mindfulness experience of deeper reality reveals that what we believe are unchanging permanent separate things, are in fact ever changing interconnected interdependent processes or events. Actually inter connected and inter dependent waves of energy experience. The implications of this for mental health is that symptoms or problems are not “solid substantial things belonging to the self” but are temporary non substantial processes or events, more like waves of energy that come and go , and that can be changed by the energy of being observed by direct experience. There are actually much deeper implications because the applying these insights to the concept of the “the self” or the “ego”, bring its very existence and its power into question, and thus removes the sting all psychopathology has on the ego. Removing the “I” or “me” or “mine” from a problem can have great therapeutic effects.
What does this mean practically?
Practically and simply this means that feeling a feeling, and sensing a sensation by accepting it regardless of emotional charge positive or negative, and not interfering with it by thinking about it, but allowing its wave like nature to unfold as it is experienced is all that is needed to change it, weakening it if it is negative, enhancing it if it is positive, stabilizing the unstable, by decreasing its energy, and making neutral more “exciting” by increasing its energy wave. This is similar to the findings of subatomic physics wave vs. particle and energy = matter[wave-particle] x speed of light , for mindfulness psychology it is conditioned vs. or equal to/ original reality, where the observation alone changes the properties of subatomic phenomenon.
What are the negative mental health effects of not being mindful of the impermanent unsubstantial interconnected wave like nature of all mental health symptoms?
Two negative effects both which increase anxiety -depression, and thus suffering in general are: 1. Not seeing a thing as a multi process, one cannot deal with it by breaking it down to more manageable parts. 2. We are driven by excessive & obsessional attachment to avoid pain and seek pleasure in what we believe are unchanging things.
How does un-mindfulness lead to worry, fear, anxiety and depression?
Un mindfulness causes us to live in constant fear that we may not be able to keep avoiding the feared thing which is constantly changing, or we will lose the pleasured object gained and have been attached to, and then get depressed when it changes or goes away, feeling it as a loss. Mindfulness can prevent these outcomes.
What are the three things mindfulness can help us do when it comes to handling problems?
In brief and simplistic summary mindfulness alone can help us do three things, 1. Keep us consciously aware of staying in the present and do what the present requires, rather than being on auto pilot, 2. See things as they really are not driven by emotions and dealing with a distorted reality that has been changed by thinking 3. See the deeper reality free of conditions and attachments, as we use direct experience to feel-sense the inter connected inter dependent wave like non substantial and impermanent nature of reality.
What are the general effects if used with meditation?
Used with meditation it exponentially reestablishes the original reality of experiences, decreasing pain & increasing pleasure ,leading to decreased mental health symptoms, may eliminate them, prevent relapses with lasting and healing emotional, mental and behavioral change.
How can I convince myself that mindfulness can help?
The power and usefulness of mindfulness is best demonstrated using it in daily life beginning with mindful breathing and meditation using breathing.