What is Mindfulness, Meditation and How can it help!
What is mindfulness, mindfulness meditation and how can it help?
Anything experienced with mindfulness is improved, the positives become more pleasurable, the negatives have less suffering, and what is neutral and/or boring becomes unexpectedly interesting. It is to our advantage to be come mindful and to be able to sustain it. Any process that sustains uninterrupted mindfulness can be considered to be a meditation. The simplest and easiest process is to learn how to do mindfulness based breathing meditation.
Many mental health and physical problems can be helped by applying mindfulness. Physical pain can have less suffering, panic, anxiety, insomnia, depression , and addictions can be lessened and avoided, any psychosomatic problem can be helped.
In the process of practicing mindfulness and mindfulness based breathing or other meditation other positive things will happen, you will become more and more alert, and aware and oriented to the present doing what you really want and need or should be doing, and you will do it more effectively because you will be seeing it more realistically, not having your judgment distorted by emotions, past experiences or unrealistic future wants , needs and fears.
If this is all true why aren’t more people being mindful and meditating? Three reasons, one they don’t know about it, two they don’t really understand it, and three they aren’t practicing it. It is the latter which is the key, the actual practice like in any skill or sport, that leads to really knowing what it is, how it works and how specifically it can help you. Mindfulness is a process that must be experienced to understood and properly used. To experience it you must practice, practice , over and over, and over and over again and again.
The mind can be thought of as having two modes, the experiencing , the pure awareness or being mode and the thinking and doing mode. First the mind uses pure awareness as it experiences a thing and then it thinks about, and may do something about it. Mindfulness is an example of the pure awareness of the experiencing mode, it occurring before the thinking mode intervenes, gets involved and takes over. What keeps the thinking going are two basic factors , its emotional reactions, good, bad or neutral, and the experience it has had with the past and what it thinks it may need or expect in the future. So the thinking more emotionally reacts and compares the present with past and future. It does this so well and so fast that it often functions out of conscious awareness and much of our functioning occurs on an auto pilot manner. Mindfulness is by definition awareness that is intentional thus gets us out of auto pilot functioning.
Mindfulness is the first part of any mental activity where bare attention, a mirror like pure awareness, experiences the reality of anything, by feeling-sensing what it is, accepting it for what it is, without the thinking mind intervening by trying to control it, judge it based its reaction to the emotions it may cause positive, negative or neutral. Mindfulness stays perpetually in the present moment, accepting, allowing the wave like nature or reality to unfold, and does not use any reference to past experience or futures needs or expectations. It does not compare or expect anything.
In summary the thinking-doing mode emotionally reacts, allowing more of what it senses as positive and avoiding what is negative, and ignores what is neutral, It compare present with past and future and in the process changes the original reality of a thing by comparing it, controlling it, and expecting something from it. Often all of this happens out of awareness in an auto pilot manner.
Mindfulness is always intentional awareness, thus taking one out of auto pilot functioning, perpetually stays in the present only, and then moment by moment, it does not react to emotions or past or future, and by its nature accepts what is and allows the original reality of thing to be experienced, before the thinking mode intervenes and in the process changing it.