TM4T Mindfulness - Choosing Your Planet

I need to correct a mistake I made earlier; I talked about 'planet of Mindfulness' and the 'world of meditation' and that is just plain wrong. Mindfulness takes place on Planet Earth.

It is important to emphasize that mindful meditation does not involve escaping to some other place, to some different place, to some imaginary world. Mindfulness explicitly and exclusively involves the real world, the real 'real world', the physical reality of the immediate experience.

This means ignoring unevidenced supposition (the Head of Department hates me); unstructured anticipation (I'm going to fail my next observation) and purposeless reflection (I should have told him to stuff his son's PE kit); instead you focus on the real immediate experience of your earthly existence (this chair is comfy, the birds are singing outside, my shoes are sticking slightly to the staffroom floor).

When it comes to 'reality' we all have a choice: obviously we all live on the same planet, but each individual looks at that planet in a different way, and in effect chooses what aspects to ignore and which to focus on. Those aspects 'in focus' constitute a life experience which may be dramatically different to those of a colleague or friend.

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