MindfulnessMindfulness means paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, with qualities like compassion, curiosity and acceptance.
You find out how to make the present moment a more wonderful moment to be in – the only place you can create, decide, listen, think, smile, act or live. Awareness.
This is an aspect of being human that makes you conscious of your experiences. Without awareness, nothing would exist for you. Attention. Attention is a focused awareness; mindfulness training develops your ability to move and sustain your attention wherever and however you choose. Remembering. This aspect of mindfulness is about remembering to pay attention to your experience from moment to moment. Being mindful is easy to forget. The word remember originally comes from the Latin re ‘again’ and memorari ‘be mindful of’. Which really means:
Paying attention. To be mindful, you need to pay attention to whatever you choose to attend to. Present moment. The reality of being in the here and now means you just need to be aware of the way things are, just as they are right now. Whatever your experience is, it is valid and correct just as it is. Stop the fight-or-flight response (what we call the Physiological Alarm Response). Normally, when you experience something, you automatically react to that experience according to your past experiences and beliefs. In any unpleasant or threatening situation, we often react unconsciously with some version of the fight-or-flight reaction when we are having a problem; i.e. instead of calmly evaluting the situation and responding in an optimal way, we react. If we have an engine failure happening at the highway, or the boss is criticising Your performance, or we are coming too late to a meeting, or the workload is enormous …. We react automatically rather than in a calm and assertive way. In Mindfulness you are encouraged to stop that automatic response and just notice your breathing. In such situations;
No Judging.
Our mind is trained to judge, compare and evaluate. We compare and judge things before we even know what we are doing. It is a habit of the mind, and we need to have extra focus on this habit as we start doing Mindfulness. If we look at the sun-set and we are comparing it to all the past sunsets we have seen, we are not really seeing it, and we are absolutely not experiencing it. Actually the minute we open our mouth to tell about how fantastic it is, we stop seeing it as it is. The temptation is to judge experiences as good or bad, something you like or dislike. Reality is not good or bad, it just is. When we chose to set labels on the experiences and the surroundings we are introducing stress into our lives. Letting go of judgments helps you to see things as they are rather than through the filter of Your personal judgements based on our past, our likes and dislikes and our beliefs and opinions. Now it is easy to say, well I just have to judge what I am doing else I won’t improve. Just check it out; how many times do you really need a judgment in order to do your best, and do what you like to do and what you know is the best solution in the moment. Do you need the stressful thought about the dead line while you are doing what you are doing in the moment? Do you need to think about getting home in time …. or being ready for something which has dead line in 2 months or two hours, does it help? Do need to think about if the project will be well valuated or not while you are doing it? It is okey to give yourself a time for evaluation from time to time, but not all the time. It is okey to have a schedule for your free time activities, so you don’t need to go around think about when you are going to do them?And it is absolutely necessary to have schedule both for Mindfulness training, exercises, home with the family time, and all kinds of meetings and dead lines at work – this will allow you to live even more in the moment. As Mindfulness becomes a part of your daily life, you will start to notice that you judge yourself and others less, and enjoy more what is. Open-heartedly. Mindfulness isn’t just an aspect of mind. Mindfulness is of the heart as well. To be open-hearted is to bring a quality of kindness, compassion, warmth and friendliness to your experience. For example, if you notice yourself thinking ‘I can’t concentrate on my breathing’, you are aware of the thought, you do not need to push it away, you’ll just notice how you gently turn your attention back to the focus of Your breathing. You may choose what to focus on in Mindfulness meditations, you may focus on one, or a combination, of the following: o The feeling of your own breathing o Any one of Your senses o Your body o Your thoughts or emotion Whatever is most predominant in your awareness |
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What changes can you expect
This compendium contains the most important instructions and reminder that you will need in order to use Mindfulness as a tool in you daily life in order to get the life you want. If you want to learn to play tennis, it is not enough to listen to the trainer, it is not enough read about you have to do, it is not only recommended, but necessary to practise Mindfulness to reach Your goal. WHAT DO YOU WANT - BE SPECIFIC If you want your life to change, you need to have a specific goal. Telling yourself that you want to be more healthy is fine, but you’ll need to define what that means. So the first step is to be specific; what exactly do mean by becoming a healthier; is it to become fit, to lower you cholesterol, to run faster … Then you have to put up some inspiring milestones; by the 15th of …. I will be able to run around …. Or the bad-Cholestrole level will be at … What kind of food will you eat, if it is more exercising; how many times a week will you exercise, which days, what time of the day, for how long, with whom, what kind of exercises, …. I recommend you choose some tempting steps. The more tempting and desirable the goals and the milestones are the better. What specifically do you want to change in your life? Remember:
Mindfulness is best performed with a smile. Take humour seriously. It may change your life. 200 smiles a day keeps the doctor away. |
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