What is mindfulness?
Are you willing to clear your mind, or focus on one thing, but you still can’t? Here we’ll give answer of what is mindfulness. Why you need it? And how you can reach this state?
Mindfulness is our central ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, but mostly the quality to be not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.
You're NOT Your Thoughts
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
Most of the time, we tend to think that to be truly mindful we have to cleanse our minds of all perceptions and views of past experiences, halting or controlling our thoughts entirely and existing in a chasm of unconditional positivity. It is not the case at all.
Mindfulness does not ask you to stop or control your thoughts, judgments, or negative experiences. Instead, it asks that within your experiences, you simply pay attention to what is happening at the moment.
Mindfulness is allowing the thoughts that are often entangled with opinions, judgments, and preferences to existing exactly as they are. It’s a state of clear awareness where you observe them with attention, compassion, and non-judgement.
It is more about intention than anything else. You turn your attention to what is happening in the present and embrace this with openness, curiosity, and acceptance.
In order to experience complete mindfulness in the present moment, you must first understand that you’re NOT your thoughts.
You CAN Separate Yourselves From Your Thoughts
Using methods such as taking some time to be still and focusing on the breath allows you the time to practice this skill, making it easier to incorporate mindfulness into all of your daily experiences.
Why does it often seem so difficult to be mindful?
Major part of our transition as human beings in the world involves perceiving things through the lens of our past experiences. It requires connecting and drawing on our experiences to create an ever-evolving way of perceiving and being in the world.
The mind plays an important role in this proces. Without the mind and the lenses and boundaries that it creates for us, we would have no capability to individuate ourselves and make sense of our existence.
As we evolve as humans, the mind become more and more conditioned by our past experiences, using these to make decisions, and project ideas about our future.
What keeps us away from mindfulness?
Your thoughts are not new and nor are they permanent. They are transitory accumulations of what you have already learnt and experienced. Some of these thoughts seem to make you feel good while others seem to make you feel bad.
Despite that, regardless of the positive or negative emotions that these thoughts generate, you rarely stop to observe what is truly happening within your mind, body and surroundings.
Instead you spend much of your time existing within the mind’s judgements, projections, and memories.
This draws you further and further away from being able to experience life in the present moment and you often find yourselve engulfed in spiralling thoughts.
Rather than your mind being a useful adjunct to our being, you’re associate so deeply with the thoughts that you are often controlled by the apparent inescapable journeys that the mind takes us on. You then become unable to pay attention to what is actually happening in the present.
But isn’t positive thinking a good thing?
It is very easy to step away from having an awareness of the present moment, regardless of whether you are in a positive or negative state of mind.
When you are feeling anxious, angry, depressed, or sad, you can be quick to get caught up in negative thoughts. You’re tend to worrying, ruminating, or becoming frustrated about the past or projected future events.
Even When You’re Immersed in Positive and Happy Thoughts, it Can Still be very Challenging to be Mindful
It’s because your external circumstances, including relationships or projects and events that you are looking forward to, are virtual places that the mind enjoys escaping to in order to feel good in the moment.
Indeed, often the anticipation of a positive occurrence in the future, can bring the mind more joy than even when it truly happens.
During the actual experience(that you have been looking forward to), your mind may begin to again its journey into the past and future.
Your mind enjoy to complicating the things. You’re involved in a chans of thoughts where thinking about ways that it may relay your presant experience to others or analysing and judging how good or bad the experience is compared to expectations.
Once again, you are quickly removed from allowing yourself a mindful experience. Your physical bodie is going through the motions, but your mind is elsewhere and the more you do this, even in relation to seemingly positive thoughts, the more challenging it becomes to remain rooted within your present experience.
What about meditation? Is this the same thing as mindfulness?
Daily meditation can bring enormous benefits if you wish to live a more connected and fulfilled life.
Meditation is a way of practicing mindfulness. Meditation by itself is one of the best means to help you develop mindfulness in your daily life.
It strengthens your ability to react and perceive things with openness, greater clarity, and awareness. This, in turn, improves your ability in a range of areas; how you deal with stress, make decisions, regulate emotions, create positive relationships, and show resilience in the face of negative circumstances.
It also allows you to connect with a renewed depth and joy when engaging in experiences, as you can truly participate in your present moment.
Like any Skill, the More you Practice, the More Automatic it Becomes
For some people, it is challenging to even sit for 30 seconds and focus on their breath. Their mind is so used to removing itselves from the present moment.
For this reason, teaching mindfulness to children can have such a significant impact on how they develop and grow.
Easy Practices Of Mindfulness
While mindfulness is innate, it can be cultivated through proven practices. Here are the most common examples:
✓ Seated, walking, walking meditation, and moving meditation (it’s also possible lying down but often leads to sleep);
✓ Short pauses full of awareness we insert into our daily experience;
✓ Merge meditation practice with other activities, such as qigong, yoga, or sports.
The Benefits of Mindfulness Practice:
When you meditate it doesn’t help to fixate on the benefits, but rather to just do the practice. Yet there are tones of cintifically proven benefits, and there’s NO doubt about this.
When you’re mindful…
you reduce stress, enhance performance, gain insight and awareness through observing your own mind, and increase your attention to others’ well-being
Mindfulness meditation gives you a time in you live when you can suspend judgment and unleash your natural curiosity about how workings the mind. It enreaching your experience with warmth and kindness—to yourselve and others.
Final words: What is mindfulness and why we need it?
We’re here on the Earth for a relatively short time, but we have a connection to everybody that’s come into our life, everybody we’ve loved.
Transformation is essential to make the world a better place.
Part of this transformation, or perhaps our biggest purpose, is to try to choose first cultivate happiness and joy and spread it all around.
As human being we need to nurturing not only our mental, emotional, physical, but mostly our spiritual dimension of who we are. This is what gives us purpose. And we can do this by using our most familiar tool–our mind.
The mind is one of the most fascinating concepts that we can work at because it’s the foundation of all of our experience. Understanding it from all the angles trought living in mindfulness is the key to learning our behaviors, and moving toward a healthier society.
Imagine it is natural and easy for you to live joyfully in the present and be compassionate with any thoughts, feelings, or judgments that arise inside your head. And you are able to understand at a deep level that the present moment can always be rich and fulfilling, regardless of conditions.
