Getting Mindfulness and meditation right
These days almost everyone is talking and trying to practice Mindfulness and Meditation most of the time together with yoga. This is a topic with a greater importance for everyone, not only for people that love or are interested in mindfulness and meditation. Doesn’t matter if you are religious, no religious, spiritual or not spiritual it is for everybody.
Meditation and mindfulness is something that has been practiced for many years and more recently in the Western Culture people are more and more drawn to it. You go to yoga, you learn some meditation, you find it beneficial so you trying to find some time every now and then during the day, during the week to practice. It is something that you pick it up, like a book or a cell phone. “ ok I’ve got 20 minutes this morning to practice meditation” then back to reality back to the world, attend to all the thing that we need to, cook, clean, pick up the kids, spend sometimes with them, put them to bed. Then finally we might get some time for meditation (pick it up – put it down). in these times, with a fast life, with the amount of stimulation and information , especially when we are living in the city, we need to be multitask. It is really difficult to keep your mind calm, to control your mind, it’s very draining very stressful so it is understandable that we need to look for something that can help reduce that stress, and mindfulness and meditation can definitely help to reduce stress. You tube, magazine, shops, workshops, internet, everywhere you turn, you can find different way and technique to meditate and to practice mindfulness. Everybody’s got a little good pill of advise about it. Is not a mystery why is so popular because it is working really well to help reduce stress and anxiety.
BUT what if you see a completely different prospective and approach.
What about preventing the agitation, the anxiety, the attention disorder , stress, the mind going on and on
All these feeling are not just happened to us but happening because of the way we are seeing our reality and everybody have a different way of addressing these feeling in different levels.
There is a proverb that says : “The best medicine is prevention “ so why not use Mindfulness and meditation not as a “Band Aid “ (that is equal important) not just like movement driven by a marketing propaganda that reduce and put down the meaning and the richness of mindfulness.
So what is it Mindfulness: it means to bear in mind and to remember
To bear in mind, to keep in mind, to recollect, to recall, to hold in mind. Non forgetting.
Not forgetting what we are attending to, work, family, children, driving, learning, all the things that we attend to in our everyday life, we choose to place our attention and keep it there for something helpful or to remove it from something unhelpful, like fear, doubt, or cakes.
What if we use it like a way of life and not just a 20 minute practice to reduce the stress without addressing the cause of that stress.
We can use mindfulness to train the mind to go back to a base line, to find your base line, where we can go back more times a day, everyday, while we caring for our family or work or relate with people we meet during our life, so we cannot find ourself agitated, stressed or anxious.
You are probably thinking now “ I’m too busy to do that. I have a really busy life”.
That’s what I said and still say to myself everyday. But everyone is busy, everyone’s got 24h a day to fill with whatever they put value on it, but if I stop for a second I know that is an excuse because I can still have during the day, few second here and 5 minutes there, 2 minutes here, many times during the day, to come back to base line.
Mindfulness is not just a practice or a technique, for me is an ability that everybody already have but we forgot how to use it and how to use it well. It is a foundation a system of well- being a way of life.