Mindfulness
By MindMindful
Well, to begin this conversation about mindful ways of being …….. what DOES it look like?! I only ask because I must upload a photo for my profile, & at first I found it very frustrating. Then – after a few mental tricks to get past that – I realized that IS the central issue — How does it appear? How do we recognize it? Does it change? And, hey – just what is “mindfulness” in the first place? What does it mean, & -perhaps most importantly – why should anyone care?
It’s extremely important to widen the gap between impulse and action; and that’s exactly what mindfulness does. This is one of the big advantages of mindfulness practice: it gives us a moment or two, hopefully, where we can change our relationship to our experience, not be caught in it and swept away by impulse, but rather to see that there’s an opportunity to make a different, better choice. -Daniel Goleman
This excerpt, from “Tricycle: the Buddhist Review”, www.tricycle.com, makes the point quite well – “mindfulness” trains us to be able to recognize the chance to AVOID being caught up in our usual mental & emotional habits, & thereby creating the same kind of outcomes, mistakes, suffering as we have before. With a mindful mind we have the opportunity, & hopefully will avail ourselves of it, to create a better world, for ourselves & for everyone else.
The Buddha said, “With our minds we create the world”. This is my heartfelt wish: With our ever-more mindful minds, let us together create the world we wish to live in.
((PS – I still don’t know what “mindfulness” LOOKS like …………. any thoughts??))
Mindfulness is living the moment and being acutely aware of your environment. It can look like a tennis player seeing the ball hit the racquet, or looking at sunrise over a quiet lake.
I think it is being in the now and feeling genuine feelings. Loving yourself and those around you. Even loving the tree that is in full bloom or the scent of spring in the air…..
The world definitely needs more people practicing mindfulness. It is easy to react and lash out at other people, not thinking how our words or actions are going to effect those whom we touch.
I think we should always remember that what and how we do things affects not only ourselves but causes a chain reaction. Be aware how your choice(s) may affect the world around you. That’s my take.
My partner, Den, read and is now rereading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Den is a blurter and a nuclear reactor and it has been the challenge of his life to stop and think before leaping. Some of us (with ADHD) have to overcome this challenge until the day we die. There are so many mistakes to make along the way that sticking your foot in your mouth or running away just makes life so much tougher than it needs to be. Mindfulness is the perfection of the impulsive brain. Some of us suffering much more than others. I too have ADHD and so we make a funny couple. We are a couple of kids in our hearts and not every impulse is a bad one. I can testify that it can add so much spice to life! And so many laughs. Den is 61 and how many 61 year olds do you know insist that they can leap a 5 foot tall stone wall every time they come upon it on a walk? We have the same argument every time; me being the voice of reason and him insisting he still can. In the end reason wins and saves him from taking a silly risk. But not without a very good argument as to why it is a silly idea.
I bet he could do it… But don’t tell him I said that or you will never win the next argument…
I won’t tell him because I would never live it down.
Love this! Praying for the grace to have a breath before I act on my impulse to react to my kids today. Breathing …
Perhaps I can help you to see a little more clearly what mindfulness “looks like.” First let me say that it’s understandable that “looking at” mindfulness is so difficult, because technically, the mind can’t really look at itself.
So mindfulness is actually more of a feeling experience that shows up when our emotions are fully engaged with tuning into whatever our attention is immersed in at any particular present moment. In order to fully tune our emotions into a present moment exploration, we must actively practice intentionally relaxing our emotional responses as soon as we sense an emotional “spike” coming on for any reason.
Once we induce our emotional reactions to relax, that same emotional energy becomes fully available to us for accomplishing whatever we desire, and it also diffuses by spreading out over a wider area of our being. That diffusion frees our attention from being attached to a narrow range of thoughts, which then opens the way for us to allow our intuition (i.e., our quantum perceptual ability) to take the lead in place of our usual ego-driven perception process.
It’s all quite simple and blissful. That’s why “time flies when you’re having fun!”