Tag: Awareness

Practicing mindfulness in daily life 2.

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A very simple way of heightening your awareness to what is going on in the present moment is to draw attention to your sense of touch:

During the day find as many ways as you can to increase your awareness of your sense of touch. For example, notice the warmth of a cup of coffee, notice your fingers touching the computer keyboard,  or the steering wheel of the car at a red light. When you wash your hands really feel the touch of the water, and the softness of the soap. When you lift a glass or cup  feel the touch of the glass, the coldness or warmth due to the contents. Feel the touch of what you eat and drink, staying with the sensations of the food rather than thoughts about it.

….yet I’ve arrived

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Let go of the idea that the path will lead you to your goal.

The truth is that with each step we take, we arrive.  Repeat that to yourself every morning: ‘I’ve arrived.’  That way you’ll find it much easier to stay in touch with each second of your day.

Paulo Coelho

Let each moment be

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Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.” This would be a true stillness, a true liberation.

Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Jabbering

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All we need to do is awaken to the here-and-now

– to stop jabbering to ourselves –

and be present in this moment.

Steve Hagen

Always generating judgments

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Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience.  To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Where we should invest

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The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at Imperial College, London was told that the evidence-base for the therapeutic value of meditation for a wide range of health problems was significantly stronger than most pharmaceutical products. A new meta-analysis of 823 randomly controlled trials of meditation, conducted by the US National Institute of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, showed the clinical benefits of meditation across a wide range of physical and emotional disorders.

Meditation is a way of life rather than quick fix achieved by using gimmicks such as incense, music and light, Dr Avdesh Sharma, past president of the Indian Psychiatric Association, said. It doesn’t work immediately. You need to practice it for several weeks before the effects begin to be felt. Dr Sharma added: If meditation was a drug, we’d all want shares in it. It has a beneficial effect on most physical health problems and is very effective for mental health problems significantly reducing levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia by improving relaxation, oxygenation of the brain, and energy levels.