Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that.
It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
Sylvia Boorstein
Like most of the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity. The person I normally take myself to be – that busy, anxious little ‘I’ so preoccupied with its goals, fears, desires, and issues — is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life. This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his ‘life’ (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
The Buddhist teachings are fabulous at simply working with what’s happening as your path of awakening, rather than treating your life experiences as some kind of deviation from what is supposed to be happening. The more difficulties you have, in fact, the greater opportunity there is to let them transform you. The difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into the lousy habitual patterns you already have, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you, on the spot.
Pema Chodron
Will put up one or two posts on the effects of our speeded-up world and social media on the human psyche, partly prompted by reading this address of Pope Benedict XVI to a group of contemplative monks. His remarks, although from a philosophical perspective, reflect the most recent scientific research on the fact that increased internet and social media usage seems to effect and change the very nature of the brain itself.
Technical progress, markedly in the area of transport and communications, has made human life more comfortable but also more keyed up, at times even frantic. Cities are almost always noisy, silence is rarely to be found in them because there is always a lingering background noise, in some areas even at night. In the recent decades, moreover, the development of the media has spread and extended a phenomenon that had already been outlined in the 1960s: virtuality that risks getting the upper hand over reality. Unbeknown to them, people are increasingly becoming immersed in a virtual dimension because of the audiovisual messages that accompany their life from morning to night.
The youngest, who were already born into this condition, seem to want to fill every empty moment with music and images, as for fear of feeling this very emptiness. This is a trend that has always existed, especially among the young and in the more developed urban contexts but today it has reached a level such as to give rise to talk about anthropological mutation. Some people are no longer capable of remaining for long periods in silence and solitude.
Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest. The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit.
When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed-to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored. In our consciousness there are wounds also, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Sometimes the studies on MBSR can be quite small and therefore it is hard to make very solid claims based on the research. Different ways of doing research can be used and this makes it sometimes difficult to compare results. In order to overcome this problem, a new study was conducted, looking at all the studies carried out on MBSR and MBCT in the past 30 years, but using only the more rigorous, randomized, trials which used control groups, and only those studies with a minimum of 33 participants.
The research team, led by Lone Fjorback, who works at the Research Clinic for Functional Disorders and Psychosomatics, Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, performed a systematic review of all the articles published with these criteria. Using this type pf meta-analysis, they found that they showed that MBSR was beneficial for reducing stress and distress, alleviating depressive symptoms, and improving anxiety in both clinical and non-clinical populations. Looking at MBCT, they found that it was shown to reduce the risk of relapse in depressive patients who had recovered from three or more previous episodes of depression.
The researchers concluded that Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction has a significant evidence base for its approach towards improving mental health for both clinical and non-clinical populations.
