The habit of judging our experience locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all. These judgments tend to dominate our minds making it difficult to find any peace wihin ourselves.
It is as if the mind were a yo-yo going up and down on the string of our own judging thoughts all day long.
Jon Kabat Zinn
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
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
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
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.
Modern culture keeps sending all these messages that the people who know how to live properly are always doing something.
The great question “What are you doing this weekend?” keeps coming up, as if that defines us. We hear talk about lives where everything is “so busy that I do not have time to think”, or “I am so busy I never have time for myself”, or “I am so busy I am exhausted”, and this word, busy, busy, busy comes up time and again, and it starts to sound like an epidemic – an epidemic of busyness.
Abbot Christopher Jameson, The Big Silence, BBC2
Mindfulbalance 