Is this year the year of mindfulness? A quick scan in the media seems to confirm the suspicion. Huffington Post recently declared ‘Why 2014 Will Be The Year of Mindful Living’.
But what is this phenomena?
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Mindfulness
Everywhere you look, it’s mindfulness this, mindfulness that. Have we lost our minds? What’s it all about?
The front page of Time magazine (3rd February 2014) details The Mindful Revolution, then there’s a full feature in The Times Magazine on Headspace and the pin ups of modern ‘mindfulness’ – its co-founders Pierson and Puddicombe (shouldn’t they be a firm of solicitors with names like that?). It’s doing my head in!
And it’s not just the press who’ve gone mindful mad. Celebrities Gwyneth Paltrow, Davina McCall and our very own friend of that other well known firm of solicitors – Mssrs Potter and Weasley, aka Emma Watson have all tweeted their support for the technique. Why, in this last week alone a friend in her 60s told me she’d like to take up mindful meditation and another in her early 30s is also considering it. Has the world gone out of it mindful mind?
What is this phenomena that can cross age and gender barriers?
That on the one hand has the likes of Google giving a dedicated mindfulness training camp in California as part of its employment package. Whilst on the other has the US military offering it to those returning from active service to help them cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the psychological after-effects of combat action.
What is Mindfulness?
The godfather of modern mindfulness is surely Jon Kabat-Zinn whose Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course (MBSR) has spread throughout the world.
Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as:
“The awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally. “
Simple – just make the choice to be more present in your life, less judgemental and everything will be better.
I’m sure we’ve all had occasion to reflect that what is often missing from our lives is our willingness and ability to show up fully in our own lives and live them as if they really mattered, in the only moment we can ever be sure of – the present moment.
But no our minds are more often than not elsewhere – as yours might be by now. Instead we dwell on our past misgivings, misfortunes and missed opportunities or stress over the future.
So we need to cultivate our awareness – of when we are not living in the present moment, of when we are not paying attention and when we are being judgemental of our situation or surroundings.
Mindfulness and specifically, the technique of mindful meditation can teach us that – initially through awareness of your breath.
By bringing the focus of your attention to your own breath – making your breath centre stage in your awareness we quickly come to recognise that our minds are often all over the place.
We have a very hard time sustaining attention. Our minds flit away from this simple task. The practice of returning your mind continually back to the breath whenever it wonders gradually teaches us how to see and observe our thoughts and eventually to not over identify with them.
Not convinced?
Good, and don’t worry. Neither was I when I first came across the technique.
We’ll talk about the evidence for mindfulness in a later post, but I’ll leave you for now with a testimonial from some of the many books out there on the subject. And not by the authors, but by the people like you and I who’ve tried the techniques and offer these open testimonials.
Here’s one of my favourites.
“The worse you think you are at meditating the better mindfulness is! Because the other red herring is the whole foundation of mindfulness (coming into the present and freeing yourself from the shackles of the past and the worry of the future) is built on seeing what’s going wrong in our heads, where our thought processes get screwed up. And how do we discover this? By failing at meditation and then gently and compassionately thinking “Ah, I can see I’ve wandered off track” – and repeating this over and over, seeing first and then understanding later how this process works. How the mind and our thoughts work and take us away from the moment we live in – this moment. How our whole life is a train of thoughts that just keep coming but one which we can learn to control. It’s about switching off the autopilot.”
And here’s one from me in my early days of this technique.
“I came to realise that for much of my life I hadn’t really been there! It has taught me to be more in the present moment, more grounded and has been a genuine life changing and growing experience.”
Now there’s a thought – succeeding through failure, switching off the autopilot, the unsettling churn of thought that runs the mind. Being more present in my own life. Observing thought rather than being too involved in it.
What did you say it was called again? Mindfulness.
What’s next?
- Tried mindfulness meditation or thinking about it? Tell us about it in the comments below.
- Learn mindfulness meditation with “A Beginner’s Guide to Mindfulness Meditation” – our online course (and audio downloads)