Mindfulness involves choosing to pay attention, with kindness, acceptance and curiosity to whatever is happening right now and remembering the patterns or habits you observe. While one of the benefits of Mindfulness is often a feeling of being calm or relaxed, the purpose is more about gaining insight.
In Mindfulness meditation, we learn to bring a sense of kindness to whatever arises, even the thoughts and behaviours and feelings we don’t like. We increase our tolerance for seeing the unpleasant, neither identifying with it, nor running from it, and in so doing we come to notice the patterns of our mind and behaviour and can respond with choice rather than habit. Paradoxically, this both cultivates happiness and our ability to deal with unhappiness and difficulties.
The greatest gift we can give to another is to be fully present with them, and the greatest gift we can give ourselves is to be fully present with ourselves. Often we are seeing ourselves through one lens or another, measuring and comparing ourselves with some idea of who we do or don’t want to be, some idea of what we do or don’t want in the future, and of experiences in the past that we either want to relive, or avoid forever. Amongst all of this we often lose sight of what it means to simply be present with ourselves. We are aware of our thinking, we know what we think we want to do, we just may not be with our experience, and therefore we may not have all the information we need to make wise decisions. And so, in Mindfulness meditation we learn to simply be present.
Mindfulness meditation cultivates a rebalancing, a moving of our awareness to our sensory experience and away from our thinking. We all have experiences of Mindfulness during daily life, and we know when we lose it. If you were on the court, netball, basketball, tennis and you see a ball come to you, your focus is on the ball, on the ball, on the ball, then all of a sudden, if your mind starts thinking about what could go wrong, or remembering the last one you dropped, or thinking about how embarrassing it will be if you drop this one, or how wonderful it will be if you catch it and become the star of the match… what happens? You drop the ball. You drop the ball because the focus of your attention went from your sensory experience of looking at the ball, to your chatting mind as if you were looking straight at the chatter box of your mind.
Mindfulness meditation teaches us to pay attention to where our focus is, how it moves, what happens when it moves, and how we choose where it is. This cultivates an experience of presence.
Mindfulness training has emerged as a powerful, evidence-based tool for enhancing psychological health. It is empirically supported as an effective intervention in a wide range of issues and disorders, including chronic pain, stress, depression, relationships and wellbeing just to name a few.
Mindfulness aims to increase awareness of and acceptance of ordinary human experience, very much including the unpleasant, so that we can live our lives joyfully, skillfully and according to our inner wisdom and values. Any exercise which will have us practice being in the present moment will increase focus and enhance performance. By undertaking Mindfulness training, either through individual or group therapy, we can learn to soften the negative self-talk, change habitual patterns of behavior, experience clarity of mind and body, increase our capacity to self sooth, feel more in control and happy and can utilize the strategies learnt any time or place.