Mindfulness For Beginners

Mindfulness For BeginnersMindfulness For Beginners I'm gonna talk about what mindfulness is and why it might be important to us to pursue and then later I'm gonna talk about Some of the practice and how we practice it and talk about a few Potential books or other sources that might interest you if you want to read further or learn further.

general mindfulness in English means to be aware of or attentive to something or conscious of it, and it's opposed to, let's say, being distracted or inattentive or in some way not present. And, So mindfulness is the practice of substituting awareness for inattentiveness it's a practice of being really and fully present with the way things are right now as opposed to being lost in thoughts about the past, or lost in reminiscences of the past, or lost in thoughts about the future: what we're going to do tomorrow or What we need to do in the rest of the day. And here it's good to keep in mind that The past is beyond us. The past is already over.

there's nothing we can do to change the past. And the future isn't here yet, So there's nothing we can do right now about the future Where we act, where we live, is in the present moment only so it's the present moment that we really should focus on and The point is not that we don't focus on the present, or that we should never think about the past or the future, of course not. The point is that mindfulness is a practice of spending more time where we really live and where we really act, which is right here and now, as opposed to Losing so much of our lives in in pointless thoughts about times that we really can't affect. When we do a practice like this, however, of, let's say, trying to stay in the present moment for a time We find certain things pretty quickly And I would say you should try this yourself Because that's part of the practice. But I think we generally find things pretty quickly First of all, we tend to find that there are certain things that annoy us in our surroundings. Not always, but often. A sound that we don't like; A way we're sitting or standing that we don't like over a period of time; Some smell in the air perhaps; maybe some light that we don't like, it's too bright or not bright enough And so, the mind begins to wander and begins to sort of think about ways to change that. Let's say we're sitting in an apartment building.

We have neighbors upstairs and the dog is barking So our mind immediately goes off into some kind of a story about how we can stop that from happening about if we get up right now and go out our front door and walk upstairs and knock on their door and We come up with these stories We see how the mind works and we also note that This kind of working of the mind has taken us out of the present moment It's taken us into a future that doesn't exist yet It's taken us into a kind of a story about how we could act in the future and change things Nothing wrong with that and in its right place, but right now we're trying to practice being in the present moment Also, we might be in a situation where there's something that we really enjoy. Perhaps a nice smell of food That's being cooked. Perhaps a nice cool breeze that's wafting through the the room that we're sitting in. Perhaps it's a Beautiful kind of filtered light that we really love, or the warmth of the Sun on our back.

All of these things may be, or others as well, may be things that we enjoy, perhaps it's even music that we enjoy and What we'll find then is often That we'll want that to continue. And, if it changes or stops, We may again be lost in thoughts ruminations about how to bring that back, about Worries or wishes of it coming back. If the Sun goes behind a cloud we may be thinking to ourselves Well, perhaps if I move over here or how long is that cloud gonna be there? If there's a nice smell and it goes away again We might wonder why. And again, when this happens, it's taken us out of the present into Whats and whys and hows of life, which are ordinarily where the mind resides.

The third thing that we learn Is that this syndrome of thoughts and impulses that comes up in the mind, this syndrome is something that is entirely out of our control because we've sat down here and said, okay, I'm gonna focus on the present moment and Almost immediately these thoughts arise, these impulses arise. Almost immediately, we're brought off into thoughts about the future or thoughts about the past, remembering the last time that something happened similarly Almost immediately, the mind is pulled somewhere else, and that this is not under our control What we begin to learn I think, when we sit down and do this practice, is that this is how we live Virtually all of our lives in an ordinary way. Virtually all of our lives, we're at the mercy of these kinds of Automatic impulses that pull us this way and that. That we're not really in control of anything because the mind simply brings these things up, brings up these ideas and impulses into Into the present moment into our thought stream without us Wanting them necessarily, without us even thinking that they are necessary.

It's just things that arise And we begin to see them as just things that arise in the mind stream, that pull us away from the present moment into thoughts, reminiscences; into planning, into thinking about what's happening tomorrow, or regretting let's say what happened yesterday, or musing about how nice it was what happened yesterday, and how I can get it to happen again. And Normally, we live our lives this way, under the control of these kinds of thoughts and impulses. However, it may be that as you do this practice You really get to a place where you want to reduce the control that these thoughts and impulses have over you that you want to reduce the kind of the way that they pull you this way and that, All the time during your life. And for that you need to practice. And that is the practice of mindfulness. So what is, then, the practice of mindfulness? Well, the practice of mindfulness begins with calming. So, It doesn't really matter what position we take, what physical position we put our body in. We can do mindfulness lying down, We can do it seated on a chair.

We can do it seated on the floor on a cushion We can do it standing up. We can even do it while we're walking although while we're walking, we'll see, is a little bit different, but similar so we can do it in any position and Ordinarily, what you do is you begin by closing your eyes. Now if you're walking that's not going to be possible but at least closing them a little ways, and that's To try to diminish the amount of sensory input that you have Diminishing the sensory input is going to try to calm you down. So the point here is to try to calm yourself down Because the more agitated we are, the less calm that we are, the more that these kinds of thoughts that arise in the mind can control us. The more that they arise generally. However, The calmer that we are, the less frequently they tend to arise, and when they do arise, they tend to arise with less force So we begin by closing the eyes Getting into a position that we can hold for awhile without having to move, that is to say, a comfortable position and we can focus on something. Focus on something is usually something that's that's regular, that's cyclical.

A Great place to start, indeed one way that people can do their entire lives, in fact, is focusing on the breath Because the breath is always with us. It's a regular kind of Phenomenon in the body. It's something that is again cyclical. It's something that will calm us down as we focus on it and we'll find by focusing on the breath for a while and Closing the eyes that we introduce a level of calm and so a level of clarity, more clarity in the mind. So we're able to see a little bit clearer how the mind works and what's going on and how things are happening If we want, we can count the breaths from one to ten and then going back to one again. Again in a sort of a cyclical way. Or we can name the breaths; we can say "in-breathing", "out-breathing", or "inhaling", "exhaling" "In", "out", it doesn't matter what words we use, but if that helps us to keep Focusing the mind on the breath, we can use words like these, naming like this.

Second, we try to get to a place where we're allowing negative and positive feelings to arise in the mind without Without them taking control of us So if we have a slight pain in our leg, or if there's an annoying sound in the room, We practice simply sitting with it We practice simply sitting with it and perhaps even naming it, saying, "an annoying sound", or "a slight pain in my leg" And that way we can sit with it and see what happens if we do nothing at least for a period of time where we're simply Observing it as part of the present moment. And similarly if something good happens, if something nice happens, we simply sit with it without necessarily trying to grasp at if it goes away or if it changes.

We simply name it, "a nice sound", "a pleasant breeze" If we want we can use these kinds of words silently in our minds. And this kind of a practice gives us more mental space around which simply to embrace these as part of the present moment. To allow them to simply exist as phenomena that arise and pass, as they inevitably will; they'll arise and pass, they'll change over time. And so by doing this practice We then get ourselves to a place that is more fully present, That's more fully in the present moment, that is less liable to be pulled this way and that by the vicissitudes of life in a long-term practice It's not the sort of thing that you're going to expect is going to have-- is going to create miracles in a day or a week But over months, over years of a regular practice of mindfulness like this, it will help us get to a place That's more equanimous in a more equanimous state with our own lives by being able to Be in the present moment, by not having our minds be so easily pulled into the past or into the future or into other places.

The ordinary tendency of the mind is to go off into Ruminations, to go off into into streams of thought that aren't particularly useful or healthy to us We've already thought about these things enough times so we don't need to think about them the hundredth time or the thousandth time So this kind of practice allows us to relax around that. And this is especially important I think in today's what's known as the attention economy where our attention is is being pulled this way and that by the Enormous amount of information that's being thrown at us all the time through the internet, through cell phones, email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest. And I did a recent article about the role of mindfulness in this information economy And why this kind of practice is indeed so important nowadays. Now, what I've given here is only an introduction. There's a lot more to be said.

Conclusion

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