It’s a remedy alright!
Mindfulness Meditation is simply a formal practice for learning how to pay attention without thinking. While it was originally formulated as a part of various Eastern religious and spiritual practices, most modern forms of Mindfulness Meditation don’t have any spiritual component.
Arguably the most basic Mindfulness Meditation exercise involves paying attention to your breath. That’s it.
Seriously, you just sit down (or stand up, it doesn’t matter) and pay attention to how it feels to breathe without thinking about anything else.
While 95% of the time our mental ability to problem-solve is a good thing, what if you’re trying to problem-solve something that can’t be solved?
This is the situation we find ourselves in when we’re chronically anxious.
Ordinary mindfulness means taking the skills you build in your mindfulness practice and applying them to small situations throughout your day.
Just like an athlete practices drills and then applies those skills in scrimmages and games, to feel the effects of mindfulness, you must practice, but also apply, your new skills.
It’s a lot easier to practice mindfulness when you actually feel the benefit!
Am I willing to regularly dedicate about 2 hours per week to practicing mindfulness?
For most people, that’s what it will take to get a consistent and meaningful benefit from a mindfulness practice.
20 minutes per day, most days of the week, for 30 days Mindfulness should feel uncomfortable much of the time. That means you’re re-training your mind to work differently. Keep that in mind as you go.
All you need to do is sit down for a fixed amount of time and try to hold your attention on being aware of your breath.
Expect it to be uncomfortable. Mindfulness is a form of mental and emotional exercise. And like physical exercise, if it’s not hard, you’re probably not doing it right. Mindfulness should be uncomfortable and difficult. We don’t get growth without discomfort. Expect to be uncomfortable when you’re practicing mindfulness, but re-frame that discomfort as a sign of growth not failure.
I’ve not experienced the uncomfortableness of yet, and I can think of how it could be right now. I’ll recap on this when the time arises. Update: 30th May 2020 The uncomfortableness isn’t a given thing and you might not experience it as such. Being uncomfortable with it simply means having to pay attention when we are so used to letting our minds wander.
Setbacks are inevitable and normal. It’s how we respond to them that matters. In this instance you’ll concentrate on your breathing while your’e doing it. hear it, feel it and be it. (Now your’e meditating).
I have a few tips on breathing and I’ll share those in another post, but for now go with your own flow.
Negative thinking patterns exert a powerful gravitation pull on our attention, which is why it’s so easy to slip into them and get stuck in them. In order to resist the pull of negative thinking patterns, you must strengthen your ability to shift focus, and control your attention. What we can control IS our attention.
