Meditation helps focus and heal the body, thereby healing the brain and mind.
To cope and engage reality a good habit will do no harm.
It helps to have this habit as a daily practice to change and improve as opportunity presents itself.
There are many people or peoples that reflect the above image or practice.
Does the message kill the practice or is it the messenger?
Does breathing cause us harm when we fall into the habit of shallow breathing?
The experience of being mindful may be its best teacher, but many students will need a Little Rock and roll to get the message across to them.
Check out the sexy app about being mindful now!
Don’t worry, you will find it if it works for you.
Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, M.K. Gandhi,
Cicero, The Cynics, The Stoics,
Tao Te Ching, Mindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa, Meditations for Beginners by Jack Kornfield
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Red Book by C.G. Jung
There are many more roads to living a full life.
It feels good inside my mouth: cooked greens, carrots and yams.
The greens are kinda chewy, the carrots are chewier than the yams.
Yams are yams: soft.
The food is hot.
It’s pretty easy to bite.
I crave the chewy greens!
But it all has great texture.
Being aware allows one to fully engage people, places and things.
To untie oneself from a problem or find workable solution.
To behave like this is just a fancy way of coping, strategizing, and being more purposeful about day to day affairs.
It is fair to say the more mindful we are, the more content we become.
It is a challenge to stay focused and content in today’s 24 hour day.
Mindfulness makes everything a little better.
The proper use of my young mind.
4:30 AM is the time set on my alarm clock.
My mind wakes me up a few minutes early to avoid the noise of the alarm.
Do no harm.
I set my connection with mind to allow myself to wake up without the alarm.
I am aware of what I say and do.
This is part of my practice of awareness to do no harm.
Developing my practice of awareness, I do daily exercises: journal and walking meditation.
I like to set the alarm to wake up my body each day: it is automatically set to go off at five AM.
Imagine, I can listen to my mind and wake up my body at 4:30 each day.
Young mind.
The marriage between health and mind is mental health.
It is a habit like cleaning the house, doing the dishes, taking a shower and going to sleep.
Like sleep, it is a fundamental need for the body.
Like sleep, it is a connection or relationship primary to the body mind connection which is called by many names.
Anyone who has been broken by stress, disease, cancer, insomnia, or a breaking down of body, mental or physical health, is aware of the need to maintain and perhaps grow the connection or relationship with body and mind.
In religion and spirituality, language and habit is another form of marriage that describes the union of the mind with our own being or state of consciousness.
For example, Buddhism, mind is enlightenment or the proper use of the mind.
In secular society we offer work for the mind: vision and other mental abstraction.
But to declare the meaning and purpose of mind does appear to be at the very least a relationship with self and being that has to do with some kind of higher purpose for mind and self-aware beings like humanity.
At present we are deaf, dumb and blind: young mind.
The absence of ‘monkey brain’-10,000 thinks.
Feeling flow-like being in the zone while executing a particularly difficult sports move.
Being busy: raising kids, going to school or working overtime.
When the brain is quiet, it goes crazy: sometimes people fill up on junk food, talking, TV.
Other times people feel bored, tired overwhelmed and depressed anxious and sad.
Thinks get worse when the brain gets stuck in a down mode.
People exercise, challenge themselves with a study or project.
Some people get a second job.
So, mindfulness works out monkey brain and allows the brain to feel inner peace, compassion and emotional stability.
Why not earn happiness through a practice of mindfulness.
The breath meditation is a kind of mindfulness that helps improve the trait of attention.
This is the same trait that is important when learning or becoming aware.
When a trait is becoming a skill, we exercise it regularly with whichever form of mindfulness that is useful.
Imagine becoming smarter or learning to use your brain in a manner which improves the task you do.
Imagine improving your disposition towards yourself and others with another form of mindfulness called loving kindness.
There is an arc or continuum of mindful exercises which improve the use of our brain.
It all relies on the simple act of paying attention or being aware of awareness.
Imagine life is like a movie. Most of us live like there is no tomorrow. We go in the theatre, barely aware of our surroundings. We pay little attention to anything but the plot of the movie itself.
Know the theatre, notice the people, use your senses to smell the popcorn, this is what it is like to be aware of awareness. You still watch the movie, but you notice the theatre as well.
Mindfulness is a simple tool to help enhance our ability to use our minds wisely. It helps us learn to stand beside ourselves as friend and observer.
Be mindful and live the good life.
To be a student of compassion, does not necessarily increase compassionate behaviour.
There is an arc or continuum that starts with empathizing with someone suffering to actually helping them out.
Loving-kindness mindfulness is being mindful of oneself and reaches into the people throughout the world.
There are three forms of compassion which span the intellectual, emotional and our concern for others.
So why help ourselves help others?
The “Altered Traits” by Daniel Goleman & Richard J. Davidson revels why and how in their ground breaking book and research.
It says mindfulness will enhance empathic concern, activate good feelings and love, and activate brain circuitry to register the suffering of others.
It proves that in 16 hours of mindful loving kindness meditation, that we can reduce intractable unconscious bias towards other people.
Who wouldn’t want to be more compassionate?
Imagine what a lifetime commitment can do.
Yes, among other traits, my teacher says traits that improve while doing mindfulness are all about being, “the non-forgetfulness of the mind with regard to a familiar object, its function is non-distraction.”
To be mindful means to return and recall.
I use mindfulness to return whatever I have chosen to concentrate upon, a body scan, my breath, thoughts, and emotion.
I believe I am cultivating calmness, stillness, or inner peace.
At first blush, mindfulness requires a lot of effort.
Then it becomes effortless.
Lastly, it becomes who I am or who I may be.
I will decide to be undistracted by practicing my mindfulness exercise or practice.
Instead of becoming frenzied and obsessed about finding the lost object of my desire, I can now make a ‘room scan’ exercise out of it and practice being mindful: release, relax, and return to practice.
If my room scan exercise happens to produce my hearts desire or the reading glasses, that will be one of the many outcomes-along with inner peace.
However, if I don’t find my reading glasses, I am much more willing to let go of the search and make a calmer decision about my lost reading glasses.
Mindfulness may not give me my reading glasses on every attempt but ‘inner peace’ is always my most appreciated outcome.
At the beginning, middle and end of each practice, I try to express my intentions.
I am praying for a useful session of mindfulness.
I am grateful for my mindfulness session regardless of the outcome.
I hope my session will be good for myself, my family and friends, community, and ripple out into the universe.