Path of Recovery from Ourselves
Have you had friends, family or strangers tell you to practice meditation or mindfulness to help with stress and anxiety? I have and for me, it helped tremendously. About five years after I was diagnosed with cancer this feeling of dread and depression overcame me. I began to see a therapist. What was unique about him was how he approached issues. He had worked as a psychologist at the Veterans Hospital previously and therefore had a lot of experience with post-traumatic stress. Kind of what I was feeling but didn’t realize.
Meditation and mindfulness are some of the easiest things we can do to aid us on a path of recovery from ourselves. Why? Because you do not need to pay for equipment, necessarily get a teacher, or redecorate a special room. Today there are so many online free resources for both modalities.
Mindfulness – What is it?
First, it is a tradition in Asia where it was nurtured, refined, shaped and by practice, studied, and written about. It has been a custom for over 2600 years. When it came to the West, it developed into Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) which was pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn. They have gradually become part of the Western medical practice. More and more the ideas of mindfulness are being studied and a variety of scientific papers are written on it exponentially every year.
Buddha wrote (or stated) that mindfulness is the “methodical cultivation of one simple mental faculty readily available to all of us at any moment.” At that moment we are delivered from suffering because we are not thinking about the past or future. We are only focusing on what we are doing at any ONE given moment.
This moment of NOW will never be repeated.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Practicing Mindfulness
Mindfulness is simply focusing on the present moment. You bring your full mind to one object. The object can be your breath. The phrase could be, “This is me breathing” or it could be similar to counting sheep; one breath in, hold, breath out, two breath in, hold, two breath out, etc.
Different ways to practice mindfulness –
- Breathing – focus on your breath. Is it a “shallow” breath where you only feel it in your chest or a “deep” breath where you fill your chest and into your belly? Focus on how you are breathing, whether you are holding your breath.
- Waking up in the morning – When you awake, are you dreading your day already? Guess what you are doing? You are living in the future! Instead, when you open your eyes put your hands over your head and stretch out your legs and push each hand and toe to the different corners and take a couple of moments to say, “Thank you” for (insert what you are positively thankful for). And the BIG key – DON’T PICK UP YOUR PHONE.
- Everyday “Objects” – One of the worst things we can do is multi-task but when we live in the past and future that’s exactly what we are doing. Instead, focus your attention on the moment you are having with your kids, the smell of the food you are cooking, and the perfectly tempered water in the shower feels upon your skin.
Each thing you do is focused on the present moment which is the ONLY thing you can control. The anxiety, everything that you “should” be doing, resentment for what has already occurred, and any thoughts that you will face later will still be there. But for now, this moment of mindfulness is timeless.
What is your experience with mindfulness? If you haven’t had any, try and let me know what you think. Leave a comment.
