What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is focusing our attention on what’s actually happening in whatever we’re doing at the time, without any judgement. This allows us to create a healthy distance from our thoughts and feelings so we can have more control over them. We can then consciously respond to life in more productive ways.
Why practise Mindfulness?
Most people have heard of living in the moment or being in the present. Have you been told not to dwell on the past or live in/worry about the future? Relax and just go with the flow seems to be a popular cliché these days. With commitment and patience, relating to mindfulness practice with an attitude of care and respect, you can be more in the moment, and find yourself coping better with what life throws at you.
Mindfulness practice enables you to handle problems better and feel less stressed because it balances the mind as well as your emotions. If you stay being controlled by the mind, and therefore not mindful, personal suffering is more likely to continue.
Mindfulness practice reminds us that underneath our troubling emotions and negative thoughts is a deep sense of calm, joy and peace. 
How will it benefit me?
- A greater sense of calm and relaxedness.
- Reduced levels of stress, worry and angst.
- Feeling a deep sense of happiness.
- Reduction in levels of anxiety with significant improvements in anxiety disorders including panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder, and phobias.
- Better sleeping patterns.
- Positive changes in troublesome addictive behaviours.
- Better control over habits.
- Less emotional turmoil, namely, unsettling highs and lows.
- Satisfactory resolution of psychological issues like depression, bipolar disorder, and chronic unhappiness, grief, and mid life angst.
- A deeper knowing, understanding and acceptance of who you are as well as of others.
- An increased ability for compassion and understanding.
- Actual structural changes in the brain leading to enhanced mental clarity, memory, and creativity.
- A sense of contentment.
- Enhanced relationships.
- Improvements in particular physical complaints including stress, chronic pain, headaches, hypertension.
- Improved motivation.
- Spiritual enhancement.
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Mindfulness Practice
Here is a 15 minute mindfulness practice I’ve prepared for you. It guides you through being mindful of your body – what it feels like in your body to sit. You’ll hear some useful ways of managing the distractions of the mind – thoughts, allowing you to change your relationship with thoughts over time.
The main reward of being aware of the moment is that it can be the most important key to happiness. Mindfulness teachers have known, for over 2000 years, that the more our minds drift off (the less we’re in a state of mindfulness), the unhappier we are. They believe that living more in the moment leads to more happiness. This belief has also been backed up by many scientific studies. In his most recent book “Why Mindfulness is better than Chocolate,” David Michie (2014) describes how the mind that wanders, is an unhappy mind. One definition of mindfulness I’ve come across is from the book “The Mindful Way through Depression” by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn (2007). They write,(page 47): “Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally to things as they are.” Mindfulness, therefore, is the practice of being mindful or being aware of whatever is happening now, and not wanting it to be different in any way. There is an acceptance of what is there. With mindfulness, we’re encouraging ourselves to be somewhere, i.e. here, rather than trying to get anywhere. Mindfulness Perth will help you achieve this. It’s important to point out that acceptance of the situation doesn’t mean resignation or approval; this would be too passive, and could make us feel helpless. When we accept a situation, we are less likely to reject or deny what’s happening. We can then become free to work positively and constructively towards a resolution without feeling resentful or sorry for ourselves. As Lineham (1995) states: “Mindfulness is learning to be in control of your own mind instead of letting your mind be in control of you”. This message is only visible to admins:Problem displaying Facebook posts.
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Are you Mindful?
When we are mindful, there is a strong sense of feeling present and alive.
We develop a sensitivity to what is actually happening around us rather than creating a story about what’s happening, what should be happening, or what we would like to have happen. We notice the finer details of life more whilst participating fully in the current moment, just as it is. Most of the time we live our lives on what’s called ‘automatic pilot’ when our awareness of ourselves and our surroundings is scattered and truly compromised. In this state, with little control over what we attend to, we then allow our attention or focus to drift to whatever the mind finds interesting in either a positive or negative way. We seem to be lost in our mind activity, that is, our thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, judgements and beliefs. We treat these mental events as facts, as the real thing, attaching meaning and importance to our thoughts as if they define reality, and who we are. This, in turn, determines what emotions we feel in a situation, as well as how we behave or what we do.
It’s not surprising then that we feel we have little or no control over our emotions, what decisions we make, or the directions our lives take. Over time, as we practice mindfulness, we develop the ability to see that the activity of the mind with its thoughts, attitudes, judgements, perceptions and beliefs is not reality, not facts that must be acted upon. Our thoughts will be seen as a story about the real thing- an interpretation. They don’t define who we are because they come from our conditioning, our society, and our reactions to experiences. Thoughts are also transient in nature, coming and going like birds in the sky or cars on a busy freeway.
In this way, we’ll have a choice about what we pay attention to. We’ll find ourselves less likely to be dragged involuntarily to wherever or whatever the mind wants us to focus on.
New ways of interacting with the world will then present themselves because we won’t be locked into the unpleasant emotions that seem to dominate our life, or our habitual ways of doing things. A sense of freedom as well as control will prevail.