Mindfulness offers practical ways to find focus, calm and joy in everyday living, and, when practiced with regularity, can be utterly life-changing. Like a super power that allows you to deliberately direct the beam of your attention instead of being tossed around by racing thoughts and turbulent emotions, mindfulness enables one to choose their own mindset and shift how to relate to experience so that stress is lessened and happiness increased. Many people think of mindfulness as something to add to an already full schedule. Or a special skill that only a few people can learn. Or something that only works for people with a baseline personality for being calm. Instead, practicing mindfulness is about learning, bit by bit, how to train your attention to stay in the present instead of ruminating over the past or lurching into the future. Mindfulness is the awareness that arises when we direct our attention on purpose toward our inner experience, toward others, and toward the relationship we have with the environment around us. But more than just focusing the mind, it’s about one’s mindset — how you view and hold the world. A mindful mindset is open, receptive, accepting and compassionate. Beginning starts with noticing your natural tendency to judge, assume you already know something, resist what life brings or worry about what is out of your own control — behaviors that everyone grapples with.
There’s ample scientific evidence about the power of mindfulness. Since the first steps in mindfulness research in the early 1990’s, the number of studies have increased exponentially. Research proves that you can change your default mental patterns through repeated practice, a concept called neuroplasticity. The repetition of mental training in effect rewires your brain with new neural pathways that incline you to respond to situations in more skillful ways than automatically reacting out of habit. The amazing piece to all this is that you end up in the driver’s seat of shaping your brain and your life through deliberate practice — conscious creating — instead of unwittingly wiring your brain through the influence of cultural norms, one’s family of origin, or old habits.
Specifically, research on the benefits of meditation — an integral part of the practice of mindfulness— has exploded in recent years. Researchers have found that mindful meditation — maintaining a moment by moment receptive awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and surrounding environment, using a set object of focus — increases attentional control, emotional regulation and self-awareness. Yet for all the research showing the benefits of mindfulness in treating such conditions as anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, researchers still don’t know exactly how consciousness woks. “That’s been the frontier for us, understanding the nuances of the mechanism and then developing targeted treatment,” says Judson Brewer, director of research for the Center of Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. When traversing this territory, I always like to go to my teacher Shinzen’s take. “After nearly half a century of practice, teaching and research in the field,” says Shinzen, “when I hear the word Mindfulness… I don’t think of one thing. I think of eight things. Mindfulness the word, the awareness, the practices, the path, the translation, the fad, the shadow, and the possible revolution.”
For the not-so-quick-and-dirty, go here. For our purposes now, we’ll close with Shinny’s take on the practice as well as the path, the mindful take referring to the systematic exercises that elevate a person’s base level of awareness. In Shinzen’s careful, calculated usage, we refer to these as mindful practices, or more fully, mindful awareness practices (MAPS). Two of the most common MAPS are Noting and Body Scanning, both techniques developed in Burma in the early 20th century and forming the base of Shinzen’s Body-Image-Talk and See-Hear-Feel techniques. These being the practices themselves, the Path refers to the ability to dramatically elevate one’s base level of mindful awareness through a well-organized regimen of mindful awareness practices, similar to the way one’s physical strength can be elevated through exercise. This ever-sharpening arrow in one’s quiver is a tool of immense power and general application that can be utilized to improve just about every aspect of human happiness. Consider joining our Winter Meditation Retreat Weekend February 21st -23rd or monthly meditation class in the upcoming new year to boost your power and practice.