We're awake on one level, but on another level, life is often passing us by. All too often
we talk about, in our common language, I missed it completely. I was just lost.
I wasn't here for it, and sometimes that happens many times in the course of a
day. Sometimes we look back and it's a decade later, and we ask ourselves the
question: Where was I for my children's growing up, where was I emotionally for my
life with my wife, or my husband or my children. So there's something very poignant about
the present moment, since it's always NOW. All of the stresses in our lives happen now.
All the decisions that we have to make in our lives happen now. And yet often
enough, we're living in the past, or we're living
in the future, but the past is gone, the future hasn't arrived.
But now, is right here. This is when we hear the sound of the birds. This is when we feel the
caress her child's hand against our face. Mindfulness is a way of beginning to become
more attentive to the present moment,
to the actuality of being alive and, maybe even more importantly, participating in that act of being alive.
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>> Mindfulness is a whole way of living, it's a way of being engaged deeply connected and tapping into inner resource that's
always available.
Mindfulness is the awareness that rises when we pay attention, on purpose, in the
present moment, non-judgmentally. >>Can mindfulness help help me be more concentrated and focused?
Can mindfulness help me have more of a sense of mental stability, in the sense
of, can the mind be more stable, more present, more focused, more directed? When we first wake
up in the morning, it might be worth taking a few moments to stop, while you're lying there
in bed, take a few breaths, feel the breath in the body, open the eyes, notice
the sounds around you or the light streaming into the room, or the
quality of the darkness, if it's still dark out. Just those few moments are a way of
grounding ourselves, on purpose, in this present moment.
We're all gonna be stressed, there's no doubt about it. Stress isn't a bad thing, in and of itself.
I think there's a real difference between stress and feeling... what people often say is, "I'm stressed out."
Mark Twain said, "My life has been filled with terrible tragedies, most of which
never happened." And what he was really pointing to, in his own unique way,
I'm catastrophizing all the time. I'm thinking about things way out in front of me that
have never happened. I'm speculating about what will happen,
but they haven't happened. >> There are many things that are stressful to many of us, but even
inside that, there's going to be individual differences.
Knowing your own self can help so much. It's like saying, you know, when I'm in
busy traffic, I tense up. So knowing that can help you not have to just fall into the
same old reactive pattern. Then there's meeting it, skillfully. You might even say tools to meet stress, to meet tension
in the body, to meet thinking that feels overwhelmed. That's one of the cues for me. If I hear my internal
voice say, I'm overwhelmed, that's a time for me to really stop, to ground, to take a
breath, to just get more space, sometimes step outside, shift for a moment
if I'm indoors, see the sky, open to nature,
a few breaths. And actually, what that's doing neurologically,
is a rebalance. This term balance that comes with meditation or mindfuless, this
is a very basic biological definition of where we come into a greater restorative
state, and it may be many times, many small times, during the day, that we meet
this and we recalibrate. If you've ever stood on one foot to balance, you find
that those tiny little movements, these little re-balancing, out of balance, re-balancing, out of balance...
So it's not some fixed static state. It's very very alive, when
it's informed by awareness, when it's informed with mindfulness, we can more
skillfully meet those moments of being out of balance.
You might think of three qualities that are involved in mindfulness. One is
Attention. So choosing to be awake in each moment of being alive.
Intention is the choice to do that, purposeful choice. And the other is Attitude, and
attitude is kind of open curiosity that we bring to what we're aware of
in the moment.
>> The research has been suggesting that these practices can have a powerful and positive effect on health and well-being
across a wide range of medical and psychological conditions.
Medicine can do a great deal for us, and to us.
You break your leg, you want somebody to do something to you, you want them to set that leg, you want them to
do something for you. That's essential. And modern medicine has done a great deal
for us that we need. Equally so, there's a lot we can do for ourselves in the domains of health
and well-being. Nobody knows your body better than you. And we know, as well, that
about 80 or 90% of our ongoing illnesses are lifestyle related. They're related to behavior.
Only we could do something about that. I don't think there's any doubt any longer that the human being,
a person, is at the center of their own health and wellness. And that's what we mean when we talk about
participatory medicine, is that, you want to be a spectator, your health will pass you by.
You want to be a participant, it can help you be alive,
moment by moment, and enrich your life. Mindfulness begins to reveal to us our
habits, our patterns. Mindfulness is a very good training ground for developing that kind of buoyancy, that kind of stability, that kind of
capacity to catch ourselves when we're just moving off into our usual conditioned activities, or habits, or patterns, and saying,
wait a second. Or, we don't always catch ourselves. There's a redeeming
quality to the recognition, I just did the same old thing again, because it means we now know it.
And so our capacity not only to handle situations differently in the
moment is important, but our capacity to, if you will, recover, or notice when
we've just gone down the same old road we've always gone down. So if we take those as
learning moments, which is really a moment of mindfulness, when we're learning from it, because we know it. It's just not
automatic any longer, we now know it.
We're examining it in some way, not through judgment, not through condemnation, but because
we want to know, we want to understand. Because that kind of understanding leads
to changes in the way we handle the situation the next time, or the next time, or the next time...
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