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karthika
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« on: September 19, 2011, 07:27:14 AM » |
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Mindfulness Mindfulness - calm awareness of one's body functions, feelings, content of consciousness, or consciousness itself.
In addition to various forms of meditation based around specific sessions, there are mindfulness training exercises that develop awareness throughout the day using designated environmental cues. The aim is to make mindfulness essentially continuous. Examples of such cues are, notice of the ring on your finger, the hourly chimes of clocks, red lights at traffic junctions and crossing the threshold of doors etc. The mindfulness itself can take the form of nothing more than taking three successive breaths while remembering they are a conscious experience of body activity within mind. This approach is particularly helpful when it is difficult to establish a regular meditation practice.
In some early teachings of buddhism - mindfulness of breathing were emphasized more than any of the other methods.
The idea of mindfulness of mind is to slow down the fickleness of jumping back and forth. We have to realize that we are not extraordinary mental acrobats. We are not all that well trained. And even an extraordinary well-trained mind could not manage that many things at once - not even two. But because things are very simple and direct, we can focus on, be aware and mindful of, one thing at a time. That one-pointedness, that bare attention, seems to be the basic point. It is necessary to take that logic all the way and realize that even to apply bare attention to what we are doing is impossible. If we try, we have two personalities: one personality is the bare attention; the other personality is doing things. Real bare attention is being all there at once. We do not apply bare attention to what we are doing; we are not mindful of what we are doing. That is impossible. Mindfulness is the act as well as the experience, happening at the same time. Obviously, we could have a somewhat dualistic attitude at the beginning, before we get into real mindfulness, that we are willing to be mindful, willing to surrender, willing to discipline ourselves. But then we do the thing; we just do it. It is like the famous Zen saying, 'When I eat, I eat. When I sleep, I sleep." You just do it, with absolutely no implication behind what you are doing, not even of mindfulness. When we begin to feel the implications of mindfulness, we are beginning to split ourselves. Then we are faced with our resistance, and hundreds of others things seemingly begin to attack us, bother us. Trying to be mindful by deliberately looking at oneself involves too much watcher. Then we have lost the one-shot simplicity. |
