MINDFUL MEDITATION IN REAL LIFE
What is Mindfulness?
When you own your breath, no one can steal your peace!
In the 60’s and 70’s, Westerners started to explore meditation practices & Buddhist teachings in Asia. They brought those practices back to the West and began to teach them within the framework of Buddhism.
In the 80’s and 90’s, it was discovered that those practices could be extracted from Buddhism and the cultural matrix of Asia and used within a non-religious context.
Mindfulness is a type of secular meditation, i.e. not connected with religious or spiritual matters, practiced to develop useful attentional skills.
Over the years, mindful meditation methods have become prevalent in clinical settings for pain management, addiction recovery, depression, stress reduction, and as an adjunct to psychotherapy.
Increasingly, it is being understood that mindful awareness is a cultivatable skill with broad applications through all aspects of society, including healthcare, business, education, politics, prison system and even the training of soldiers.
“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
“Mindfulness ... means being free and not clinging to either the past or future - the ifs and maybes - and free of judgement of right or wrong, such as the "I'm-the-best" or "I'm-no-good" scenarios, so that we can be fully present without distraction.”
“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”
- William Somerset Maugham