Читать книгу Summary: How to Live Mindfully with the Help of Meditation. Maria Gorina - Smart Reading, Ольга Ганкова - Страница 2

What does it mean to make decisions consciously, to have a mindful conversation, to drive consciously, to mindfully play with a child? Doesn’t it imply that we live in an unconscious state and that we require special training to live "inside ourselves"? That seems to be the case.

We spend a considerable part of life "on autopilot", existing mainly in our head rather than in reality. We eat while scrolling our Facebook feed, we drive while listening to some podcast, we make love while planning tomorrow’s meetings. The most beautiful sunset above the ocean cannot distract us from the consuming dialog we’re having with our inner critic and our reliving a failure that happened a year ago. No wonder the life we are living at this very moment gives us little pleasure and satisfaction. Yet, at the same time, everyone has experienced mindfulness at least once.

Try to remember a situation when you felt you were truly in the moment, being fully present and immersed in every passing second. What was it? Was it the birth of a child, finishing a marathon, the moment of your mother’s death? Was it the seconds before a car crash or the captivating feeling of being at one with nature while standing on a mountaintop?

Usually, it’s an experience beyond our daily routine, when time either disappears completely or stretches considerably, when one second feels like ten minutes. All the various episodes that have just come to mind share one thing in common – you were in same state of being: you were concentrating on the present to the max and were prepared to accept and live life it "as is" without evaluating or making judgements.

This state is known as "consciousness" or "mindfulness". There are three key points to it:

▶concentration;

▶acceptance;

▶non-judgement.

"Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally."

Jon Kabat-Zinn

"Mindfulness is the practice of complete presence in the moment, feeling alive, feeling harmony between body and brain."

Tit Nath Khan

You can develop mindfulness by being regularly aware of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, while at the same time being aware of what is happening externally. This includes acceptance of and the ability to watch your thoughts and feelings without judgement, without labeling them "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong". By practicing mindfulness, people learn to focus on what they are experiencing at a given moment without getting distracted by thoughts about the past or the future.

Mindfulness is organic to human nature as this mechanism is already preinstalled in us. It’s not so much the study of, as it is the recollection of our experience and dispersing it over the meaningful part of our life.