"I tried to do mindfulness but then I let it go," is a statement I hear again and again on my mindfulness days.
What
the speaker means is that he or she was told to practice mindfulness of
breathing or of the body for twenty to forty minutes a day, managed to
do so for a few days and then gave it up.
Life and its demands got in the way. So did the fact that mindfulness meditations can be somewhat boring. So they gave it up. What they gave up, though, was meditation and not mindfulness. We tend to get the two mixed up because of the Buddhist origins of mindfulness as it is practised today and because meditation forms part of Buddhist practice (though whether most Buddhists sit down and meditate is another question - I suspect they do not, but live more or less by Buddhist principles).
Life and its demands got in the way. So did the fact that mindfulness meditations can be somewhat boring. So they gave it up. What they gave up, though, was meditation and not mindfulness. We tend to get the two mixed up because of the Buddhist origins of mindfulness as it is practised today and because meditation forms part of Buddhist practice (though whether most Buddhists sit down and meditate is another question - I suspect they do not, but live more or less by Buddhist principles).
To
me mindfulness, especially as we practice it in a non-secular form in
the West, is an attitude we bring to daily life. We cultivate that
attitude by returning our attention again and again to awareness of
whatever is going on in reality in the moment and doing so without
becoming lost in self-talk about it. What we are returning from are the
fantasies, memories and mental talk in which we frequently lose ourselves and our well-being.
To do this we need to use short mindfulness practices that remind us to be mindful: coming back to awareness of breathing or of the body for instance many times a day.
This is similar to the approach taken by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in his book The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness and is a traditional approach taught to him by his father.
So if you can't/won't meditate, don't drop mindfulness: build it into your day with the sort of short practices you will read about on this blog and on my website.
So if you can't/won't meditate, don't drop mindfulness: build it into your day with the sort of short practices you will read about on this blog and on my website.
