As a yoga teacher, I have been working with mindful movement for twenty years. However, it is only in the last few years that I have found a love for meditation and conscious mind work. I was led to it by my own need to relieve inner tension and stress, which often originated only in my view of the situation rather than in the nature of the situation itself. Among other reasons, there was and is the fact that as descendants of our ancestors, we carry as (un)desired inheritance a temperament and certain tendencies to reactions that we ourselves perceive as no longer functional, and yet find it very difficult to free ourselves from them. In all this, the concept of MINDFULNESS can be a very good guide and helper. Calling mindfulness a panacea may sound a bit hyperbolic, but my own experience confirms that mindfulness has the enormous potential to direct the wandering mind and thus heal the ailing body. The season of autumn's melancholy moods and the rising energy of Christmas encourages us to delve into our own inner self and can support us in our intention to start working on ourselves in this direction.
To bring us closer to the potential of the mindfulness approach, we can interpret the word - mindful - an adjective that translates as awake, with a mindful mind, i.e. conscious and in full experience. In English, mindful is often used to mean mindful. Mindfulness is a noun, mindfulness or mindfulness. Both of these translations indicate very eloquently what it is all about: being mindful and attentive to what is happening to me, how the external world affects me and how I react to it, what I experience in my body and on the level of my mind and emotions. With longer practice, through the perspective and distance gained, we can also observe what lies beyond our spontaneous reactions. We can even work with them, breaking down unwanted reactions and letting go of dysfunctional thought patterns.
A mindful approach, or if you prefer a mindful approach to life, offers us tremendous benefits both in everyday life and in crisis situations. For in our daily routine we realize that nothing is actually routine J, that everything is changeable. We notice the little things and the beauty that we suddenly appreciate. It's as if someone had taken off our grey, worn sunglasses, through which we could no longer see properly. We've become accustomed to that limited view, but (maybe) we were looking for something more. And now it's coming. Life is suddenly colorful, bringing new joy and vigor, happiness and enthusiasm, sometimes sadness and tears, but in a profound experience. If we are aware, moreover, that everything happens for a purpose, and that even the most bitter experience can, in time and through winding turns, bring us to just the next important crossroads in our lives, we perceive even that sadness with humility and gratitude.
In crisis situations, I see a huge benefit of mindfulness precisely in the fact that our practice and training does not allow us to short-circuit, i.e. attack (aggression) or escape. On the contrary, we remain alert to both the outside world and our own reaction to it and to stress. We CHOOSE our reaction. With full awareness.
At one of the TEDex conferences, Dr. Dan Siegel, who works in a field called interpersonal neurobiology, explains in a very clear (and folksy) way the relationship between the different parts of the brain and their impact on our lives: the brain stem, primarily responsible for our body's reactions; the limbic system, responsible for our emotions and relationships; the cortex, the brain's cortex that primarily processes our experiential experiences; and a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. It is the latter, the prefrontal cortex, or frontal lobe, that is the evolutionarily very advanced part of the brain responsible for concentration, understanding, decision-making, remembering, and for moral and social reasoning. It is this part of the brain that has the ability and the possibility to integrate, i.e. to connect, the other mentioned parts of the brain and to monitor and direct their activities. This happens, according to Dr. Siegel, because as meditation practice progresses, the lowermost part of the prefrontal cortex becomes connected to the limbic system, the brainstem and the cortex. But this does not happen by chance. The condition is a process that Dr. Siegel calls "TIME IN," a time when we are within ourselves. It is in meditation, when we become aware of internal experiences and processes, both physical (such as breathing) and mental (the flow of thoughts), that the aforementioned parts of the brain are connected. As a result, we have better self-reflection and self-regulation, in other words, we have better control over ourselves and do not jump out of the box like a devil, we keep a cool head and better distance from things. Furthermore, positive changes are also seen in the areas of learning and memory, self-perception and taking a stand. These changes to the brain are even demonstrable on magnetic resonance imaging. The first monitorable results can be seen after about three weeks of practice, with significant changes occurring after about eight weeks of daily practice.
Behind the term MINDFULNESS stands Western science, but let us look for its origin in the ancient tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. It is the Buddhist meditation of mindfulness, the observation of the present moment without judgment, that is at the heart of the mindfulness approach. Today's mindfulness, however, is free from any religious affiliation. It is an approach that was adopted in 1979 by the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Hospital in Worcester. This program, which is called MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), has become a new current within medicine, psychiatry and psychology, which can perhaps most aptly be termed participatory medicine. The use of mindfulness in clinics is an opportunity for patients to become more engaged in improving their own health and well-being, complementing standard treatments. Mindfulness now has fifty years of clinical experience and over two thousand studies that demonstrate the clear impact of mindfulness and meditation practice on body health, immunity, state of mind, general wellbeing and stress reduction.
If we focus the energy into one point, we can do wonders.
Healing through meditation is based on the belief that every being has everything necessary to harmonize its condition, and minor, sometimes even significant deviations from full health can bring it back to normal. This whole approach has one big condition, the body and the psyche of a person need enough life energy. We receive life energy through breath, sattvic or harmonious diet, good quality sleep and balanced physical activity. However, we also lose this valuable and healing energy, sometimes consciously (by deviating from our healthy habits), and very often unconsciously, for example when we pay attention to many stimuli at once. That women are capable of multitasking and men are not is nonsense. Distracted attention harms both sexes equally. Perhaps men have a more developed instinct for self-preservation in this regard... Our conscious attention has enormous potential; if we throw it in all directions, we are inexcusably wasting it, but if we focus it on one point, we can do wonders. Like the innocent scattered rays of sunlight that we bring through a magnifying glass to a piece of dry wood - they ignite a flame...
Tip for home practice: Give yourself moments each day with full awareness when you will intentionally do only one activity. Indulge in an undisturbed cup of coffee or lunch without picking up your cell phone and dealing with pending correspondence, or a walk in the woods without music in your headphones, or anything without other distractions.
How to grasp all this and where to start? Certified mindfulness courses, which are now held all over the Czech Republic, last exactly eight weeks. This is the time during which it is possible to observe significant changes both in the brain and in everyday life. Suddenly, situations that used to make us feel stressed out leave us calm... During the mindfulness training, a group of participants get together every week with a lecturer for about 2 hours. They introduce a topic, go through the meditation together and the rest is home practice. So our intention of stress relief is not fulfilled by one meeting a week, but by a daily independent practice of about 20 - 30 minutes. After the training is over, the meditation practice becomes a habit and it is good to return to it in variations as needed. For those who are more interested, there are so-called follow-up programs, deepening the skill of meditation and its functional use, for example in working with fear, trauma and other challenging topics. I personally believe that in personal practice, discipline is superior to momentary motivation. Even if you don't feel like it and are looking for a thousand and one excuses why you don't have time right now, do it. It reminds me of the old joke about the lumberjack who cut wood with a dull saw. When asked why he didn't sharpen it, he said he didn't have time...
What can you practically try? The basic training includes about ten different meditations, which are graded in difficulty. However, the basic one that everyone goes through is breath meditation.
Tip for home practice: Breath Meditation - Just sit in a comfortable position with a straight spine and just observe your breath, don't judge, don't deepen, just let it flow, mentally repeat INHALE AND OUTHALE to yourself, and hold on to the breath as an anchor of your attention. You will be surprised where your mind will take you in just five minutes... What colorful stories you will be a participant in, what fabrications you will create... Of course, this is not our intention. Whenever the mind diverts our attention to that which is not related to the anchor of our attention, we must bring it back to the INSIGHT AND OUTPUT. How simple and complex at the same time. For it is during these returns of the mind to the present moment that the aforementioned linking of the different parts of the brain takes place.
GRATITUDE: An integral part of mindfulness training and approach is the promotion of gratitude. Everything that comes into our lives should be appreciated and thanked for. Unfortunately, very often we forget this in the rush of everyday life, and we often only realize the true value of what we have when we lose it...
Tip for home practice: Pre-Christmas Gratitude Ritual - Take a moment for yourself each evening and take a piece of paper or your journal and appreciate and give thanks with gratitude for the small and larger joys that today has brought you. If you don't want to write, express your gratitude at least in thought.
FALSE: Another important element is the promotion of kindness. Many of us are not kind enough even to ourselves, let alone to others in our environment. We have a hard time finding understanding, patience and kind words for others when we don't have them for ourselves.
Tip for home practice: Pre-Christmas Kindness Ritual - Treat yourself to a small (or bigger) kindness every day and consciously enjoy it. When you feel satiated enough, start spreading the flame of kindness around you.
Gratitude and kindness are the themes that give the meditations a further profound meaning.
We could talk for hours and hours about mindfulness and meditation. For me, this topic is not a theory from a wise book, but a lived practice with all the new insights it has led me to. I am very grateful that meditation has come into my life. We are still a pretty materialistic society and the insights that meditation offers are very uplifting and soul liberating.
Before we start making excuses for the fact that the environment is not working according to our ideas, let's start looking for solutions within ourselves, let's change our point of view, our approach. Let's use our senses to their full potential, let's keep our eyes truly open, let's listen and hear, let's savour every food, touch and smell. Let us be here and now. Let us live our lives fully and consciously at the same time.
Mgr. Lucie Vybíral Pastrňáková - author of the book Motherhood and self-realization, yoga teacher for adults and children
This article was published with the kind permission of of the magazine Sphere
casopis-sfera.cz / gnews.cz-HeK
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