Mindfulness - 10 Clarifications

Mindfulness can be a hard concept to get your head around. Firstly, the name: having your mind full (of whatever) doesn't sound a particularly attractive proposition when many of us have overflowing minds anyway.

And the opposite, empty mind, sounds a bit vacuous... empty-headed, even.

So why all the fuss about Mindfulness? There's no doubt that a truly mindful state is life-transforming for some of us. But it's also true that the concept has been hijacked to a degree and turned into just another misunderstood tool for commercial success.

Rather than attempt to explain Mindfulness (why explain a garden when you can visit it?) here are 10 statements to help clarify it:

1. You can't stop thought. Try to and you just generate more. That's how it's meant to work so don't waste energy trying to change it.
2. You can control where you focus your attention. This is the only thing we can do since thought precedes all speech and action.
3. Thoughts and Feelings are two sides of the same coin. Different but inseparable. Thought provides direction, feeling provides movement.
4. If you can observe thoughts or feelings, you cannot be them, any more than you can be a bunch of flowers.
5. Your conscious attention can be focused on a thought, a sensory input, an imagining or a memory. It can also be opened to include everything going on right now. Or it can be left to dissipate and scatter.
6. When the focus is left to scatter it can gravitate towards self-sustaining cycles of thought and feeling. When these are unpleasant, the only solution is to withdraw your attention.
7. We have to live with the feelings generated by the thoughts we think. So if we want to feel good (who doesn't?) we have to decline all negative, critical, judgement of ourselves and others. Otherwise we sentence ourselves to feeling bad, which is a form of self-abuse that creates mental, emotional and physical dis-ease.
8. Thinking about mindfulness is not mindfulness. The state transcends human intellect and is not amenable to analysis.
9. Meditation and Mindfulness are not the same. By all means drive your car mindfully, but don't meditate at the wheel!
10. Because thought is causal, it needs far more care and attention than the world around us which is full of effects.

So there we have a non-exhaustive list of axioms, directly or indirectly related to the state of mindfulness intended to clarify rather than define or explain. Mindfulness - and in particular, meditation - is an excellent path to a brighter, lighter, more enjoyable existence, accessible to all.

And it is a fundamental imperative of good leadership.

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If you agree, disagree or would like to know more, get in touch with me at [email protected]