What are we mindful about?  Four aspects of mindfulness

Four aspects of mindfulness

“Knowing what is happening, when it is happening and without preference.” (Rob Nairn).

Coming back to our definition of Mindfulness, we can see clearly that training in mindfulness will involve becoming more familiar with the workings of the mind.  But what do we, in the West, mean by the mind?  We usually understand the mind to mean our thoughts.  However, as we come to see when we train in mindfulness, there are many other aspects to our experience of mind, such as:

Body (physical sensations of wellbeing; discomfort; aches; pains; pleasurable sensations)

Sensory experiences (what we touch, see, hear, smell and taste)

Emotions (moods; feelings; felt senses; different emotional states)

Thoughts (memories; plans; images; chatter; earworms)

When we sit to meditate, the different aspects of our experience emerge into our awareness, like clouds through a vast sky.  Over time, there develops a sense of spaciousness to that awareness and with appreciation of the different aspects of our experience, an awareness of the richness of that experience too.

Working with body sensations, we learn that we can shift our attention onto those different aspects of physical sensations, as we become practised in shifting our attention from narrowly focussed to more broadly open.  We notice sensations of clothing covering the body; the feel of a gentle breeze on our skin; how different parts of the body feel from the inside, as a universe of varied sensations that come and go.  We might perceive tingling; warmth; tightness and holding in different parts of the body; we may, over time notice habitual patterns of holding that we notice emerge in response to particular situations; pockets of wellbeing; coolness; discomfort and pain; a sense of life flowing and pulsing through us.  We may notice all this as we experience our own inner universe. 

When we pay attention to what is coming into our mind via our senses from the world around us, we may become aware of the feel of our clothes and the air around us against our skin; smell scents wafting on the air around us; experience whole worlds of tastes in our mouth; feel the texture and solidness of the chair we are resting on supported by the ground underneath; resting within the soundscape that surrounds us; feasting our eyes on the richness and diversity of colours, shapes and textures of objects filling the space surrounding our bodies as we move through the landscape of our lives.  As you reflect on these different layers of your world, do you notice which sense feels more familiar to you – which sense dominates?

Simultaneously, we may be more aware of the feelings aspect of the mind – moods, feelings, feeling tones, emotions, felt senses.   We may become aware of layers of different emotions occurring all at once, how the different flow of this aspect of the mind takes place in the body and even where in the body such feelings might typically tend to be focused.

Mostly, we may be aware of the thinking aspect of our minds: thoughts; worries and concerns; plans and to-do lists that never end; hopes and fears; life plans. We have just looked at the “separate” aspects of our experience, but of course, our experience can involve all of these aspects simultaneously, although we may seldom be aware of those different aspects in that moment.  However, as we bring our mindful awareness to one such moment, we might notice which aspect of the mind is uppermost in our awareness – we might shine our awareness like a torch on narrow-beam to focus on one aspect, ie; body or senses or emotions or thoughts, or we might broaden that torch to wide-beam and take in the broader picture of all aspects of our experience in that moment. 

The choice is ours – and as we come to learn – that choice can make all the difference.

Click here to find out more about training in mindfulness

What is Mindfulness?

What is Mindfulness

What is Mindfulness?

To appreciate what we mean by Mindfulness, we start with recognising “automatic pilot”. How many times have you walked into a different room in your home and found yourself there with little recall of the steps you took to get there, or the thoughts you were thinking on the way.  To top it all, you find yourself standing there having forgotten what you came in for in the first place!  Sound familiar?  The story plays out in many other ways – if you drive a vehicle, you may have driven home many times and find yourself with little recall of the journey home because you were lost in thought.  Or, you walked into town and had no idea you walked right past someone you know quite well, without noticing.  Perhaps some of those situations sound familiar – the similarity in each situation is how the mind becomes involved with thinking without our being fully aware of the activity we are involved in at the time, it is as if we were on automatic pilot, or “autopilot”. 

We can spend much of our time in autopilot, engaged in an activity and lost elsewhere in thought.  The elsewhere is the interesting part – it may include re-playing scenes from the past, or the day just gone, or thoughts about what we’re going to do when….projecting our minds into the future.

Where’s the problem with that, particularly if our thoughts are happy ones?  Therein lies the problem, very often our automatic thoughts are negative.  They may start off on a happy line of thought, but then along comes a memory attached to that happy thought and we follow it, from there we’re drawn into one thought, then another, on into a train of thought and before long, we’re waking up at “Thought Grand Central”, not feeling very happy at all.  To top it all off, while we were walking along on our thought train we missed the beautiful sunset, walked straight past the trees ringing with birdsong and walked past our friend, without seeing them, once more! 

Not only does our tendency to become drawn into thinking rob us of the richness of our outer and inner world, it more often than not leaves us with negative feelings that, when we come back to awareness, seem to have appeared out of nowhere.  If only we had been more mindful, we might have experienced the sunset, heard the birds and their enchanting melodies and seen and enjoyed a minute or two chatting with our friend, while the sun went down.

Why practice mindfulness?

Recent research in mindfulness, has revealed many benefits, including: decreases in anxiety, depression, rumination and emotional reactivity.  Mindfulness has been shown to help increase well-being, feelings of happiness and concentration.

The regular practicing of mindfulness has also been found to help foster benefits to physical health including: quality of sleep, improving immune system function and decreasing blood pressure.

Regular and longer term mindfulness practice has been linked to structural and functional brain changes in areas associated with attention, emotional regulation, empathy and bodily awareness.

So, what is Mindfulness and where can I get some?

We already possess within us everything we need in order to become more mindful: an innate ability to be aware of what’s happening now in this present moment without judgement.  As Rob Nairn puts it:

Knowing what is happening, while it is happening, without preference.

Knowing what is happening while it is happening, in other words, when we are present through our senses to what is happening around us this moment, is an experiential knowing – an awareness – and that awareness, we learn, is always present, always aware, here for us to rest in.  As we train our minds in this way, we gradually come to trust this awareness as a place where we can rest, at peace – a secure base that is less reliant on external circumstances. The learning to recognise and rest in that awareness is the practice of Mindfulness where we train our minds to do just that. 

Forthcoming 8wk Mindfulness Based Living Course!

Over a period of eight weeks we learn the practice of mindfulness – an eight week course – and over the coming posts, I hope to give a flavour of the eight week course that I will be running in January.

For more information on forthcoming 8wk Mindfulness Courses click here.