Tessa Watt - Introducing Mindfulness: A Practical Guide

Mindfulness is one of the oldest and most basic skills known to mankind. In its essence, its as simple as rediscovering the taste of fresh water or the vastness of the sky. It is learning, or re-learning, how to be present, how to be in this moment. It can be like stepping out of a grey flat screen mode into a world which is vivid and three-dimensional.

Mindfulness means becoming more aware of whats going on right here, right now. We can appreciate our lives, instead of rushing through them, always trying to get somewhere else. Being mindful can also help us to be less swept away by our powerful, habitual currents of thought and emotion, which can manifest as stress, depression, negative thinking, anxiety, anger, resentment or self-doubt.

Mindfulness itself is a way of being a capacity for moment-by-moment awareness which doesnt belong to any one culture or tradition. But we find that this skill, part of our birthright, has somehow been lost to us; perhaps increasingly so in our speedy 21st-century world. The good news is that we can train ourselves in mindfulness, just as we exercise to keep our bodies healthy.

Mindfulness is about teaching yourself to be more:

• Aware of your body, your mind and the environment
• Present in this moment; right here, right now
• Focused more able to make choices about where you place your attention
• Embodied being in your body; bringing your mind and your body into synch
• Accepting of yourself and other people.

Mindfulness training draws on the ancient traditions of meditation and yoga, often incorporating insights from modern medicine and psychotherapy. It involves setting aside time for practice time when you can literally practise being mindful by bringing your mind back, again and again, to a particular object of attention.

In mindfulness practice you may use one or more of these as your focus:

• Your breath the physical sensations of breathing
• Your body in stillness or in movement
• Your senses such as hearing, seeing and tasting
• Your thoughts which may include your emotions
• Your experience whatever arises in your awareness in this moment, including any of the above.

As well as making space for formal meditation, you can bring mindfulness into your life throughout the day. You can use informal practices to help you do this washing the dishes mindfully, perhaps, or taking a short breathing space. With practice, the mindful approach will slowly seep into your being and you may find yourself naturally being more present and aware in your daily life.

Mindfulness practice can be:

• Formal such as sitting meditation using the breath as a focus
• Informal such as making a cup of tea with awareness.

The practice of mindfulness goes back thousands of years. Many spiritual traditions have encouraged presence in the moment as a way to be in touch with our inner selves, or the divine. Buddhism has made mindfulness a core part of its teachings, more so than any other tradition. Buddhist thinkers have taken great interest over the centuries in the way the human mind works, developing methods of training the mind to be more present, focused and aware. The practical techniques used in current mindfulness training come largely from the Buddhist tradition of meditation, along with elements drawn from the more body-oriented Indian discipline of hatha yoga.

Since the 1960s, the political situation in Asian countries like Vietnam and Tibet has sent Buddhist teachers into exile in the West, where theyve taken up the challenge of teaching new audiences. Meditation practices which were traditionally done by monks in a forest or monastery have been adapted for busy Westerners with jobs and families. Influential Buddhist teachers have included the Japanese Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the visionary Tibetan Chgyam Trungpa, and of course the well known Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet.

But you dont have to be religious, become a Buddhist or believe anything particular to practise mindfulness. Since the 1970s, mindfulness training in the West has developed into structured, secular courses which are increasingly accessible. Mindfulness has spread like wildfire in the public consciousness. In 1979 the American Jon Kabat Zinn created an eight-week course at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to help people with difficult conditions such as chronic pain, AIDS and cancer. Without being able to cure them, he discovered that meditation could help them relate to their stress and suffering in a different way. This course of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), is now used around the world; not only for people with illness, but for many thousands of participants simply wanting to find a way to deal with the normal daily difficulties of life, and to enjoy life more fully.