Being Mindful in Everyday Life By Juliette Taylor T
he term mindfulness has been part of the spiritual conversation for thousands of years through Buddhism, Hinduism, and even in the Muslim/Christian and Judaic traditions. But secular mind- fulness – mindfulness devoid of any spiritual quest is what I’m talking about here and that conversation has its roots in healthcare over 35 years ago. It was integrated into the institutional environment through Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduc- tion program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction His work over the past thirty-fi ve years according to the UMass medical center website,
http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/stress- reduction/history-of-mbsr/ , “has shown consistent, reliable, and reproducible demonstrations of major and clinically relevant reduc- tions in medical and psychological symptoms across a wide range of medical diagnoses, including many different chronic pain conditions, other medical diagnoses and in medical patients with a secondary diagnosis of anxiety and/or panic, over the eight weeks of the MBSR intervention, and maintenance of these changes in some cases for up to four years of follow-up.” While mindfulness has its roots in Bud- dhist meditative traditions called Dharma, the practice of mindfulness (dharma) is universal which is why Jon uses dharma with a little ‘d.’
Since the start of his program over 22,000 people including me
have completed the MBSR 8-week program. MBSR has received massive coverage being featured in: “Bill Moyers’ PBS documentary Healing and The Mind, NBC Dateline, ABC’s Chronicle, The Boston Globe, CNN, and in various national print media. It is the subject of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s best-selling book, Full Catastrophe Living and Saki Santorelli’s book, Heal Thy Self. The central focus of the program is intensive training in mindfulness meditation and its integration into the challenges/adventures of everyday life.”
Now that’s what I’m talking about. Mindfulness meditation inte- grating into the challenges and adventures of our everyday lives.
What is Mindfulness? So what is mindfulness exactly if we separate it from the spiritual quest of connecting to something higher and from the notion of being better than someone else?
Jon describes mindfulness as, “being fully awake in our lives and
perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment.” Through medita- tion he states that, “we feel more alive. We also gain immediate ac- cess to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.”
Psychology Today describes mindfulness as, “a state of active, open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, you observe
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your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience.”
Powerful. The notion that sitting in a mindful position noticing each sound
in our environment and sensation in our body has a ripple effect on our lives is powerful.
What makes it so powerful? For me the life-changing aspect of bringing mindfulness into my
every day life is that in each sitting we learn to create space between stimulus and response. Mindfulness is sandwiched in the middle. Where normally we would feel the stimuli and then respond, after spending time in a mindful practice we are able to consciously decide what we want to do with the feeling that comes up.
Each stimuli triggers a story. Sitting and noticing the sound of
birds may trigger an event where you heard similar birds or that you wished you heard birds at some other time or that these birds are really annoying like so and so and on and on it goes. In mindfulness we learn to look at the story attached to the sound and then bring ourselves back to the present to the sound itself and then into the body of what sensations come up. It’s all very simple, yet may not be easy. It takes practice and in that practice – in the space – we sit in awareness and in conscious decision-making outside of the judgment zone.
To me mindfulness is about the awareness, awareness of what is and without any judgment. I get to sit with each sensation or noise and the story it conjures up and look at it as I feel it. If I’m angry I see it as such. If I’m self-pitying…guess what? It’s self-pitying. But then something amazing happens in that 30-minute “sit.” I see the me outside the story looking at the story and the emotion drifts away. The Mindful School curriculum describes emotion as either impulsive or responsive response motions and mindfulness “creates the spaces replacing impulsive reactions with thoughtful responses.”
The other day my oldest daughter Alex spilled sauce all over
the kitchen cabinets and she commented that I was so chill about it. “Wow.” She said. “You’ve changed, Mom. Years ago, you would have jumped all over me or at least made a face and mumbled under your breath depending on what mood you were in. And now, you just got a rag and started cleaning up.” I guess a mindful ‘sit’ allows me the space to not sweat the small stuff. I’m still me. But I’m chill!
Mindfulness is the fi rst M in my 4 ‘M’s that are the cornerstones to the LifesPath approach.
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