MINDFULNESS

As one Buddhist monk once stated, Mindfulness is the ability to be able to quiet the monkey mind. The “monkey mind” is about a monkey going “ape shit” and jumping from thought to thought with little to no processing of information. The monkey is just in the emotional state and dissociates the outside and inner world.

A lot of new-age people equate mindfulness as simply meditation but it is more than that. Yes, you can practice mindfulness meditation and sit in your thoughts. However, it takes massive willpower to practice it while doing everything else in your life and that is the goal. When you practice mindfulness for everyday living you can extrapolate the causes for everything in your life past and present.

With mindfulness techniques, you are able to acknowledge when a thought enters your mind and visually let it go. If you’ve ever had a cussing problem and had to be around kids for an extended period of time, you may swear once, acknowledge it occurred, swear again, but catch yourself and stop swearing on the third time. Mindfulness is catching thoughts or actions and redirecting or finding the source of that thought and correcting it.

For those who have panic attacks, deep debilitating ones that are so severe that you are stuck in your mind until it is over, mindfulness may be a source to break free. These people may use mindfulness to reflect and find the source or trigger of the thoughts that created the attack. This is literally where the word “trigger” comes from, it is from mindfulness exercises by psychologists.

To begin mindfulness you don’t need anything you just need to follow these very simple instructions:

1. Turn off all sounds in your rooms and turn your phone to silent

2. Sit down on the floor and shut up 3. Observe thoughts when they occur, thank them, and discard them visually in a folder you will access when you are done

That’s all you need to do. You don’t need to worry about breathing, you need to just sit, and shut up, and watch your thought patterns. When you do this for 6-8 weeks you can move on to do this in daily life, when cooking, taking a shower, or other.

When you really focus and try to obtain mindfulness while doing daily tasks the insight you can gain about yourself and the world can be almost overpowering. It is akin to a superpower that very few people understand. At this point, you are closer to dissolving the Ego accidentally or at will.

You should not fear this as it is not permanent. Everyone in Hollywood pays gurus hundreds of thousands of dollars to attain enlightenment or Jhana during meditation. I am here to tell you that enlightenment doesn’t last forever but the insight gained does. Jhanas don’t last long but the insight gained from it does as well. Mindfulness will get you there. Meditation in combination with Mindfulness is the key.