Hello, friends. I have already written about mindfulness, about how, thanks to it, your life improves many times over, and you become healthy and happy people.
Today I will tell you exactly how to train mindfulness in everyday life, I will give effective exercises for mindfulness, in a word, I will teach you how to achieve it in order to get all the bonuses of this state of consciousness.
For those who have not yet had time to read the previous article, I will say briefly that a person is designed in such a way that he constantly drives himself into depression, neurosis, panic disorders and other similar problems. It's all due to the uncontrolled work of our psyche, our mind, or in other words, the ego.
We constantly worry about the future, we cannot forget the bad past, we are always afraid of something, angry, offended, and so on ad infinitum. All this leads not only to mental problems, but also to physical illnesses. As they say: “All diseases come from nerves.” We are ruled by thoughts and emotions stuck in our heads; they, and not we ourselves, decide what our life will be like.
If a person, for example, is very nervous during an interview, it means that emotions are clouding his head and preventing him from thinking rationally. He has no self-control and usually fails an important meeting. And many such examples can be given. We simply do not live consciously and do not know how to control our thoughts, feelings and emotions. Almost all of a person's problems are due to his unawareness.
Only awareness will help us get out of this hell, wake up, improve our lives, become a healthy and happy person.
And you will learn how to achieve it from this article.
Awareness comes gradually
Awareness is a special state of consciousness in which we do not wander in the chaos of thoughts and emotions, but are in the current moment, here and now. We begin to clearly understand everything, but most importantly, we become aware of our real self. Or you can say, it awakens in us. As a result, we go beyond the psyche and can look at its manifestations from the outside. This immediately solves many problems. Uncontrollable negative emotions, which previously destroyed us from the inside, leading to illness, finally cease to have power over us and gradually dissolve.
It all seems clear and sounds beautiful. But it will not be possible to gain awareness immediately, at the “pike’s command, at my will.” This is a workout and the results will not be immediate. Our consciousness must get used to working more productively, development will be gradual. The habit of living unconsciously is deeply rooted in us and it takes time to change it. You cannot gain awareness right away. This is a process, and the growth of awareness can go on endlessly. You can’t say that a person has become as smart as possible and that’s all. You can develop your mind throughout your life. So it is with awareness. At first we are aware a little, then more, even more, and so on.
But don't be alarmed. You don’t have to be super conscious to improve your life. Already your first efforts will bear fruit, negative emotions and uncontrolled internal dialogue will significantly decrease. And having felt all the charm of this state, you will be happy to increase the power of awareness. For you, such work on yourself will be easy and relaxed, you will like it. And someday your awareness will increase so much that you will simply be surprised how much your life has improved. “How did I live before without her,” you say to yourself.
But first you have to work hard. There is no way without this.
How to learn to become aware of yourself in meditation?
It is not without reason that meditation is considered an effective way to develop mindfulness. It gives you the opportunity to contact
a person inside himself, concentrating on his breathing, including counting the number of inhalations and exhalations.
It is a mistake to think that in this case it is necessary to stop all thought processes. This won't lead to anything good. You just need to try to separate your thoughts and feelings from yourself, allowing them to arise and go naturally.
Such meditation is an important element of every spiritual teaching, esoteric school. It is one of the methods of training the mind. It is successfully used in psychotherapy. There are actually a lot of meditations. The simplest of them involves the following steps:
- You need to sit comfortably in your favorite place (room, on the roof of a house, in a park, in a forest clearing, etc.), sitting or lying on your back.
- Try to feel only what is happening here and now, not paying attention to the flow of your own thoughts.
- You should feel how all the muscles relax, “scan” yourself from the tips of your toes to the top of your head. This will allow you to feel the process of muscle relaxation. In this case, you should not try to adjust your breathing. You just need to achieve a state of conscious contemplation.
Where to begin?
And you need to start by removing the importance of your thoughts and emotions.
The fact is that we are very strongly linked to them. And such a thing as a sense of self-importance is to blame for everything.
A separate article will be devoted to it. Now the main thing is to understand that this feeling leads a person to pride, selfishness, stubbornness, disrespect for other people, and placing oneself at the center of the whole world. Feeling important actually has both pros and cons. Without it, we would not be able to interact normally with people or defend our opinions. But excessive self-importance actually leads to big problems, gives rise to many negative emotions, and obscures our true vision of the world. What we are interested in now is that due to a sense of self-importance, a person is strongly attached to his feelings, thoughts and emotions. He considers them unshakable, very important, unchanging, and not subject to criticism. “I said so, that’s it, it’s the law.” “My opinion is unshakable.” “My thoughts and emotions are me, they are important and unchanging.” All this leads to the fact that a person considers his character, his reactions, his entire psyche as a very important part of himself that cannot be changed. Even if he is not happy with his character, he still believes that nothing can be done about it. This is also important.
The first step towards awareness is to reduce your sense of self-importance. To do this, you need to change your worldview and understand what I am about to say.
Our thoughts, feelings and emotions are actually not as important as they seem to us. This importance was invented by us, other people look at our character completely differently, they don’t care about us. But most importantly, all manifestations of the psyche are just a program that exists in our head and which can be erased and replaced with a new one. It is only a part of ourselves, but it is not us. We are actually something more than all these thoughts and emotions.
Learn to listen to other people's opinions. Not only your own, but also their thoughts deserve attention. Try to understand what the other person wants. Stop arguing, maybe your opponent is actually right.
Just stop, stop being proud and not seeing anyone around. Look at other people with understanding and respect.
Maybe you don’t want it, you’re not used to it, but try it. You want to become conscious and change your life. At first it will be difficult and you will have to change yourself.
Such a change in worldview leads to the fact that a person stops, calms down his pride a little, pauses the internal mental conversation and begins to notice at least something around him, stops being stubborn like a sheep. And here the so-called pause in response appears, the key to awareness.
Practical advice No. 4 What to do with feelings, emotions, moods?
Harmony of mind and body helps to work on the fourth step - awareness of feelings, emotions and moods. This is the most difficult step because it is the thinnest layer. In the inner world everything is like this - the subtler it is, the more powerful it is, the more difficult it is to work on it. And vice versa, the rougher the layer, plane, energy, the easier it is to cope with it. That's why we start by observing the body.
But if you can already be aware of your thoughts, you will be able to be aware of your feelings, your emotions, and your mood. It just needs a little more awareness, more intense awareness.
“When all three layers merge into one, when they vibrate as one, and there is no longer any discord between them, then, as a reward from existence, for the efforts made in the previous steps, extreme awareness is activated. It makes a person awakened. Then the seeker comprehends the Truth and the state of total Happiness and bliss no longer leaves him. He came home that many lives had sought."
This is what enlightened masters say.
Stop the world
To come to awareness, you need to find this pause in reaction within yourself. Or, you could say, you just need to stop the world.
A person is constantly in a hurry to somewhere, doing something, spinning through life like a squirrel in a wheel. Maybe this is all good, but it leads to the fact that his internal dialogue is constantly working, without stopping for a second. We are always thinking about something, making plans for the future, imagining what will happen next, remembering past events, reacting emotionally to events, and so on ad infinitum. This has become a habit and has led to the fact that we are constantly attached to our thoughts, emotions, and our ego. The real self is in a sleepy state.
A person's attention constantly jumps like a mad monkey from one object to another, unable to focus on one thing.
There is no talk of any awareness in such conditions.
All this led to an unconscious reaction to the surrounding reality. A person lives like a robot, obeying the programs programmed in his head.
The formula is: stimulus-response. All! And these reactions are already in our brain, and we always react the same way. Our life is the result of such programs and we are not able to change it. And the world that we observe is also the result of the work of the same programs. We look at the world through the prism of our ego. You can read more about this here.
But we can stop the habitual reaction, which means we can change our lives. Changing your life starts with changing your thinking. Change your thoughts and your life will change. But the world around us will also change. If we stop, for example, being angry with people and seeing everyone as enemies, then we will come across more good people. To change the world, to rebuild it, you must first stop the old world, stop the old reaction to the situation. To do this, you need to insert one more link into the stimulus-response formula: a pause, leading to freedom of choice. A new formula emerges: stimulus - pause (freedom of choice, stop) - and only then a reaction, but it will be conscious, and not automatic. This is stopping the world, stopping the habitual reaction, stopping the internal dialogue, awareness.
That is, before the reaction occurs, and we react habitually, there is a pause. We stop, stop the internal dialogue, conscious attention turns on, which itself will decide how to react in the current situation. We are transforming from robots into conscious people.
The techniques and exercises described below will help you come to such a stop and better understand what it all is.
How to usually train mindfulness
Meditation is usually associated with the development of awareness - sit in the lotus position (or any other, the main thing is that your back should not lean on anything), set a timer, close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing or sensations in the body.
