Mindfully

 Hello ^-^

The first thing I immersed myself with was mindfulness. Mindfulness helped me to get rid of my stress and calm myself. Mindfulness is a bit tricky to explain, but I will do my best to convey my understanding of it.

In short, mindfulness could be described as the mastery or control over your own mind. However, in my experience, mindfulness was not quite as unallowing and as disciplinary as this description might sound. One helpful way to see the mindfulness, is to think of your mind as a young puppy being enthusiastically all over the place. This would be your mind being 'mindless' and to become mindful would mean to learn the skill of patiently guiding, steering and motivating your mind in a kind manner, as you would do with a puppy.

Mindfulness can also be seen as a practical skill, with the notion that it is not enough to know the components, but it is important to bring them together by practice. I think a good parallel can be drawn to drawing. Similar to the skill of drawing, just knowing how to move pen on a paper and seeing the lines being drawn is not enough. To become a good drawer one needs to repeat the process of drawing over and over again to grasp how to use the pen to get the lines required for the result one wants.

The results that mindfulness skills can be used for is to live eyes fully open. This would be to intentionally live in the reality. The intention in mindfulness arises from the open and focused mind. When one has an open mind the mind is allowing things to come and go. Having the skill of open mind is to have the confidence that thoughts, emotions and sensations will come in, and fade out. Focused mind on the other hand, is able to focus on or away from a specific thought, sensation, or emotion. Focusing the mind is the skill of steering the mind into whatever you want.

One of the things mindfulness can bring, is the skill to remove stress. For me this started with spotting that I was feeling in hurry. After convincing myself that hurry was a feeling that I was feeling and that it would eventually pass and not actually help me in any way, I was able to set it aside and not let it blurry my judgement when deciding what was the best course of action to take to for removing the pile of work that was causing the feeling of hurry. Earlier I would have just mindlessly tried to do things feeling super stressed and being less efficient due not feeling like I had the time to  considering what it was I should do.

A key to mindfulness is understanding that mind can be separated into emotional mind and rational mind and into wise mind. Wise mind has the skill to brings balance between these two. Emotional mind is your feelings, while rational mind is your thoughts. When you are living too much in your rational mind, you will ignore the feelings of yourself and others, but when too much in emotional mind you are driven by your emotions. For example, doing things against what you feel is right, or things that will cause you or others great pain would be too much rational mind. Whereas, raging and breaking things or doing bad decisions when in love could be examples of too much emotional mind. Wise mind is this calm and centered state of knowing with your whole being the right thing. Wise mind can show itself randomly during the life. For me this has happened when I was deciding what to study. It was not the most lucrative thing and I had no idea what I would be if I picked it, but it just felt right. And has felt right for the past 16 years. Mindfulness is a way to enter this state of knowing whenever needed.

One way to practice is to repeat to yourself: "I am a stone flake on a beach of a clear blue lake on a sunny day. I'm being tossed into the middle of the lake. I skim into the clear blue cool water and begin to sediment. I'm going through the mass of clear blue water in big circles. One circle after another. I can feel the weight of the water and quiet serenity of the lake. I settle into the bottom of the clear blue lake.". At first I just saw all this in images and felt a bit calmer, but one time I felt really calm. Unshakeable. I felt in my gut that this was my wise mind.

Comments

  1. aboomination5 December 2021 at 15:42

    Thanks for letting us explore this thought process of yours.
    Will have to re-read to see if I fully agree with your logic :p
    But some lake's bottom I don't fancy. I'm a smol feather on a warm summer's day.
    Slowly, I rise up high into the air - carried by a gentle breeze and thermal lift.

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    Replies
    1. 12ofnu12 December 2021 at 11:22

      You are welcomed ^-^. I got the inspiration from two people (HelineFay and Anna Akana) who, by sharing their journey to mental health, had made the road easier for me and now I hope I can pass on their gift.

      I agree, the end points are kinda grim.. the bottom of the lake and a dark cellar. The dark cellar one I have not shared (yet) and was slightly freaked out to try it out. My theory for why they went for this "flavor" of the end in the exercises is that it is supposed to be a trip to your deepest and most solid point. But this is highly speculative :p

      I'm curious to try out this air stuff, it probably wont make one feel deeply rooted or grounded, but maybe it will lead to something nice :p

      Delete

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