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What is mindfulness Meditation?

People often ask me what is Mindfulness Meditation?

It’s hard to come up with a short answer but here is my attempt:

It’s a family of techniques that promote a conscious attempt to focus your attention in a non-analytical way and to disconnect from your ruminating thoughts.

Easy Right?

If I break this definition down, we can start by looking at “meditation is a family of techniques.”

This is important because many people think of meditation as a one-way technique and if they can’t master that technique, they are doomed to a life of taming the monkey mind.

In fact, meditation is many things. Any moment can be meditation.

If you bring your full attention to the moment, whatever the activity is, then you are entering a form of meditation.  

So, for example, if you take a shower and every bit of your attention is on the sensation of the water splashing on your body, the feeling of the temperature, of the pressure of the water on your skin and you are fully present with the experience, then you are having a mindful meditative shower.

So, whatever the experience so long as you are fully present with it you are mindfully meditating.

Any moment can be an invitation to mindfulness.

It is what we choose to do consciously that has the potential to become a meditative moment.

It’s all about the experience of bringing your attention to a focal point, like your breath and having that open, accepting, non-reactive relationship with that focal point.

 No thoughts about it, simply the experience of it.

We’re not thinking about it, we’re not judging it, we’re just “being” with it.

If you bring your attention to the blue sky and you just breathe air, observe the sky, breathe, and see the beauty of the sky, that’s the entire mindful experience.

If the mind interferes and you start to analyse the sky and start thinking about how the sky is so beautiful and you hope it will be tomorrow again then you are no longer with the sky but rather with your mind and thoughts about the sky. You’re gone.

When you use, for example, the breath as a focal point within the breathing meditation, your mind may wander but you will bring your attention back to your focal point – that is the breath.  

And you’ll do it again and again in a single meditation. This is how you begin to retrain the mind.  The more you do it the more you exercise the mind’s ability to return and maintain its focal point.

Anything we do regularly will change our cognition.

So mindful meditation is choosing to engage in an activity that changes the quality of our attention from a fluctuating reactive all over the place attention, to one that sits still with a particular focal point.

So, practice and don’t be discouraged if your mind wanders its all part of the training.

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