What is mindfulness? Come and join Janet Solyntjes as she talks about Mindfulness and Stress Reduction.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
This is the story of how we are now in 2020 have mindfulness as a household word. Everywhere I go, people are familiar with it. And it all started in terms of the mainstream focus in the mid-70s. So, Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered like the grandfather of the mindfulness revolution.
The Deep and Wide Path
The deep and wide path came from Dan Goleman and Richie Davidson. So anyway, tribute to them. So, these traditions go way, way back, ancient lineages of Buddhism. So that would be called the level one, the pure form where people’s motivation was enlightenment. So, that included long or long periods either in solitary retreat or in monastic communities, for the most part. So that practice, formal meditation practice, was your job. You did that 10-12 hours a day. And you did it for years on end.
The View
The view is important, how we view ourselves when we’re sitting down to practice meditation, or when we’re walking through our life matters. And so, Jon Kabat-Zinn, this is a quote from him. “As long as you are breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or despairing you may be feeling in a given moment.”
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a natural part of the mind; we are always paying attention to something. We might be paying attention to our to-do list or a conversation we had, or maybe paying attention to something that we’re anxious about coming up in the future.
This particular kind of paying attention really is about the present moment.
Here’s just obviously a simple picture. And if you look at the thought balloon on the left, so much of the time, when we’re out in nature, or in a meeting, or in a session with somebody, our mind might be filled with many extraneous things. So, we don’t need to block those. We don’t need to pretend that meditation is an empty thought bubble. But on the right, we just see that sense of being where you are just present, mindful.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (8 Week Course)
Emphasize the importance of making each moment count through formal and informal mindfulness.
Taking an MBSR course means that you do home assignments or home play, and that you build a practice you do 45 minutes a day of one of the mindfulness tools, and you have other things that you kind of reflect on, your relationship with things that you call pleasant and, and you kind of look at that in terms of the body and the thoughts and the feelings, emotions around that, and unpleasant.
It is an engagement. It’s a change in lifestyle for those eight weeks.
The other thing is that it is about caring for yourself and how do you engage in that own care, so that you develop an understanding of feel for your role through your whole lifespan?
How can you find ease? How can you do it by yourself whether or not you can get body work or have a meaningful conversation? What is it in you that will help you care for yourself?
