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Creating calm and relaxation: Relaxing your body and quieting your mind aren’t the
primary goals of mindfulness, but they can be a welcome and valuable
by-product. Mindful meditation can help you escape your stressful thoughts and
feelings by learning to attend to a breath, an image, or a relaxing thought. In
this article, I discuss how mindful meditation can help you calm your mind. By
focusing on your breathing, a sensation, or an object, you can create your own
quieter place, undisturbed by the fears, worries, and distractions that
punctuate your day.
Living in the present: Mindfulness can give you an appreciation of the richness that life has
to offer by teaching you to notice the fullness of your experience. It shows
you how to live more fully in the present. Too often, you have one foot in the
past and the other in the future, and as a result you miss out on the present.
You lose any appreciation of what’s happening to you right now. You get lost in
rumination, worry, and fear. Your thoughts, feelings, and actions become
automatic, reactive, and distressing, and your life becomes less authentic and
less meaningful. But mindfulness can pull you out of auto-pilot and give you
greater awareness of and appreciation for the life you want to live.
Coping with stressors: Mindfulness can function in more direct ways, giving you an important
tool to cope with specific stressors and stress reactions. Becoming mindful can
help you detach from your stressful world and observe it without judgment,
criticism, or resistance. You can learn to step back and view your thoughts,
emotions, and behaviors as by-products of an overactive and, at times,
distorting mind. This gives you coping options: You can become aware of these
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without fighting them or feeding them, and,
if you choose, you can more calmly and effectively explore avenues of change.
It really works
Research shows that mindfulness can
result in a significant reduction in stress levels. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, at the
Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, in Worcester,
Massachusetts, followed a group of more than 6,000 patients presenting a
variety of stress-related conditions and disorders. He found that when patients
followed an eight-week program of mindfulness training, their stress-related
symptoms decreased and their conditions improved. Kabat-Zinn also found that
following the mindfulness program helped people reduce their anxiety levels and
lessen the severity of depressive episodes. More importantly, these changes
were maintained on follow-up visits.
The more specific uses and benefits
of mindfulness are described more fully later. For now, here’s a
simple exercise that will take only a moment or two and will give you a sense
of what mindfulness is like. Read the following instructions and then close the
book and do the exercise:
1. Stop whatever else you’re doing,
take a deep breath, and try to become more relaxed.
2. Now, take this book (or tablet) in
both of your hands.
Try to become aware of the book (or
tablet) as if it’s the first time you’ve ever seen a book/tablet. Become
curious, wanting to know more about this thing called a book/tablet. Holding it
in your hands, gently focus all of your attention on the book/tablet.
3. Focus on the weight of the book/tablet
in your hands.
Does it feel light or heavy?
4. Notice the texture of the paper/screen
by rubbing your fingers over a page.
Does it feel totally smooth, or can
you feel some roughness?
5. Without reading the text, pay
attention to the print — the types of fonts used, the size of the print, and
the word patterns.
6. Look at the cover of the book/tablet
and notice the different colors and designs.
Notice the way light is reflected on
the cover. Now feel the cover of the book. Running your fingers over the cover,
notice its glossy smoothness.
This exercise seems so simple that
you may miss what’s happening. What you discover is that you’re attending to
something in a way you normally wouldn’t. Hopefully you were able to slow
yourself down and take your time as you became an observer, noticing, without
any judgments, a very small piece of your experience. There was no analysis, no
over-thinking, just observation. Your awareness was focused; you were in the
moment. This ability allows you to detach from your world of automatic
thinking, feeling, and behaving. This detachment puts you in an accepting,
non-judgmental frame of mind, where you choose to simply be. You can use this
frame of mind as a base for exploring better ways of coping with your stress.
Copyright © Allen Elkin Phd – Originally appeared in Stress Management for Dummies 2nd edition by Allen Elkin
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