What Is Insight Meditation and Mindfulness?
Insight meditation is the intentional, non-judgmental awareness of our changing experience. Mindfulness is applying that awareness to our everyday lives. Together they encourage us to live each day responding to life's challenges rather than reacting mindlessly. Together they open the heart and calm the mind.
Insight meditation and mindfulness are deceptively simple yet powerful tools. In this practice, we pay bare attention to whatever is happening in the moment. Bare attention is an attention that is fully focused on the experience itself and not on our thoughts, judgments or mental commentaries about it. This is more difficult than it may appear, as our habit is to pay far more attention to what our mind tells us about an experience than feeling the actual experience itself.
Insight meditation begins with quieting and centering our normally busy minds by concentrating on one object - usually our breath. It is performed sitting on the floor, a meditation bench or on a straight-backed chair in a relatively quiet location. As we settle down, we feel the changing sensations of breathing and notice what happens. We soon find that the mind is no longer focused on the breath but has wandered off to plan the day's activities, replay yesterday's events or tell us all the reasons why we should give up and turn on the TV. Like training a puppy to sit and stay, we gently bring our minds back to our breath again and again.
As we train our minds through meditation and mindfulness, we begin to see our life experiences more clearly. We observe that there is an experience and then a reaction to it - an itch and our reaching to scratch or a sound and the judgments and thoughts about the sound. We see thoughts appear in our minds ("All men/women are like that!") and can begin to question their validity. We learn that we can choose a response far more appropriate to the situation that our old habits would have allowed. We learn to live a more free and authentic life.
|
|
Meditation is to be aware of what is going on in your body,
in your feelings, in your mind and in the world.
- Thich Nhat Hanh,
Being Peace
Regular meditation practice enables us to know ourselves better and to balance our mind/body. It can activate our wise mind that knows to drop things we do that cause unhappiness and motivates us to do things and think thoughts that will give us more moments of happiness.
- Tom Barrett
|
