7 Tips for Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
by Parker · 35 things on Twos
- Tips from "Wherever You Go, There You Are" by Jon Kabat-Zinn
- Pause and let the present moment sink in
- To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in.
- Mindfulness means paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.
- Just sit. Reside at the center of the world. Let things be as they are.
- Realize our thoughts are not "the truth"
- We usually fall, quite unaware, into assuming that what we are thinking—the ideas and opinions that we harbor at any given time—are “the truth” about what is “out there” in the world and “in here” in our minds. Most of the time, it just isn’t so .
- Are you seeing people or seeing your thoughts about them?
- Our thinking can prevent us from seeing clearly in the present moment.
- Be comfortable with not knowing
- Being in touch with not knowing is called mindfulness.
- Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.”
- It is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don’t know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places.
- Listen to yourself
- Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded.
- Move in the direction your health tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.
- Somewhere deep within us resides a profoundly healthy and trustworthy core, and our intuitions, as deep resonances of the actuality of the present moment, are worthy of our trust.
- We watch television and submit ourselves to constant bombardment of sounds and images from minds other than our own.
- “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much of dare too much.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Let things go
- Don’t try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go.
- The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good.
- When you sit, you are not allowing your impulses to translate into action. You quickly see that all impulses in the mind arise and pass away. That they are not you but just thinking, and that you do not have to be ruled by them.
- Meditate
- Go and sit or meditate lying down. Let this or any time you practice be your time for letting go of all doing, for shifting into the being mode, in which you simply dwell in stillness and mindfulness, attending to the moment-to-moment unfolding of the present, adding nothing, subtracting nothing, affirming that “This is it.”
- Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.
- Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself.
- Don't hurry
- Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help, it can create a great deal of suffering—sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us.
- There is hardly an outward hurry. Only an inner one, usually driven by impatience and a mindless type of thinking, which varies from so subtle I have to listen carefully to detect it at all, to do dominant that almost nothing will deflect its momentum.
- Do good or nothing at all
- If I can’t do anything useful, at least I would like to do as little harm as possible.
- “As long as you are trying your very best, there can be no question of failure.” - Mahatma Gandhi
- Read the rest of my notes for "Wherever You Go, There You Are" by Jon Kabat-Zinn