Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.)
I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present.
After reading Haupt's story, I've tried to pay more attention to bringing my mind into sync with what my body is doing. As she says in the excerpt below, my body can be in either a neutral or pleasant place while my mind is worrying about something that happened in the past, or about something that could happen in the future.
Of course, our ability to time travel is part of what makes us human. So it's fine to do this in moderation. But when our mind is habitually at odds with the state of our body, that's not conducive to our happiness and well-being.
Here's the first part of the TIME story. Click on the PDF file at the end of this excerpt to see the eight non-meditative ways to practice mindfulness. Or click here for the TIME story.
There’s a certain disconnect that plagues almost everyone nowadays: Your body is doing one thing—sitting in a meeting, eating dinner with the family—while your brain is miles away.
Some might call it multitasking, but mental-health experts say it’s more problematic. Corrie Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and founder of Shore Therapy Center for Wellness in the Chicago area, says that a lack of mindfulness can deprive us of a deep connection to our most meaningful experiences. “Our body moves through the motions of life, but our head isn’t in the game,” she says.
Not being grounded in the moment—instead allowing our thoughts to skip from place to place—is an open invitation to stress and unpleasant emotions. “Our minds tend to focus on worries about the future, or upsets from the past, even when our body may be in a neutral or pleasant place.”
Enter mindfulness. The now-ubiquitous concept, which is rooted in Buddhism, has surged in popularity in recent years and is generally defined as turning your attention inward and maintaining an awareness of your thoughts, bodily sensations, and environment. The benefits are vast. A mindfulness practice can help lower stress, reduce anxiety (as effectively as medication, in some cases), increase a person’s capacity to savor positive experiences, stop rumination, promote concentration, and more.
Mindfulness can also help cure the blahs. Three years into the pandemic, Kelly Neupert, a psychotherapist in Chicago, says that many of her clients feel like they’re languishing. Becoming more mindful has helped them get in touch with what they’re feeling and why, she says—and cultivated a greater capacity to handle life’s curveballs.
After adopting a mindfulness practice, “I typically see that they’re less reactive and more intentional,” Neupert says. “They can respond to other people rather than react. The things that used to set them off, like running late for work or getting cut off, feel more tolerable.”
Meditation is the best-known way to achieve mindfulness—but it isn’t appealing to and doesn’t work for everyone. Some find that it’s awkward, or that they have trouble sitting still. Fortunately, “a person can practice mindfulness while engaged in literally any activity,” Goldberg says, and with any available amount of time.
Here are eight ways to practice mindfulness if meditation isn’t your thing.
Download How to Be Mindful if You Hate Meditating | Time
Mindfulness follows on nicely from the previous blog on Advaita/Buddhism. I would gravitate more toward Buddhism especially Zen or Chan as their basic theory is to understand the self along with the mind-body connection.
And yes, there is a certain disconnect we have habitually fallen into; not only the disconnect between thoughts and the reality of what the body is doing or feeling at the moment, but a disconnect between the ever-rambling contents of the mind and the on-going reality of the natural world around us. So much so that we decidedly feel that we are separate from nature. And perhaps mindfulness can help to reconnect one to the nature of one’s own body, to other people and also to the natural world.
The Zen Buddhist way in particular is to study the reason for this disconnect that we feel –being the cause of much of our suffering and conflict. To this end. Their way of mindfulness is to study the self either through meditation or as Goldberg says, “a person can practice mindfulness while engaged in literally any activity,”
‘Mindful’ mindfulness could help evade the pitfall that is common, where practicing meditation is done for various spiritual reasons, for states and revelations. One could say that mindfulness, just watching one’s inclinations and habits of mind and recognising as Neupert mentions, helps ‘to respond rather than react,’ is in itself a spiritual practice in that it reconnects.
It’s a lovely thought, being at one with oneself, other people and the natural world – of which we are an integral part. Perhaps mindfulness can help toward that – or are we so entrenched in our habitual divisive ways of thinking, believing and behaving that such is a pipe-dream!
Posted by: Ron E. | February 22, 2023 at 02:15 AM
Mindfulness could be thought of in terms of;
Time is a human concept to communicate change.
Change is the only constant in the known universe and as such can never be static.
The past only exists as a memory and the future only exists as a projection.
The process of causality, that links the past to the future, I refer to as now-ness.
Now-ness is the non static flow of experience.
In our everyday communication we use terms such as now, moment or present to try and communicate our current experience, but even the word current is deceptive as it too is within the flow of now-ness.
Conscious awareness is going with the flow of now-ness and responding to the flow of experience as is appropriate to the experience.
All human experience happens within now-ness.
Posted by: Roger | February 22, 2023 at 09:24 AM
Roger, good comments - nicely put.
Posted by: Ron E. | February 22, 2023 at 12:22 PM
Thanks Ron E. Same to you too .................
Posted by: Roger | February 22, 2023 at 02:54 PM
@ Roger [ The past only exists as a memory and the future only exists as a projection. ]
Interestingly, that's how it's experienced but, if I understand mysticism's Iswar Puri,
we actually live totally in the past. The entire drama was created at once and we're
living the fabricated storyline serially now. But that doesn't comport with our strong
sense of a future of course. The answer is a subtle trick to conjure a future. Just
preface an event with a feeling of hope, fear, or even neutral anticipation. It's a
very small motion, particularly neutral anticipation, in the windmills of our mind but
it occurs nonetheless according to mystics. Without it, we'd just be remembering
another moment in the past... which it really is! But that would be no fun.
Posted by: Dungeness | February 23, 2023 at 03:28 AM
In the “now” of mystical meditation practice, one finds release from time. There is no real present in this temporal world that is in fact now past.
This life is but a dream. The less we dwell on the past or project into our imaginary future, the closer to reality we get. And that feels good.
Posted by: 808 | February 23, 2023 at 04:24 AM
People can have a mystical experience even without believing in the supernatural. The more in tune we are with nature the more we begin to recognize a connectedness among all living things. That connectedness—that Oneness—is what some people call God.
Call it what you want—we’re more at peace when we recognize our connectedness.
Posted by: 808 | February 23, 2023 at 04:29 AM
Look for the opportunities in your life where you can have mindfulness - being fully present . Keep it simple, we don't need special secret mantra meditation to make you feel special and superior. Mantra meditation is nothing but calling kaal , Lucifer and lead you down the path of the negative in this duality. Rssb and gurinder singh dhillon is based on bhagti and satanic mantra meditation. The first secret name is jot nirunjan, meaning light of the devil and the other names (onkar, rarunkar, sohung, satnam) are stepping stones to kaal. Beware of the crook gurinder singh dhillon he is a deception to what is a simple mindfulness , meditation, the right for all souls.
Posted by: Kranvir | February 25, 2023 at 02:05 PM