We are all being bombarded with encouragement to meditate or to ‘practice mindfulness’ as it probably the best thing you can do to help with maintaining good mental health. We are told it is easy and above all very cheap. Oh and anyone can do it the celebrities tell us almost every hour on some show (pick your own medium as they are far too many to choose from).
Before I go on any further, I just want to state that I think that meditation and mindfulness are incredible tools to help with your mental capacities. I will also like to say I am not a celebrity, I haven’t been rehab (Noo, noo noo), I don’t go off to find myself regularly, I am just a normal sort of person going about her business in the workaday world. I would like to explore these concepts a little more though as I don’t think they are as easy to access as the ‘Wellness Community’ would have you believe.
The first issue for most of us is we don’t know whether we should be practicing mindfulness or meditation or both. Then you get people throwing in mindful meditation to confuse us even further. I thought I would do a bit of research on the matter and so typed into the great transcendental search engine, Google, ‘What is the difference between Mindfulness and Meditation? I opened an article which was going to tell me the five differences and right out of the shoot it told me that there were many different types of meditation which have different qualities, have different practices and will do different things for me. Whoa already!
This easy practice we can undertake at our desk quite quickly has turned into something that I need a Guru to help me with. This could prove more expensive than I thought, as most Guru’s are holed up in rural India, Tibet or a ‘Galaxy Far Far Away! The travel costs are sending my fingers out to reach for my little bell that I need to ring in order to return calm to my twitching brain. OhKay…..lets get back to the simple understanding then.
I am not going to pretend to be any kind of expert but from what I can glean through the reems of academic waffle and through my own experience is that meditation is a practice of which, one of the results is becoming mindful. Being Mindful is the ability to be present in the hear and now rather than allowing our brains to go off flights of fancy which usually means creating endless ‘To Lists’ which will never have any chance of being done. The trick, apparently when doing Mindful Meditation is to allow the ‘To List’ to enter your consciousness but then push it away so you can remain in the present.
Now for any of you experts out there, I probably have simplified this too much but I am a simple sort a’gal. What I can tell you is, this mental ping pong with your thoughts isn’t as easy to do as it sounds and it takes practice and patience. It is absolutely worth it though. I am sure there must be a right or wrong way to do these things but for me, taking 15-20mins out of the day in which you are able to push the whirling thoughts away without guilt is invaluable.
For anyone who is interested, I use Wim Hof’s Basic Breathing Technique from his App. This App does cost me a few pounds each year but Wim’s voice encouraging me to ‘fully in, fully out’ with the sound of the ocean in the background is well worth it in my book. I am sure the experts will tell me that this technique isn’t a meditation but a breathing technique but I find I can combine it into a mindful meditation. Hey it works for me! Here is the thing though, are you ready. This practice didn’t work for me in one session, it has taken me months of regular practice for me to truly see the benefits, including being able to use at least part of the technique in times of high stress, like just before you go down to get surgery.
I guess, I will wrap up but will send you off to look up Ruby Wax’s musings on this subject. She has studied this mindfulness meditation malarky at Oxford University, no less, and puts things in a way which us mortals can understand. It doesn’t matter which expert you use (within reason), the main thing to remember is to keep doing it, most days. Don’t stop after a week, you need a few months, maybe longer before your mind will say,”ahhhh I get what you are trying to do now”.
