The following is a very helpful introduction
to mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn taken from his book, Wherever
You Go, There You Are. It can be helpful even for those of us who've been doing it awhile. I think he was following a golden thread as he worked on this book.
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While it may
be simple to practice mindfulness, it is not necessarily easy. Mindfulness
requires effort and discipline for the simple reason that the forces that work
against our being mindful, namely, our habitual unawareness and automaticity,
are exceedingly tenacious. They are so strong and so much out of our
consciousness that an inner commitment and a certain kind of work are necessary
just to keep up our attempts to capture our moments in awareness and sustain
mindfulness. But it is an intrinsically satisfying work because it puts us in
touch with many aspects of our lives that are habitually overlooked and lost to
us.
It is also
enlightening and liberating work. It is enlightening in that it literally
allows us to see more clearly, and therefore come to understand more deeply,
areas in our lives that we were out of touch with or unwilling to look at. This
may include encountering deep emotions—such as grief, sadness, woundedness,
anger, and fear—that we might not ordinarily allow ourselves to hold in awareness
or express consciously. Mindfulness can also help us to appreciate feelings
such as joy, peacefulness, and happiness which often go by fleetingly and
unacknowledged. It is liberating in that it leads to new ways of being in our
own skin and in the world, which can free us from the ruts we so often fall
into. It is empowering as well, because paying attention in this way opens
channels to deep reservoirs of creativity, intelligence, imagination, clarity,
determination, choice, and wisdom within us.
We tend to
be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The
incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little
respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway
just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions
are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by
those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a
coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it
winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go
and may not even realize we are headed for.
Meditation
means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to
it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to
tyrannize us. This process doesn’t magically happen by itself. It takes energy.
We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment
“practice” or “meditation practice.”
