Mindfulness always seems like such a daunting task to me. I plan every day to sit down for 20-30 minutes and get serious about becoming more mindful. The day withers away much quicker than it seems like it should and there I (don’t) sit, wishing I had practiced my commitment
After all, there is a lot of evidence for mindful meditation. The practice actually grow the brain in all the right places. When we think about brain fitness, isn’t that at least part of what we all would like?
Chade-Meng Tan mentioned an idea in the Huffington Post that just touched my heart.
And my desire for simplicity. He said
In learning and teaching Mindfulness, the good news is that Mindfulness is embarrassingly easy. It is easy because we all already know what it is like and it is something we all already experience from time to time. My friend and personal hero, Jon Kabat-Zinn, skilfully defined Mindfulness as, “Paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally”. Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps the greatest Zen Master of our time, refers to Mindfulness poetically as, “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality”. Simply put, I think Mindfulness is the mind of “just being”. All you really need to do is to pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It’s that simple.
Simple? Easy for him to say. Then again, he goes on to say…
The creatively-named “Easy Way” is to simply bring gentle and consistent attention to one’s breath for two minutes. That’s it. Start by becoming aware that you are breathing, and then paying attention to the process of breathing. Everytime your attention wanders away, just bring it back very gently.
The “Easier Way” is, as its name may subtly suggest, even easier. All you have to do is to sit without agenda for two minutes. Life really cannot get much simpler than that. The idea here is to shift from “doing” to “being”, whatever that means to you, for just two minutes. Just be. via Huffington Post.
Could be easier than any of us thought. And what’s to stop us from going on from there?
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