Mindfulness. Practical Use

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Probably, there is not a single training, book, article or podcast, in one way or another connected with "practical esotericism", in which the word "awareness" would not be used. Moreover, I am absolutely sure that this concept is the cornerstone of self-development and self-knowledge, and all - or most - of spiritual practices, in one way or another, are connected with it or are built on it. As a practicing life coach, I use this term almost at every session, and just recently a client asked me: "But this very awareness that you talk about all the time, what is this?"

To put it as briefly as possible, I would say that "Awareness is the maximum involvement in the process of one's own life" when nothing is done "just like that", "by itself" or "out of habit / inertia", and I mean not only actual actions as well as thoughts, feelings, emotions and attitudes from which we respond to external stimuli.

An example came to me like this. Imagine that some small and very nimble creature appeared in your house, maybe a dog, or a kitten, or a duckling, or a ferret. It did not appear by itself, of course, but with your help, you bought it / took it from a shelter / found it on the street, and now you voluntarily bear responsibility for it. This creature is very cute, moves very quickly, silently and, from your point of view, chaotic, in other words, "gets underfoot." That is, if you do not want to step on this creature, stumble over it or cause any other harm to him or yourself, not by malicious intent, but simply because the movement of the creature cannot be predicted, you always need, not that every minute, and almost every second, remember that even if half a second ago the creature was not near your leg, this does not mean that it is not there now.

I have two such creatures, these are my dogs, from here in the house there is a rule: "Before taking a step, make sure 100% that there is no dog right in front of you." The analogy with them prompted me to the above definition of awareness, and I propose to disassemble it into four levels: action, feeling, thought, attitude.

Let's start with action. It would seem that it’s difficult, every adult understands, one might even say, realizes why he does what he does, and I’m talking about completely obvious things - why does a person study this or that profession, work for some then work, getting married / getting married, having children or a ferret. Nevertheless, this is not the case, it turns out that there are very few such people, and most of them do all of the above and other "life-forming" actions without thinking too much and not asking themselves too much, "do I really want this?" There are a lot of options here: choosing a university according to the principle of "money profession", choosing a job according to the principle "they didn't take anywhere else" (the same happens with marriage, by the way), or with the principle "not far from home", the birth of a child, because "it happened”, Marriage because“it's time already”, and even a ferret because“the neighbor has it, and what am I worse?”. Moreover, to be honest, the big problem here is not even that a person did these actions unconsciously or not according to his personal desire - anything can happen, sometimes real circumstances force - but that he continues to perform them, even if they regularly cause mute negative emotions. That is, not "What can I do to make me happy with my life", but so that "My life does not make me happy, so I sit and complain about it all my free time."

In my book "A Dollhouse for the Hedgehog" the main character at the beginning of the story could not answer the question: "Why are you doing what you are doing?" … What she did gave her more negative feelings than anything else.

If a person begins to regularly ask this question and find honest answers to it, I will call it "awareness." Even if the answer is “I work in a job I hate because it brings me income,” that’s better than “I don’t know”. Of course, simple awareness of the problem does not mean its solution, but it definitely takes a step towards it. The next question will be: "What would you like to do and how to make it so that what you want to do also brings you income?" Thinking about this already has a chance to bring you closer to a new reality.

Next is the level of feelings. In part, I wrote about this in the article about responsibility, when I said that a person himself is responsible for what emotions he experiences. As much as we would not like to blame someone from others, or the weather, or the circumstances that "I am in a bad mood", the point is not in them, but in us. Our so-called "bad mood" is a signal that someone inside us, some part of us, subpersonality (I call them "little people") does not receive something that he needs, he is unhappy. When a client says: "I am sad / I am lonely / I feel bad", I will always clarify: "Who exactly inside you is feeling bad, who is sad and who is lonely?" If you have tried to “be good for everyone” for too long, while forgetting that you also have your own desires, at some point that part of you that wants something for itself will come out and demand attention, and it will seem to you that you are simply “tired / not slept / out of sorts”; if you endured a disrespectful attitude towards yourself for too long, explaining this with anything, then at some point the resentment will come out very clearly, and you will also be uncomfortable, and if, for example, your boyfriend does not call you for a long time, then listen to yourself, Has the fear of loneliness raised its head? For practitioners of a conscious approach, any "bad mood" is an excuse to stop, think and track exactly who in the inner kingdom is suffering, which, again, is already a step towards a solution.

Feelings always depend on thought, and do not arise just like that, by themselves. There is a thought behind any negative (and positive too) emotion. For example, a girl feels unhappy that a young man does not call her. What thought triggered this "unhappy feeling?" Everyone has their own answers, but I’ll give them the following: “He stopped loving me / doesn’t love / never loved / he left me / I was left alone / I’m not good enough for him / I’ll never get married / I’ll always be lonely / I’m fat, therefore he is not interested / I am a loser / nobody loves me / I have been for many years, but I am still not married!”. The list goes on, there is a lot of interesting things, sometimes these phrases have nothing to do with reality, and if you think about it sensibly, you don't understand how and where it got into your head.

The next level is the level of attitudes, or the level of reason. Through the analysis of feelings and thoughts, we come to where everything comes from - the fundamental attitudes that build our life. Changes at this level lead to global changes in everyone else, and very noticeable. For example, let's take here the very girl who is sad about the lack of calls from her boyfriend. Suppose the feeling of sadness comes from the thought, "I will never marry," but what is the attitude behind this? In other words, what is so terrible about "unmarried", some people are generally fine there, because they do not need to be responsible for anyone but themselves. The attitude may be like this: "Unmarried women are worthless," or "You cannot survive alone," or something else, but it is this attitude that probably pushes the girl to cling to this boyfriend, although he may not be at all costs. And if this setting is removed, the rest of the chain will disappear by itself.

From the point of view of mindfulness, a good exercise is this: if you feel that some negative, heavy, disturbing belief has come to you, then begin to understand what exactly it is and what it wants to tell you. What is the feeling, what is the thought behind it, and what is the attitude behind the thought. In a session with a specialist, this is easier to do, of course, because the transformational trainer will guide you through all levels faster and will not let you "escape" - and the mind really wants this, but if there is none at hand, then you can try to cope on your own.

Summing up, we can say that the less in your actions, thoughts and feelings of "automatism" and "autopilot", the closer you are to awareness, and the easier it is for you to live the way you want it, and not how "it happened by itself ".

Good luck with your creations, Yours, #anyafincham