Mindfulness Practice

A Powerful Tool for Achieving Loving Acceptance

Including mindfulness practice in our routine provides an easily available and effective approach for most of us when we need to be able to step back and get perspective on the changes, losses, and accommodations that aging brings us ready or not. Really, it requires nothing more than our intention and commitment to do it. The rest just happens.

Like most everything else, with any mindfulness practice there are varying levels of complexity and skill that can be attained, but so much can be gained from even the simplest approaches that it deserves our attention and effort for a reasonable trial.

A basic mindfulness practice can be as simple as setting aside a period of quiet, uninterrupted time during which you sit comfortably still and simply notice your breathing. Without changing how you are breathing or analyzing it, just place your awareness on it. When your focus of attention drifts away from your breathing, be it to thoughts, things you notice around you, or physical sensations within your body, gently bring your attention back to your breathing without judgment or analysis. Do this for 10 to 20 minutes each day and notice what your experience of it is. If you feel that you absolutely must say something about any part of the experience, try to keep it to "isn't that interesting" or some such acknowledgment that you did indeed notice something without judging.

Give yourself a reasonable amount of time to get used to doing this before you decide whether it is "working" for you or not. It is a skill and it takes some time to develop it. The important thing is not whether you will experience distractions or not (you will), but how gently and kindly you can direction your attention back to the breathing. This is a skill and as such takes a while to get the hang of it. A week of practicing it at least once every day is probably a reasonable period of time to do it before deciding whether you want to keep on or not.

Be aware that people starting to do this often say that they feel less calm and focused, not more at first. As with any other distraction, just gently and kindly return your attention to your breathing. Sometimes this is because instead of just noticing the breathing we start to control it causing various discomforts to follow. Our bodies know how to breathe. Trust in that and keep watching.

For many of us, since this mindfulness practice involves not-doing more than doing, it can be a bit of a challenge. Especially when that is the case, it is well worth the effort to stick with it.

The approach to using this general technique to self and relationship improvement that has been most effective and doable for me has been the one described by Michael Brown in his book The Presence Process. In it he leads you through a comprehensive, step-by-step program that can be adapted to just about any situation.

Eckhart Tolle is less specific about the practice itself, which is for some an advantage and others a disadvantage, but what he describes is assisted by some ability to focus.

A very nicely done description of mindfulness practice for Christians can be found on the St. David's Breath blog here.

Click here to see a report on a study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on how practicing mindfulness meditation affected people's relationships.

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