CONNECTING TO WHAT MATTERS AND SUSTAINS US

In recent years, mindfulness meditation has gone mainstream in the West. It’s common to hear the word mindfulness in everyday conversations, typically when a person is referring to paying close attention or expressing care about something.

In the context of meditation, mindfulness is a capacity of the mind that has been studied and trained for thousands of years in Buddhist and other Asian cultures. Words can only get us so far in trying to explain what mindfulness truly is because being mindful is an embodied process. With practice a person learns to be in wise relation to life experiences, rather than living in a state of doing in which the mind is mostly on autopilot and creates suffering.

This can be tricky to understand because, in general, the dominant Western culture is far removed from working with the body as a means to calming and training the mind to gain insight about reality, or from listening and being with the body to grow and heal. At the same time, thousands of scientific papers now support the benefits that mindfulness meditation can have for people with anxiety, depression, addiction, grief, chronic pain, to mention a few. We also know that wholesome mind states that are cultivated during practice, such as compassion, lovingkindness, forgiveness, equanimity, and generosity have an enormous positive impact on people’s life.

For me, one of the most beautiful and empowering things about mindfulness meditation is that we learn to take full responsibility for our experience. We learn that the true sources of joy, peace, ease, and connection lie within, right here, and are available at all times. We remember that it’s every human’s birth right to live from a place of kindness and wellbeing.