Mindfulness Training

Tom Adams

Mindfullness is moment to moment awareness. It is acknowledging and accepting life's experiences in each new moment whether it is pleasant or painful. It is embracing all aspects of ourselves and life around us. It is being in reality, seeing life as it is; as opposed to how we think it is, or think it should be. This doesn't mean you take a fatalistic, or apathetic view of life, just the opposite, it means you embrace life fully and act compassionately to transform the things you can , accept the things you can't and ask for the wisdom to know the difference.

Everything we perceive in life through our five senses is impermanent, and constantly changing, including our thoughts. It is our ignorance, our resistance, our inability or unwillingness to be open, receptive, to acknowledge, accept and adjust to this constantly changing stream of experiences that causes stress in our lives and chronic stress causes illness.. Instead of taking appropriate action moment to moment, we tend to unconsciously react according to our past conditioning. We tend to see life through the filter of our past experiences, and because of these painful and fearful memories we unconsciously avoid the unpleasant experiences of life and hold onto the pleasant ones for security or completely deny our experience altogether.

Thinking and acting in this way, separates us from life, from each other and from ourselves, and we suffer. When we practice mindfulness regularly, we learn to stay open, and receptive to our experience whether it is pleasant or painful, and to recognize the unconscious attachments, desires, fears and past conditioning and remain free from acting them out over and over again. We learn that we don't have to struggle with the painful experiences and fight so hard to change ourselves, and we begin to realize that health comes from relaxing and surrendering into pure awareness, the eternal moment. We begin to accept and appreciate and to use all of our experiences to transform our suffering into happiness, our fears into love, anger into compassion, and ignorance into understanding.

Meditation is one of the practices we use to strengthen our mindfulness. The regular, consistent practice of mindfulness meditation is one of the ways we learn to open ourselves to life, to each other, and to grow in love, wisdom, and compassion, and to accept the constantly changing dance that is life.

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