Jon Kabat-Zinn, in his presentation provided as part of the Mindfulness & Meditation Summit, focused on the theme, Fully Embodied as You Are. Jon is the author of a number of books, including Coming to Our Senses and Full Catastrophe Living.
A quote from his book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, throws some light on his chosen theme for this presentation:
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
So fundamentally, mindfulness is a commitment to cultivate awareness so that in any given moment we can embody calmness and the clarity that comes with progressively waking up to full awareness.
We grow in mindfulness through meditation practice which can take many different forms or as Jon describes it, “many different doors to the one room”. Just as there are different regimes to build fitness and stamina, there are multiple doorways to mindfulness – mindful breathing, mindful eating, mindful walking, kindness/compassion meditation, mindfulness yoga and body scan being just a few of the many options. Jon encourages us to be creative in our exploration of meditation practice.
Awareness through meditation awakens us to our own likes and dislikes, our biases and prejudices and how we harm others, often unconsciously, through insecurity, uncertainty, doubts, mental/physical pain and resentments.
As we become increasingly aware of our internal landscape, we learn to recognise how we place ourselves at the centre of things – it is all about us and our world, our future, our well-being and our security. In this sense, we each have some of the characteristics of a narcissistic person. Mindfulness, however, helps us to become more unselfish, interconnected and compassionate.
He suggests two simple practices to increase our wakefulness:
(1) each time you take a seat, see it as a new beginning, grounding yourself in the present;
(2) when you wake of a morning, lie in bed for five to 10 minutes, and practice the body scan so that you can be fully awake and, in Jon’s words, “fully embodied”.
The more we grow in mindfulness, through daily meditation over increasingly longer periods, we leave behind our self-interested focus and become more other-focused and interconnected and more aware of our impact on others.
By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)
Image source: courtesy of johnhain on Pixabay