Thinking about meditation and mindfulness

“Breathe in, breathe out, focus your attention and relax”.

These are the words that jump to my mind when I am thinking about meditation. There are different kinds of meditation: you can concentrate on your own breathing or on a fixed point, there is dynamic meditation using (rhythmic) movement like sing and dance and transcendence meditation, which gets you in a meditative state through the repetition of mantras and there are many others. Like I think that practicing art and in my specific case working with clay, brings me to a meditative state, helping me reach the here and now and the much sought after peace of mind.

Nevertheless, I am seriously evaluating whether I want to dig further into meditation in the stricter sense of the concept, e.g. the process of concentrating on your breath, as is the common practice of mindfulness. I am sure my friend Fiona will be happy to help me with that. Check her out on wellnessurway.com!

When clay is not handy, I think it would be great to have a toolbox at hand to be able to tame wild thoughts and reduce overreactions and avoid being overwhelmed by emotions. The meditation has the aim to focus our concentration on our inside and get into our here and now.

Most of the time we are not aware of what our minds are doing and we are just pushed and pulled in directions that we have no control over. We act and react without being really aware what we are doing. Our sense of self is also strongly affected by our thoughts about the past and the future.

Meditation trains you to achieve control over brain activity and creates the space between an event and our (harmful) reaction.

By bringing awareness to what we are really doing, we can start to act and react in a more mindful way. This means turning into your inner self and observe your emotions, instead of engaging with them. Mind you, meditation is not running away from your problems, but a way we can appreciate that these feelings are just fruits of our own mind and they will go away if they are not given too much attention. We can just observe these reactions or emotions, acknowledge they are there, welcome them and leave them where they are. No need to fight the emotions, just acknowledge them and let them go.

Our mind often drifts in the past or in the future, awakening emotions that affect our mental well-being. It is like what I describe in my book in correspondence to the exercise of centering the clay of the potters wheel. Noticing that our mind is lost and using techniques to return to the present, the here and now, allows us reset our brains and focus our minds on the here and now.

Mindfulness affects how we are dealing with our feelings and this can change the manner we relate to the world. We can not control what happens in our lives, but we can control how we respond.

Meditation in my eyes creates the necessary space between the event to think about your immediate reaction, like I mentioned previously in my blog about “the (mind) space I was not aware of…”. Meditation gives us time to decide whether or not we want to take a distance from our reactions and emotions.

My decision is taken: I am going to sign up for a mindfulness course.

Sep 2, 2021