blog

Consider that most of your mental suffering actually comes from how tightly you hold on to your beliefs. What if you were to discover that your stories do not fully define who you are and what is actually happening to you? With mindfulness, we can step out of the story we tell and simply notice the telling of the story.

Meditation is not about ridding yourself of your thoughts, since that's virtually impossible for anyone to do. Meditation instead, is literally about noticing that your mind has drifted into thoughts and then practicing bringing your mind back to a place of stillness - over and over again. The noticing IS the practice.

Through the practice of meditation, you develop what is known as “witnessing awareness” which allows you to observe your thoughts, feelings and stories with greater objectivity and distance, rather than getting pulled into the drama and emotional reactivity. Over time, you will begin to notice that some space has been created around difficult emotional states. You will start to see that there is more to who you are than your moods or thoughts, and you may also observe that the sensation associated with the negative feelings dissolve altogether. I like to say that you begin to develop a sense of responding as opposed to reacting.

The practice of meditation is about training our minds simply to allow things to be as they are, not organizing the world around us to fit our picture of what it “should” look like. Invite distraction. Invite noise. Invite challenge. This is where the true benefits of your meditation practice will show up. When we let go of our ego and let go of trying to change or manipulate our environment to suit us, that’s where the path exists.

Recognizing our responses to certain situations and events as the feelings arise is the first step in understanding how to better begin to shift our response to it and thereby reduce stress.

People often feel intimidated by meditation, thinking there is a perfect way to join in this time-tested practice. But that’s simply not true. Each person’s practice is a reflection of their unique personality and mind/body connection. The biggest support for working with our minds in meditation is our body. Generally, I don’t think most of us are sensitive to how much our body can support our mind in meditation.