Why is it that mindfulness practice, or training in attention, intention, and attitude, can make such profound and positive changes in our lives?
Mindfulness practice helps us to change mental habits, and it is often our mental habits that cause us great suffering. It is important, even revelatory to learn that we are capable of changing mental habits, because we tend to see ourselves as prisoners or victims of our thoughts and emotions (as well as our physical sensations). We often use repeated thought patterns to punish ourselves (“I am such a jerk…” “I will never make it…”) in a vain effort to correct our own behavior, and we may habitually avoid experiencing our own emotions and physical sensations (avoiding and constricting ourselves away from feelings of anger, fear, and pain), which also turns out to be counterproductive. We may discover that we are actually in the habit of reacting to and trying to manage reality, or fighting with reality, instead of experiencing reality.
Mindfulness is about stopping all of this useless (at best) and harmful (frequently) battling with the way things are. We aim to develop a compassionate stance toward our actual experience (which is the stuff of our lives) and stop using the habits of avoidance, denial, managing, and checking out of real life.
Mindfulness practice is sometimes described as comprised of three fundamental components: Intention, Attention, and Attitude. We initiate the INTENTION to PAY ATTENTION with a certain ATTITUDE (Non-judgmentally, or Compassionately). We choose to pay ATTENTION in this way to our lives as they unfold in this minute, instead of to: television; painful memories; fears about the future; regrets about the past; useless speculation about “why?” something did or did not happen, or “why” I did or did not do something; calling myself names; scheming about how to get someone else to change; etc.
And, as it happens, mindfulness practice is precisely the type of repeated effort that changes the human brain in a positive way. Neuroscientists have now repeatedly demonstrated that: “If neural circuits receive a great deal of traffic, they will grow. If they receive little traffic, they will remain the same or shrink. The amount of traffic our neural circuits receive depends, for the most part, on what we choose to pay attention to. Not only can we make decisions by focusing on one idea rather than another, but we can change the patterns of neurons in our brains by doing so consistently.” (This quote is taken from the new book: The Spiritual Brain, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary.)
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