Mindfulness Isn’t A Tool
Meditation isn’t a tool, as we often say it is in the West. It isn’t a tool but rather it is that state in which we no longer see the relevance of using tools, or the need to do so. The meditative state is that…
Mindfulness
Prisoners of Thought
We are so very easily swayed by the mind. It is as if the thinking mind need do no more than merely look at us and we are swayed – we are swayed by the thinking mind just as seaweed is swayed by powerful ocean…
Going Beyond The Recipe
The thing about meditation that we don’t see at first – if indeed we ever do – is that it is not procedural in nature. We are not following some protocol or procedure in other words, even though it very much seems as if we…
Getting Off The Conveyor Belt
How do we start to be mindful, how do we get started being mindful for the first time when the practice of mindfulness (whatever that might be) is not something with which we are culturally familiar? Even the intellectual understanding of what is called ‘mindfulness’…
Working With Anxiety
There is no such thing as a ‘technical fix for anxiety’. There can be on the short term, to be sure, but only at the price of ‘aggravating the original problem and causing it to rebound onus even more painfully in the future’. The so-called…
Hooked On Controlling
Mindfulness – we might say – is where we aren’t fighting with ourselves, managing ourselves, controlling ourselves, repressing (or ‘soothing’) ourselves the whole time. It isn’t quite right to say this though because when we practice mindfulness we don’t try to stop ourselves from fighting…
The Uneven Mind
Resistance is the single most important idea that we need to grasp if we are to properly (i.e. not intellectually) understand anxiety. Even if we disregard everything else, all the type of more-or-less useless stuff we always get told in anxiety management classes, if we…
The Treadmill of Runaway Thinking
When we think we do so because we’re trying to change things from being ‘the way that they are’ to some other way, some other way that corresponds to an idealized view or concept of reality that we have. Or we could just say that…
Misrepresenting Mindfulness
Mindfulness has been fairly effectively misrepresented in Western culture. We tend to see it as a type of ‘all-purpose performance enhancer’, something that can improve our everyday functioning, something that can reduce stress and anxiety and make us happier as a result. Naturally, this sounds…
Being In The World Without Thinking About Being In The World…
What we call ‘being meditative’ (or ‘being mindful’) simply means ‘being in the world without thinking about being in the world’. How simple is this? How much more simple and straightforward could anything be? And yet – simple or not, straightforward or not – the…