Excerpt from the Crisis & Trauma Resource Institute Blog
More and more, I hear people saying they want to try mindfulness. There has been a huge surge of interest in it. If you google “mindfulness”, you will get almost 50 million hits.
[toggle title=”But what is mindfulness anyway?”]Mindfulness is a pretty straightforward word. It suggests that the mind is fully paying attention to what is happening, to what you are doing and to the space you are moving through. Sounds simple? Well, as the saying goes, mindfulness is simple – but not easy.
We all have a tendency to lose touch with the present. Our minds drift to obsessive thoughts about something that just happened, concerns about the past or worrying about the future. This creates anxiety and reduces our ability to enjoy or deal with what is happening in the moment.
There are slight variations on the meaning of mindfulness. One of the best known proponents of mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a biomedical scientist who founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. He created the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Program, the most researched mindfulness program in the world. He defines mindfulness as: “Paying attention – in a particular way – on purpose – in the present moment –non-judgementally”. The “non-judgemental” aspect is key, and one of the most challenging things to do. We tend to beat ourselves up, adding more layers to our stress.
Another definition treats mindfulness as a quality that we already possess, rather than something we have to create or summon up: “Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we are doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us”. (Mindful, Oct. 2014)