Mindfulness

This term is getting thrown out a lot here and there. I have seen healthy blogs writing we should eat mindfully, we should be thinking mindfully etc etc. Hence I decided to take a shot at explaining what it means to me.

Let me first explain “Mindlessness”, it’s reacting and not responding to a situation. Reactions are something which are not in our control. There is great saying “every action has equal and opposite reaction”. Hence, the reaction is not something which our mind controls. For example: someone doesn’t talks nice to me, I’ll also not talk nice to the other person. Someone picks a fight with me, I am also going to hit back. Someone shouts at me, I’ll also react in some negative fashion. A lot of times, we do react emotionally which is termed as my heart says so I did it. There are many instinct things which we buy from Amazon just because there is a temporary price cut etc etc.

Mindfulness is responding to a situation with a lot of thought, observation and insight. All these characteristics need to be developed intentionally. These qualities are like skills in any sports which needs to be developed by constant focus, time and practice. I believe any one can develop these skills. I also believe there are no shortcuts to mindfulness. Shortcuts might lead back to mindlessness.

Mindfulness can give us lot of happiness in life by avoiding suffering and taking the right decisions at critical times. We suffer not because God is unhappy or bad luck. We suffer cause of some activities or decisions made in the past which were not mindful.

Following is my mantra to be mindful:

Practice mindfulness everyday. Whenever, you are about to react to a critical situation like say just before getting in an argument, simply take a brief moment to check whats the state of mind at that point.

Thats all.

This simple technique is enough to steer from mindlessness to mindfulness. If you keep checking your mind before any reaction, the mind would actually figure out which state is actually productive and counter-productive for a given situation. If you keep doing this long enough, you’ll get better at it. The mind would automatically get to a state which would benefit the response (not reaction) in the situation. It would all be effortless and spontaneous.

Lastly, there is no shortcut to mindfulness. Buddhism talks a lot about mindfulness. Lets park it for the time being.