Let everything arise from your awareness.
And the miracle of mindfulness is that without saying anything, without doing anything, it simply dissolves everything that is ugly in you, turning it into beauty Bhagwan Rajneesh
A conversation about awareness is a conversation about you, because there is only awareness in the world, and it is at the center of the human being. The rest just obscures our visibility. Therefore, in order to return to the center, to understanding our true essence, some effort will be required in the form of exercises aimed at awakening consciousness.
Mindfulness, or awakening consciousness
Mindfulness, the awakening of consciousness by noticing minimal changes in the physical, emotional and mental planes, is practiced in psychology. But the very concept of mindfulness was not an invention of psychological science at all, but is a borrowed concept that originates from the practices of ancient philosophical teachings.
Psychology skillfully applies this concept to create positive changes in the psycho-emotional state of a person and, therefore, uses it as an applied method for correcting the psyche, forgetting that awareness can and in fact is valuable in itself. It is a thing in itself, but not in the sense of its unknowability, but in the fact that it is valuable in itself, regardless of whether we know about its existence or not. She is.
If we accept awareness as an integral fact of existence, then we let it into our lives, enlivening and filling the world around us with meaning. If we do not recognize the concept of awareness, it nevertheless does not cease to exist in reality, but at the same time our life flows in an unconscious way, by inertia. A person is more than a set of physiological and mental functions. He experiences the world through awareness. The more aware he is, the more everything becomes open to him. It is good that people are increasingly thinking about this and developing their ability to understand through various methods and techniques.
Mindfulness techniques and mindfulness practice
There is a whole sea of mindfulness techniques; The main thing is to choose those that suit you best. Most spiritual practices are aimed at developing awareness. It can be said that one of the most important goals of practice is the development of maximum awareness, otherwise no further progress along the path of discipleship seems possible.
An adept of a particular school or teaching must learn to be self-aware. This means awareness of the physical, emotional and mental body, that is, the first 3 out of 7 human bodies, which form the physical-energetic essence of a person. Self-awareness implies the following:
- awareness of your body (movements, condition, temperature, bodily sensations, etc.),
- awareness of emotions (their source, color, development and attenuation, change, etc.),
- awareness of thoughts (origin, development, transformation, transition from one to another).
Yoga provides a wide field for the practice of mindfulness. You can start with any stage of Ashtanga yoga to begin developing awareness. One of the simplest ways for a beginner is to practice yoga asanas. They form awareness not only of their physical body, but also of their psychological state. Every time you perform a set of asanas, your consciousness is focused on those parts of the body that are most occupied in one position or another.
This is essentially one of the mindfulness exercises that psychologists recommend. They say that you need to change your usual rhythm of life or choose other methods of performing those tasks and actions that you usually don’t even pay attention to. Let's say you draw with your right hand, since you are right-handed, but you need to try to perform this action with your left hand. The direction of your consciousness will immediately change.
It's the same in yoga. You usually sit on a chair or armchair. You get used to it and don’t focus on it anymore. In order to become aware of the process, take the Vajrasana pose. It seems like nothing complicated, you sit on the floor and feel good, but it’s unusual. From this, consciousness becomes absorbed in this process. Attention is drawn to the posture itself, the position of the arms, legs, and sensations in the knees.
Awareness of the emotional sphere in yoga practice
Emotional awareness is also practiced most naturally in yoga. In the first stages of practice, you will notice your feelings emerging at the moment of performing asanas, without focusing on them. You simply let them be, arise and fade away just as naturally. Eventually you should come to the point where emotions no longer play a big role. These are just emotions - the psychological response of our body to external stimuli. Yes, these are not even emotional impulses, as people prone to romantic feelings usually characterize an influx of emotions. These are mental changes that are closely related to chemical reactions occurring in the body.
The golden and silver ages of literature have taught us to treat the emotional sphere with special reverence, but for our purposes of achieving awareness, it is better to immediately put things in their place. Let us leave the description of wonderful or terrifying feelings for writers, and we ourselves will turn to their conscious observation. The mere fact that you begin to be aware of the emergence of your feelings and emotions will reduce their uncontrollable flow and stop uncontrollable reactions.
Yoga effectively works with the emotional body. As for the thought process, there is hardly any practice that can compete with pranayama and meditation. In both of them, special attention is paid to the concentration of thought, the direction of the thought flow in the right direction. First, they work to make thoughts fully conscious, clearing this process of the taint of internal criticism, and at the next stage they move on to stopping the thought process through the practice of deep meditation.
6. Let your values guide you, not your emotions.
Our emotional reactions provide us with important information about an unpleasant situation, but they do not always push us to take actions that will help us. We are accustomed to believing that feelings precede action and encourage it. In fact, we can do anything despite our emotions at the moment.
Imagine that you are a pilot and you need to land a plane that has crashed. Excited passengers are screaming around you in panic, and your assistant pilots are constantly offering different options. These images are your emotions at the moment.
Your task is not to give in to them, remain calm (that is, watch your emotional center from above) and act as you see fit, do what you believe in.
To understand how best to act, you need to decide what kind of person you want to be in this situation - that is, choose what is valuable to you. One way to become aware of your values is to imagine what you would do if you didn't feel the fear, guilt, anger, or whatever negative emotion you're currently focused on.
For example, if you value a healthy lifestyle, you learn to tolerate when you want to indulge in chocolate, or overcome yourself and go to the gym on a cold rainy evening, despite the fact that you want to curl up on a soft sofa.
We are willing to feel discomfort in order to truly participate in our lives, and values are our guide. They fill our actions with dignity and meaning in every moment we live.
Values are essentially preferences. There are no right or wrong values, what matters is what is dear to you at this stage of life, and you do not have to try to get someone else to accept your values.
A sign that you do not follow your own values, but someone else’s, and this makes you unhappy - when your values sound to you like an immutable rule, an unconditional order that you should do something (no, you shouldn’t).
How to Develop Mindfulness: Mindfulness Exercises
To give the reader the opportunity to experiment, let's look at a few exercises that can be used daily. They are not directly related to the practices of spiritual teachings, but will nevertheless prepare you for them if you want to do them in the future.
- Conscious movement.
- Conscious attention when communicating with an interlocutor.
- Concentration of attention directed at an object.
- Listening to music to distinguish the sounds of different instruments.
- Control over habits (gestures, facial expressions, filler words, etc.).
- Mindful vision is focused attention to detail.
This list could be expanded, but with practice you will learn how to create exercises to develop awareness in real life. In the next section, we will move on to look in more detail at some of the techniques for developing mindfulness described above.
Exercises to Awaken Awareness Using Attention
The essence of mindfulness training is to devote all of yourself to what you are doing at a certain moment in time, to avoid switching attention. If it jumps to another object, return it back and calmly continue to study, observing your actions, the sensations and thoughts that arise in the process. This way you will be practicing conscious thinking at the same time.
Awareness can be directed to both thoughts and movements. This even leads to an expansion of awareness, bringing it to a higher level, while switching attention to another activity or object contradicts the practice of awareness, since attention is scattered, and the key to the practice of awareness lies precisely in the direction of attention. In fact, you are taking your first steps in the practice of meditation, perhaps without even knowing it.
Conscious attention when communicating with an interlocutor is expressed in the fact that you do not evaluate him, as we are usually used to doing, but turn off the critic inside and switch your attention to awareness of what your interlocutor is wearing, how he speaks, how he gestures, or what he is holding in his hand. hands, etc. You need to completely capture his image and at the same time become aware of your thoughts and feelings during the process of observing your interlocutor.
Concentration of attention directed at an object greatly develops awareness, but is perhaps difficult at the beginning of practice precisely because of the simplicity of its implementation. You need to pick up a small object - something that is familiar to you well. It could be keys, a watch, a mobile phone, etc. After that, you begin to examine this item, noticing all its smallest details. Some may find this boring, but by being able to focus your attention on an ordinary thing, you will easily develop not only the ability for deep directed concentration, but also lay an excellent foundation for further practice of directed attention, known in the yogic tradition as dharana.
Conscious vision is very close to the technique described above, but the emphasis in this exercise is slightly shifted. You don't look at one object completely, you choose some aspect to focus on only. For example, while walking down the street, mentally set yourself the task of noticing and concentrating only on the faces of passing people for several minutes, or noticing and finding the shade of a certain color. Try to notice and realize as many occurrences of this shade in the world around you as possible.
Developing mindfulness through the practice of mindful movement exercises
By conscious movement we mean a process when your attention is completely focused on performing certain actions in the present. You can walk, fully concentrating on the rhythm of your steps, awareness of the contact of the soles of your shoes with the surface on which you are walking. It's very easy and exciting at the same time. We are usually not aware of this process, so when you direct your attention only to it, you will see how unusual it is.
You can also experiment with becoming aware of the sensations you get from touching objects: how they feel, whether they are warm or cold, how your hand feels; and at the same time observe yourself - how you react to sensations. This practice of training awareness through movement automatically eliminates combining tasks.
If you devote yourself to one thing, then you simply are not able to do one more thing at the same time. Theoretically and even practically this is possible in everyday life. People do this every now and then, but in awareness exercises this would be nonsense, since the very nature of awareness excludes internal rushing and combining things.
State of mindfulness in everyday life
A state of awareness can be cultivated through directing attention to certain aspects of life, as well as through exercises and spiritual practices. In your daily life, practicing mindfulness will help you see things differently and make your life more interesting, not to mention that you may suddenly have talents that you never knew you had.
Often the development of awareness is accompanied by the discovery of creative abilities in a person, and a craving for creative self-realization appears. This is nothing more than a manifestation of the highest spiritual principle of a person on the physical plane. How else can it manifest itself if we live in a three-dimensional reality. We cannot get by with figurative-mental creation alone; we need to transfer images, embody them in the physical world - through art, reading philosophical literature or engaging in spiritual practices.
4.End the stress cycle
If we rush to drown out unpleasant emotions in any way, we only strengthen them.
Let's say you are used to eating a “bucket” of ice cream or a whole cake in the evenings to release the stress accumulated during the day. This is your way of calming yourself down.
What's really going on?
You artificially slow down your reactions, preventing yourself from fully realizing your experiences and thereby ending the stress cycle. Instead of getting out of stress, you stay stuck in it - this is painful and unhealthy and makes an already stressful life even more difficult.
Allow yourself to feel the stress to the fullest, do not press the brakes ahead of time. Emotions are tunnels: you need to go to the very end, through the darkness, and come out into the light.
For example, instead of rushing to eat, stop and become aware of your inner sensations - breathe with them, accept them, allow them to exist and be as they are. You can say to yourself: “This is what I am experiencing here and right now. No matter what the feeling is, it’s already here and I accept it.”
Ignore the tension and stiffness, focus on your breathing - take a few deep breaths in and out.
