1 FROM DOING TO BEING

BE MINDFUL: SESSION ONE

One of the hardest things for us human beings is «not to do».  And when we stop we will realise that as soon as we get quiet the mind starts to do what the mind does all the time, which is  t-h-i-n-k-i-n-g! The mind is just like a Thinking Machine. It never stops.

So when we practice Mindfulness we are cultivating access to awareness, pure awareness, as opposed to getting lost in the thought stream. It is not a special estate that we have to get to, it is a core capacity that we have, which is part of being human but that we ignore all the time.

Mindfulness is not shutting off our thinking, there is not some special place where we don’t think. So if we try to put ourselves in some special place where we don’t think we’re going to give ourselves a gigantic headache. Because thinking is one of the things that the mind does.

That doesn’t mean we can’t be in a relationship with our thinking. Mindfulness is about Relationality, when we practice Mindfulness we learn to be in a relationship with inner experience and outer experience.

Mindfulness is not about breathing and it’s not about any other object that we can pay attention to. Mindfulness is about attending itself. 

More and more, research is showing that as you develop functional connectivity through Mindfulness what is being functionally connected is the posterior singular cortex in the limbic system with the prefrontal cortex, the cortical areas that involve emotional regulation and attention regulation, perspective taking and executive functions. 

With the practice of Mindfulness we can actually transform towards

• greater presence,
• greater wakefulness, 
• greater potential for actually acting in ways that are more in alignment with our own purpose and the actual circumstances that we find ourselves in.

So the invitation this first week is to try these instructions for your first Mindfulness practices.

                                Adapted from Jon Kabat-Zinn.

       Marbella International University

La vida, sin prisa