Power of Mindfulness
PAGE IN PROGRESS
What you see here is a page of my hypertext book POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. Initially empty, this page will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. Thank you for your interest and patience!
What you see here is a page of my hypertext book POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. Initially empty, this page will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. Thank you for your interest and patience!
See ORE article about Elihu Palmer: "Palmer believed [that] meditation and its epiphanies had the power to bend the behavior and therefore the fate of humankind"
Meditation/mindfulness allows us to see interconnectedness of the universe, which makes us more ethical beings
Find balance between self-acceptance and growth
Mindfulness: acknowledge the understanding sadness we will about society’s problems (awareness about problems) that often turns into anger against people we perceive as the root why these problems exist
From unwinding anxiety, chapter 21: “We often talk about mindfulness practice as a way to learn how to respond rather than to react in life. The urge to do something quickly is often a reaction to something unpleasant. If you aren’t paying attention, you habitually react to make that unpleasant feeling go away. That’s like driving on autopilot, or as someone in one of our programs put it, “driving with your eyes shut.” You don’t know where you’re going, but you can bet it isn’t in the right direction.”
Power of mindfulness if power to focus on the now, power to focus on and appreciate details. Using this form of mental power helps us change how you see things.
From Unwinding Anxiety:
«Mindfulness is not about stopping, emptying, or ridding ourselves of anything. Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are what make us human. And thinking and planning are both crucial things to master. If I wasn’t able to use my thinking brain to take a clear clinical history and make a solid diagnosis, I would have one heck of a time providing good care for my patients.
So rather than changing or not having the thoughts and feelings that make up our experience, mindfulness is about changing our relationship to those thoughts and emotions. »
the more you are aware of your emotions, the more you can be in control of your reactions
Why willpower does not work https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/willpower
How to be compassionate https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/compassionate
Getting unstuck https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/getting-unstuck
Please make it stop! https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/please-make-it-stop
Is it the apocalypse? https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/apocalypse?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
“Mindfulness also helps us to see what we habitually avoid, and to get spacious around it. We learn to relate to discomfort instead of bypassing it. There is trauma in our experiences which is really tough to sit with, but we can learn how to develop a more open relationship to it by being with it more over time. »
The healthy kind of self-doubt: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/healthydoubt
How I learned to stop avoiding life https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/stopavoiding
“ These may not feel like avoidance, but believe me, they are. And noticing that you’re doing it is the first step in changing your behavior.It turns out that what I learned from my grandmother is what science tells us today. We are all wired for fight, flight, or freeze when confronted by a perceived threat. It’s biologically adaptive if there’s a lion nearby, but in modern life, we need to teach our brains how to step back from those instincts. The good news is that we can do it. With practice, taking one small step at a time, we begin to set ourselves free.”
Aging wisely: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/aging-wisely?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share "We don’t want to deny the difficult, of course, but we also don’t need to be completely defined by it. Being enveloped in and defined by what’s difficult is relatively easy to do, so it takes some intentionality to recognize all aspects of our experience and remember the positive forces in our lives... First, while the difficult parts of aging are unavoidable, we can try not to add to them... Not being able to do something I used to be able to do, or being in physical pain, or losing people we love—these are already very hard. But we often add more suffering onto them, like thinking it shouldn’t be this way, or feeling shame or fear. One possibility of mindfulness is to notice where we’re adding to the suffering that’s already there, and try not to fall so much into it."
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/anger
“ Gradually we can come to feel it as pure energy. And once we're directly in contact with that pure energy, then we can make a conscious choice and say, I'm going to channel this. I'm going to go into my kitchen in a rage, and I am going to wash more dishes than I've ever washed before, clean out a couple of shelves, and I will come out victorious. Or I’m going to write the best anger poem of my life, get it published, and win a prize for it. Or I’m going to find three good organizations and give them some money. I’m going to empower myself. It's almost like an alchemical process.”
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/meditation-habit-emily
» We get to rewrite the stories of our lives with mindfulness practice, precisely by accepting the difficult parts of our experience. »
Meditation on Zoom fails https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/zoom-fails?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share: "we want things to turn out a certain way, yet they rarely do. We fixate on the frustration we have when things go awry, but often don’t see our underlying assumptions and desires."
Not knowing: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/not-knowing?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share "Fortunately, in the moment that mindfulness becomes aware of an assumption, a judgment, or a presumption regarding other people, there is the possibility of freedom. In that brief instant of spaciousness, there arises the capacity to choose whether to feed and express those desires, or perhaps instead to notice them, acknowledge them, but not hand them the microphone. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the existence of this possibility offers me profound consolation."
Thanksgiving and enoughness: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/thanksgiving-and-enoughness
is your meditation good enough?
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/meditation-good-enough
[hope]
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/emotions?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
"What I saw was that even difficult feelings arise and pass. They’re not wrong or bad; they’re just forms of clinging: needing, wanting, a feeling of unworthiness, anxiety, fear, greed, anger. And that clinging arises and passes. If I try to get out of it, it gets worse. But if I can just be with the intensity of a feeling, without adding anything extra onto it, without spinning out into a bunch of stories that most of the time are only partially true—it might still be painful, but it’s not overwhelming. And eventually it passes. This is a fundamental feature of our reality: impermanence."
"And in that holding of both, there comes this sense of “What's mine to do?”
That may just be putting one step in front of another. Sometimes we don't really know where we're headed or where we're going, especially in a time like this. Sharon Salzberg says that it’s faith that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other. We don't know where we're going, but that something that just keeps us going is faith."
Related: From Frozen 2 : The Next Right thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkClV2gM-s&ab_channel=DisneyMusicVEVO
Rilke: Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.// Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Bearing Witness to Suffering: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/bearing-witness
"Life becomes alive only when we are expansive, and we can expand only when we learn how to relax: into our seat, into our feet on the floor, into our breath and our belly. From this place of relaxation, we can bear witness to anything."
Accepting life's ups and downs: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/ups-and-downs?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
« We practice staying centered and present in the formal setting of meditation, so that we’re more likely to stay centered in our daily lives.» https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/the-warrior-and-the-caregiver
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/stressbetter-dhss?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
"We can't change the fact that there are stressors in the world and that there are things that are going to make us upset. We're going to have illnesses. We're going to have difficult periods in our lives. But we can change our response. First, you can acknowledge that if you know that you're feeling stressed, you've already taken the first step. So just knowing that you're stressed is very, very helpful. So when you notice that, you're stressed: Pause. Take a breath. Be in this moment, in your body. In fact, whether you’re stressed or not, you can try this right now, reading these words...."
Being kinder to yourself: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/three-steps-toward-self-compassion?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share "It is possible, however, to cultivate more kindness for yourself, accepting yourself no matter what—even if you mess up, even if you're imperfect.
...
When you notice a self-judging thought arising in the course of the day or as you’re meditating, see if you can label it in your mind as “judging” or “self-judgment.” We label this not to judge ourselves for judging (!) but to make conscious the fact that our mind is engaged in judging right now, so that we can respond appropriately. There is actually a lot of freedom in being able to notice these voices coming and going. We don’t have to be caught by them. They are thoughts passing through like clouds in the sky."
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/your-greatest-wound-is-your-greatest-gift?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
"In the last few decades, scientific research by Kelly McGonigal and others has validated this wisdom. Having had stressful or painful experiences can actually be beneficial, if we understand that they can be helpful to us. If we hold on to grief, rage, sadness, fury, disappointment, and betrayal, telling the stories again and again, we strengthen those neural pathways. If we repress them, they grow stronger. But if we let emotions move through us, respond to them with compassion, and draw insight and direction from our experiences, we are healthier individually and collectively.
What thrills me about this research is that it directly confronts the notion that our wounds make us “broken” or “damaged.” That belief, not the brokenness, is what is destructive. On the contrary, like the Japanese kintsugi tradition of mending cracked or broken pottery with gold, meditation can illuminate the “damage” as a beautiful manifestation of humanity. We can draw from our experiences of suffering to create more empathy for other people, asking ourselves “what do I want and need, and how can I create that for others?”
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/building-a-refuge-from-fear
"We can practice building this kind of refuge in daily meditation. After you’ve settled into your meditation space, become aware of your breathing, and then let your awareness of your breath draw you into your lower belly. Allow your belly to be soft. Let your awareness arrive fully in the body, flowing throughout it until you can feel the sensations throughout your body. Feel clearly that your body is your place. This body of sensations right here, with its tension and pleasures, its tingling and its vibrations, this body of sensations is your home. This is your refuge."
Notice correlation between state of your body and your mood. For example, when you tired, or in pain you are more likely yo see things differently from when you are rested and feeling well. Same with when you anxious vs when you are calm (anxiety is a state of your body same as state of your mind)
Notice how something can preoccupy you one day and does not bother you at all a different day (e.g, I am worried about where my project about power is going or feel fine with uncertainty)
Mindfulness helps us not to say things that will escalate conflict. We say things in anger, the other person answers in anger, and we get a confirmation that they are a bad person. The conflict never ends. Don’t I ever feel angry at people ? Of course I do. Bit I do my best not to act out my anger. I remind myself: be angry about the screen not at the person. Mindfulness is like having a big pause button in my pocket, kind of like yes/no or hamster of happiness button. Just like any tool, you need to remember to use it.
Mindfulness for interpersonal relationships:
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/how-to-build-better-relationships
Meditation/mindfulness allows us to see interconnectedness of the universe, which makes us more ethical beings
Find balance between self-acceptance and growth
Mindfulness: acknowledge the understanding sadness we will about society’s problems (awareness about problems) that often turns into anger against people we perceive as the root why these problems exist
From unwinding anxiety, chapter 21: “We often talk about mindfulness practice as a way to learn how to respond rather than to react in life. The urge to do something quickly is often a reaction to something unpleasant. If you aren’t paying attention, you habitually react to make that unpleasant feeling go away. That’s like driving on autopilot, or as someone in one of our programs put it, “driving with your eyes shut.” You don’t know where you’re going, but you can bet it isn’t in the right direction.”
Power of mindfulness if power to focus on the now, power to focus on and appreciate details. Using this form of mental power helps us change how you see things.
From Unwinding Anxiety:
«Mindfulness is not about stopping, emptying, or ridding ourselves of anything. Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are what make us human. And thinking and planning are both crucial things to master. If I wasn’t able to use my thinking brain to take a clear clinical history and make a solid diagnosis, I would have one heck of a time providing good care for my patients.
So rather than changing or not having the thoughts and feelings that make up our experience, mindfulness is about changing our relationship to those thoughts and emotions. »
the more you are aware of your emotions, the more you can be in control of your reactions
Why willpower does not work https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/willpower
How to be compassionate https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/compassionate
Getting unstuck https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/getting-unstuck
Please make it stop! https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/please-make-it-stop
Is it the apocalypse? https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/apocalypse?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
“Mindfulness also helps us to see what we habitually avoid, and to get spacious around it. We learn to relate to discomfort instead of bypassing it. There is trauma in our experiences which is really tough to sit with, but we can learn how to develop a more open relationship to it by being with it more over time. »
The healthy kind of self-doubt: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/healthydoubt
How I learned to stop avoiding life https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/stopavoiding
“ These may not feel like avoidance, but believe me, they are. And noticing that you’re doing it is the first step in changing your behavior.It turns out that what I learned from my grandmother is what science tells us today. We are all wired for fight, flight, or freeze when confronted by a perceived threat. It’s biologically adaptive if there’s a lion nearby, but in modern life, we need to teach our brains how to step back from those instincts. The good news is that we can do it. With practice, taking one small step at a time, we begin to set ourselves free.”
Aging wisely: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/aging-wisely?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share "We don’t want to deny the difficult, of course, but we also don’t need to be completely defined by it. Being enveloped in and defined by what’s difficult is relatively easy to do, so it takes some intentionality to recognize all aspects of our experience and remember the positive forces in our lives... First, while the difficult parts of aging are unavoidable, we can try not to add to them... Not being able to do something I used to be able to do, or being in physical pain, or losing people we love—these are already very hard. But we often add more suffering onto them, like thinking it shouldn’t be this way, or feeling shame or fear. One possibility of mindfulness is to notice where we’re adding to the suffering that’s already there, and try not to fall so much into it."
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/anger
“ Gradually we can come to feel it as pure energy. And once we're directly in contact with that pure energy, then we can make a conscious choice and say, I'm going to channel this. I'm going to go into my kitchen in a rage, and I am going to wash more dishes than I've ever washed before, clean out a couple of shelves, and I will come out victorious. Or I’m going to write the best anger poem of my life, get it published, and win a prize for it. Or I’m going to find three good organizations and give them some money. I’m going to empower myself. It's almost like an alchemical process.”
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/meditation-habit-emily
» We get to rewrite the stories of our lives with mindfulness practice, precisely by accepting the difficult parts of our experience. »
Meditation on Zoom fails https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/zoom-fails?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share: "we want things to turn out a certain way, yet they rarely do. We fixate on the frustration we have when things go awry, but often don’t see our underlying assumptions and desires."
Not knowing: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/not-knowing?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share "Fortunately, in the moment that mindfulness becomes aware of an assumption, a judgment, or a presumption regarding other people, there is the possibility of freedom. In that brief instant of spaciousness, there arises the capacity to choose whether to feed and express those desires, or perhaps instead to notice them, acknowledge them, but not hand them the microphone. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the existence of this possibility offers me profound consolation."
Thanksgiving and enoughness: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/thanksgiving-and-enoughness
is your meditation good enough?
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/meditation-good-enough
[hope]
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/emotions?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
"What I saw was that even difficult feelings arise and pass. They’re not wrong or bad; they’re just forms of clinging: needing, wanting, a feeling of unworthiness, anxiety, fear, greed, anger. And that clinging arises and passes. If I try to get out of it, it gets worse. But if I can just be with the intensity of a feeling, without adding anything extra onto it, without spinning out into a bunch of stories that most of the time are only partially true—it might still be painful, but it’s not overwhelming. And eventually it passes. This is a fundamental feature of our reality: impermanence."
"And in that holding of both, there comes this sense of “What's mine to do?”
That may just be putting one step in front of another. Sometimes we don't really know where we're headed or where we're going, especially in a time like this. Sharon Salzberg says that it’s faith that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other. We don't know where we're going, but that something that just keeps us going is faith."
Related: From Frozen 2 : The Next Right thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkClV2gM-s&ab_channel=DisneyMusicVEVO
Rilke: Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.// Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Bearing Witness to Suffering: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/bearing-witness
"Life becomes alive only when we are expansive, and we can expand only when we learn how to relax: into our seat, into our feet on the floor, into our breath and our belly. From this place of relaxation, we can bear witness to anything."
Accepting life's ups and downs: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/ups-and-downs?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
« We practice staying centered and present in the formal setting of meditation, so that we’re more likely to stay centered in our daily lives.» https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/the-warrior-and-the-caregiver
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/stressbetter-dhss?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
"We can't change the fact that there are stressors in the world and that there are things that are going to make us upset. We're going to have illnesses. We're going to have difficult periods in our lives. But we can change our response. First, you can acknowledge that if you know that you're feeling stressed, you've already taken the first step. So just knowing that you're stressed is very, very helpful. So when you notice that, you're stressed: Pause. Take a breath. Be in this moment, in your body. In fact, whether you’re stressed or not, you can try this right now, reading these words...."
Being kinder to yourself: https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/three-steps-toward-self-compassion?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share "It is possible, however, to cultivate more kindness for yourself, accepting yourself no matter what—even if you mess up, even if you're imperfect.
...
When you notice a self-judging thought arising in the course of the day or as you’re meditating, see if you can label it in your mind as “judging” or “self-judgment.” We label this not to judge ourselves for judging (!) but to make conscious the fact that our mind is engaged in judging right now, so that we can respond appropriately. There is actually a lot of freedom in being able to notice these voices coming and going. We don’t have to be caught by them. They are thoughts passing through like clouds in the sky."
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/your-greatest-wound-is-your-greatest-gift?utm_source=TPW&utm_medium=share
"In the last few decades, scientific research by Kelly McGonigal and others has validated this wisdom. Having had stressful or painful experiences can actually be beneficial, if we understand that they can be helpful to us. If we hold on to grief, rage, sadness, fury, disappointment, and betrayal, telling the stories again and again, we strengthen those neural pathways. If we repress them, they grow stronger. But if we let emotions move through us, respond to them with compassion, and draw insight and direction from our experiences, we are healthier individually and collectively.
What thrills me about this research is that it directly confronts the notion that our wounds make us “broken” or “damaged.” That belief, not the brokenness, is what is destructive. On the contrary, like the Japanese kintsugi tradition of mending cracked or broken pottery with gold, meditation can illuminate the “damage” as a beautiful manifestation of humanity. We can draw from our experiences of suffering to create more empathy for other people, asking ourselves “what do I want and need, and how can I create that for others?”
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/building-a-refuge-from-fear
"We can practice building this kind of refuge in daily meditation. After you’ve settled into your meditation space, become aware of your breathing, and then let your awareness of your breath draw you into your lower belly. Allow your belly to be soft. Let your awareness arrive fully in the body, flowing throughout it until you can feel the sensations throughout your body. Feel clearly that your body is your place. This body of sensations right here, with its tension and pleasures, its tingling and its vibrations, this body of sensations is your home. This is your refuge."
Notice correlation between state of your body and your mood. For example, when you tired, or in pain you are more likely yo see things differently from when you are rested and feeling well. Same with when you anxious vs when you are calm (anxiety is a state of your body same as state of your mind)
Notice how something can preoccupy you one day and does not bother you at all a different day (e.g, I am worried about where my project about power is going or feel fine with uncertainty)
Mindfulness helps us not to say things that will escalate conflict. We say things in anger, the other person answers in anger, and we get a confirmation that they are a bad person. The conflict never ends. Don’t I ever feel angry at people ? Of course I do. Bit I do my best not to act out my anger. I remind myself: be angry about the screen not at the person. Mindfulness is like having a big pause button in my pocket, kind of like yes/no or hamster of happiness button. Just like any tool, you need to remember to use it.
Mindfulness for interpersonal relationships:
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/how-to-build-better-relationships
