What is Mindfulness?

By Mary Anna Weklar

Mindfulness is simple. It means slowing down and paying attention. It means being present or aware enough to know what you are experiencing, while it is happening. Christopher Germer says it is “awareness in the present moment with acceptance”. It is pretty simple, but in today’s multi-tasking, fast-paced, on demand world, it isn’t easy.

One of the most influential people in the field who introduced mindfulness in a medical setting over 30 years ago was Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph.D., from the University of Mass. He describes mindfulness as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.”

Kabat-Zinn was introduced to Buddhist teachers when he was studying at MIT, and his practice of yoga and meditation led him to integrate such teachings with scientific findings. He created a very structured, secular 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Some of his first participants were cancer patients and others who were in severe pain, whose physicians were at a loss as to how to help manage pain levels and/or fight their disease any further. This program has become the cornerstone for many of the mindfulness programs in place today. His research took the lead in studying the impact of mindfulness on pain, anxiety, brain function and the immune system.
One of the reasons that mindfulness continues to gain in popularity today, is that with our super-charged, stress filled world today, so many times we are living the opposite of mindfulness which is (can you guess?) mindless. David Seigel, another medical practitioner who has spent much of his professional life teaching mindfulness states, “Mindfulness in its most general sense is about waking up from a life on automatic, and being sensitive to the novelty in our everyday experiences.”

I recently heard Rick Fernandez, CEO of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) speak and he describes the need as this – while our world continues to get more complex and stressful, our capacity to handle stress has not increased, and thus we have to find tools to help us meet the demands of a VUCA world. (VUCA is a term first used in the military, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.)
Fernandez also states that with so many things competing for our attention at any one time, we also need to better master our ability to pay attention in the moment. For improved wellbeing, he recommends that we practice serial monotasking as opposed to multi-tasking. Mindfulness is a tool that we can use to not be ruled by or react to the triggers of stress and instead to pause and be more purposeful in our choices.
So how do we find the path to mindfulness? We have many tools to help us wake up from being on auto-pilot. First is breath. The simplest is to sit in a chair, with your spine erect and hands gently resting on your lap, and closing your eyes either fully or slightly and just noticing the rise and fall of your breath. Doing that for 3-5 minutes in the morning would be a good start. Sometimes the brain is chattering so much, it helps to count each breath and try to focus on that in the beginning.

Rich Fernandez provides a micro-exercise that we can practice in between meetings or moving from activity to activity. It is a 3 breath/3 step practice which includes:

  1. The first breath, just notice your body and the breath.
  2. The second breath relaxes your body, notice where you are holding the tension and release it.
  3. The third breath, call to mind what is important now in the upcoming meeting, interaction or activity.

Whether starting out as a beginner or advanced practitioner, there are many tools available to help with the practice of meditation, including online guided meditations, apps, books, retreats, online seminars, etc. that are listed at the end of this article. Mindfulness has many branches today, including mindful parenting, radical self-acceptance, self-compassion, loving kindness (metta) meditation and gratitude practice among many others.

The more you practice, the more you can bring mindfulness and the state of being more present into your everyday activities such as eating, walking, talking and whatever you are engaged in at the moment. MRI studies of people’s brains who practice show increases in the areas of the brain that are associated with learning, memory, self-awareness, compassion and self-regulation. Fernandez stated that studies have proven mindfulness meditation grows gray brain matter and can strengthen the “direct attention network” of the brain. What I have noticed is that the more I keep a consistent pattern of practicing simple mindfulness, the more concentration and clarity I have.

Mindfulness is also a perfect complement to helping people change behaviors. Dr. Siegel states that by being mindful, it helps us slow down and “awaken, and by reflecting on the mind, we are enabled to make choices and thus, change becomes possible.” By de-stressing the body and brain, we can often times find new choices and solutions and thus it opens us up to more growth and opportunity.

Did you ever see the play, Our Town by Thornton Wilder? In the play, a young mother who dies is able to take one final look at her life and town that she lived in for one day. She relives her 12th birthday and is only then really able to see how wonderful all the ordinary things of life were. Luckily, we have many tools today to help us wake up from being on auto-pilot and appreciate the full experience of being alive and enjoying the simple pleasures of life. As my mom says, “enjoy every precious moment”.

Resources:

Some of the key leaders in the Mindfulness movement are Jack Kornfield, Jon-Kabat Zinn, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Tara Brach, Silva Boorstein and Thick Nhat Hanh among others. They each have books and other materials online and many are featured at larger retreat centers around the world.

The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley has many online free tools https://greatergood.berkeley.edu.

Another source is https://mindfulnessexercises.com which has lots of audios, videos and worksheets on many mindfulness topics and genres.

Some of the retreat centers in Northern CA area include Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Green Gulch, Esalen, 1440 Multiversity (new in Scott’s Valley) among others.

Whil is a web based resource which has compiled numerous mindfulness resources.
Headspace is supposed to be a good app although I haven’t used it.

Other websites:

Wisdom 2.0 (Annual conference in SF in Jan/Feb) http://www.wisdom2summit.comMindful Magazine – http://mindful.org

Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute http://siyli.org

Center for Mindfulness, University of Massachusetts http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm

(Be careful, not all mindfulness teachers and resources are high quality.)

About the Author

Mary Anna Weklar, is a Health and Wellbeing program designer and manager passionate about infusing wellness into daily lifestyles. She holds a Masters in Health Care Administration, is a Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and completed the Health4America Fellowship with Stanford Prevention Research Center and the Stanford School of Medicine in 2014. She has been a student of mindfulness for over 20 years.

Mary Anna is the Wellness Program Manager at Visa.

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