What if there could be a moment when we do not feel any pain, sadness, or suffering? What if we could get out of all our fears, distress or feeling sad for no reason at all?
Even in the strongest moments of pleasure and happiness, haven’t you felt an anxiety that you want to get away with?
The only way to get out of all suffering is to build mindful awareness. It is the only realm where lies no pains, no fears, anxieties, or distress.
But what is mind awareness, and how can it be practiced? That is what exactly I want to help you with.
Let’s go through the blog below to find out!
What is Mindful Awareness?
Mindful awareness simply means living in the present moment. It is the moment when all of you – your mind, body, emotions, and energies, are fully involved in this moment.
To help you understand better, let us look at the key features of a mindfully aware person:
- A mindful person will neither live in the past nor in the future. Of course, they remember the lessons from their past and hold onto the plans for the future. But, the major focus of their attention is to first fully live this present moment.
- Such a person becomes the ‘watcher’. They will have thoughts, emotions, or experiences. But, they do not become these things – that is, they do not identify too much with them. Rather, they just remain a watcher who is undisturbed and simply watches every emotion, thought, and experience.
- A person who daily practices individual or group mindfulness exercises does not hold any ‘duality’. It means what they feel, think, and do, are all the same. There is never any contradiction between these three. It is often the contradictions that create human suffering.
Now the question that arises is, “Why should we become mindfully aware?” Let’s look at the major benefits that it provides.
Benefits of Becoming Mindfully Aware
In truth, becoming mindfully aware is not a practice, but the ideal way of life. When you live a mindful, present and fulfilling life, you stop living it on auto-pilot mode. Then you become much more capable of changing the things that can be changed and accepting those that can’t be changed.
Let us look at the major benefits that this approach can provide you:
- With mindful awareness at any moment, you will immediately lose all stress, anxieties, fears, and sadness. It will become a moment of pure joy and undisrupted peace.
- Being fully present in a moment will also aid in your emotional healing. Since it is only in the absence of thoughts that your emotional energies will flow freely and help with healing.
- Exercising mindfulness techniques will improve your daily life functioning. You will be able to do better on your work, your relationships will improve, and you will be more effective in daily small tasks. You can find such techniques in the best books on mindfulness.
- It will ultimately give a new meaning to your life. You will experience much more growth, dynamism, and pure bliss, every single day.
You might be wondering how to develop the skill of being fully present. Let’s find that out!
How to Practice Mindful Awareness
You can build awareness of the present moment, with the help of continuous meditation practice. Mindfulness meditation is based on the teachings of Buddha and some of his disciples. Let us find out the correct way to do it.
- Find a comfortable room to sit in. Make sure it has minimal disturbance, and you feel safe in it.
- Now choose a posture in which you can feel most comfortable. Easy Pose (Sukhasana) is generally considered the best posture. But, you can even choose the corpse pose (savasana).
- Now close your eyes and watch your breaths. You do not need to concentrate, just look in your nose region ‘without any force’. How does it feel? Can you feel the cold breaths in, and warm breaths out? Is there any itch, pain, or any other sensation? Keep looking.
- Meanwhile, your mind will wander in its thoughts. It will take your awareness with it. But, do not be disturbed or angst by it. Whenever you realize it happened, this awareness in itself is sufficient. You can easily bring your awareness back to your nose and continue mindfulness practice.
- You must remember to be a watcher. Whatever thought, emotion, or any other body process occurs, just look at it with the awareness that ‘it is not you’. All of these processes will come and go, and yet you will still remain here – in the present moment.
- After a while, you can open your eyes. With your comfort, you can practice this mindfulness technique for 20 minutes, thrice a day, every day.
Once you have developed some skills in the present moment awareness of the nose, then you may move to body scan meditation. This meditation has its basis in Vipassana. To do this, you will need to become a watcher of your whole body. Start with your legs, and move towards your head, while maintaining a non-judgemental attitude towards your observations.
Some Additional Tips
While you learn these mindfulness activities, there are some tips that will help you with your daily practice. Let us have a glance at them.
- Do Not Force: While other forms of meditation demand concentration, mindful practices need you to be just what you truly are. Whether it’s about the practice, posture, or amount of time, just do what the inside you feel to do.
- Do Not Judge: During the practice, you will have multiple thoughts, feelings, and sensations. If you try to judge them, you will lose the ‘watcher’ in you. So, it is best to watch everything from a distance, without being disturbed by it.
- Do Not Regret: Every meditator occasionally gets lost in their thoughts or emotions at that moment. But, if you start to regret it will create another form of suffering. Your awareness that you got lost is enough in mindfulness exercises. Just come back and start being the watcher again.
- Understand the Difference between Watcher and Doer: Present moment awareness separates the doer from the watcher. The one who does, feels, and thinks is the doer. While the one who can see it all as the third person is the watcher. The more your awareness gets centralized within the watcher, instead of the doer, the more skilled you become in a mindful way of life.
Challenges and Pitfalls
Building mindful awareness is not as simple as it may sound. After some initial practice, many meditators leave this practice because it starts to wake them up.
With this practice, you will start to lose your ‘sleeping’ or ‘auto-pilot’ mode of life. The more awake you become, the more able you will be to see and feel all of your sufferings.
There will be moments of intense sadness, fear, anger, and every other emotion within you. But, you must ‘stay’. Do not suppress. Maintain the watcher in you. Only when you experience all emotions and sensations in all their fullness, you will be able to move from suffering to the joyful stages of emotional healing.
| “Light Will Embrace You! But, First, You Must Face all the Darkness that Comes Before It!” |
How to Integrate Mindfulness in Daily Life?
The ultimate aim of practicing current-moment consciousness is to become more present in daily life and successful in spiritual journey stages. It is to achieve those moments when we are not living in the past or present, thoughts or emotions, pleasure or suffering!
Let us look at the ways you can integrate mindful methods into your daily life.
- Walking: When you walk, look at how the ground feels on your feet. Which muscles in your legs are working? How are your bones moving? Look how the movements in your legs work in the upper part of your body.
- Eating: When you eat, look within your mouth. What is the texture of food? What is its taste? How does the food feel on your tongue, teeth, and throat? Look at how the food goes down to your stomach. It is one of the best ways to practice mindfulness.
- Talking: While talking to someone, remain centralized within you, yet observe everything about the other person. The way they talk, their tone, and body language. In truth, the more thoughtless your mind is, the better you will become in every conversation.
- Driving: When you drive put your whole attention in that moment. Look at how the traffic moves, and how you cut through it. Feel the air, the smell, the lighting, and your presence through it all.
You can even try this technique while practicing spiritual masturbation. Remember, as long as you are the ‘watcher’, you are mindfully present in this moment. When you become the ‘doer’, it means in this moment you have entered into sleep or auto-pilot mode of life.
Meditation Techniques to Aid Mindfulness
Learning mindfulness techniques straightaway is no easy feat! It will take lots of effort and patience on your side. However, you may use some of the meditation techniques that can aid you with your learning.
Let’s find out some of the popular meditation techniques for it:
- Transcendental Meditation: Choose any mantra, and repeat it continuously in a silent room. Once you achieve some peace within mind and body, then you may start with the mindfulness practice.
- Dancing Meditation: For this mindfulness exercise, you will need to let your body move in a free flow. Do not control your body in any way. Switch off your mind, and let your every body part move on its own accord. Once you get tired, then you can sit down and start with your mindful awareness practice.
- Chakra meditation: Instead of focusing on your breath or whole body, in Chakra meditation, you focus on your chakras. First, do some study on the position of chakras in your body. Now sit down and one by one focus on each chakra. Remember to ‘not’ imagine anything. Rather, just be a non-judgemental observer of whatever happens in your chakras.
- Guided Meditation: This is one of the ways I built mind awareness within me. You can find some good guided meditation audios and use them to build initial focus.
- Qigong Meditation: To do Qigong, you will need to stand. Now close your eyes and move your hands slowly from left to right, then right to left. As a distant observer, watch how your energies flow within different parts of your body.
If you find it difficult to use the above techniques, then do not worry. You can also get outside help from therapists. They can even help you with ancestral healing and womb healing. Let’s find out some good therapy practices for it.
Therapies to Build Mindfulness
Getting help from a therapist is always a good option. They can help you a lot in building mindful awareness and understanding how to feel your feelings.
Some of the therapy types that you may use are mentioned below:
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): This therapy combines mindfulness with cognitive-behavioral techniques. It can help you to improve your emotional stability and build tolerance via living in the present moment.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): It uses mindfulness and behavioral strategies to help you accept your emotions and commit to essential actions.
- Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): An 8-week program using mindfulness meditation and yoga to increase your awareness of the present moment.
- Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT): This therapy form will help you develop self-compassion and current-moment awareness to address any shame and self-criticism. It is a wonderful approach to helping people in emotional healing.
- Hakomi Therapy: Hakomi therapy uses mindfulness activity and body-centered techniques to explore unconscious patterns within you. It will help you build higher forms of self-awareness.
From the above therapy forms, you may use the one that you feel will help you in your journey. If confused, it’s always best to go by your gut feelings!
All in All
Building mindful awareness will help you get out of all of your sufferings. It will help you achieve that joy which lies beyond the anxieties of pains and pleasures.
The only thing that developing strong mind awareness demands is – patience and continuous practice from your side.