Mindfulness

When attempting to meditate, do you have problems clearing your mind of thoughts? Often those thoughts keep on coming back, and you seem destined for failure no matter how hard you try. The good news is that this is a very common challenge encountered by anyone starting meditation. It is not a sign of failure that you are having difficulties making your mind clear, quiet or supposedly blank. Even those who have practised meditation for many years may at times have problems. The most important thing is to keep persevering, and if necessary try different approaches or techniques, until you find one which works for you.

While quietening your mind is an important goal for any meditation, realise that each of us will achieve different degrees of success. For some people attaining the ultimate goal of full quietness of mind may not be possible, but that does not mean you cannot meditate.

The first and foremost thing to realise is that your very efforts to clear or quieten the mind can often be the cause. Your mind becomes filled with the distractions of the very same ideas you are making an effort to clear. If this is the case or you have a very rowdy mind, then you should shift your efforts to achieving a small area of calmness.

The second obstacle most people face is that they try to erase or eliminate their thoughts. The ability to quell or eliminate thoughts is very difficult to achieve for most of us. So the best approach for success is instead to push your thoughts aside or to the background, thereby diminishing their presence. With time and effort, you can build the skills to be observant of your thoughts, acknowledge them if necessary and push them aside. Then as you push more of these thoughts away, you can establish a small beachhead of quietness in your mind. Be happy with this achievement, as it is an important milestone. As you practice more, you will find that you can expand the quietness outwards, pushing your thoughts farther aside and into the background.

A very useful technique which can be utilised to help with meditation or even mindfulness is called Ekagrata, which simply means focused thought. Applying Ekagrata enables you to focus on one thing, such as your breath, repeating a mantra, or mindfully shifting your attention to a specific thought. As a master of your mind, you are not thinking of everything at the same time, you are being purposeful and focusing on one thing at a time. If stray thoughts enter your mind, you acknowledge them and push them aside to achieve that focus of mind which is Ekagrata. Become the master of your mind with Ekagrata, so that you may learn to clear your mind.

Increasingly more of us have ceased noticing many aspects of the world within and around us, especially when we live very busy lives. It is something which may not be immediately obvious as we are so entrenched in our lives. With an ever-changing world, it has become significantly easier to lose touch with the sensations of life and living. As we do, some of us start to act totally via conditioned thinking, apparently reacting unconsciously to life.

You do not need to change who you are or modify your beliefs to become a lot more self-aware. All of us have the capacity to be mindful, to take notice of and be aware of the here and now. The trick is discovering that impetus to break free from the thoughts which your mind generates to keep you living life mindlessly. Active intelligence is the act of engaging in your thought processes beyond unconscious thought, utilising both good judgment and awareness to make real choices. In all of this, it is awareness which is the fundamental key to activating choice in life.

Through the awareness of yourself and your life, which can be achieved via techniques such as mindfulness, you can break those patterns of unconscious thoughts or pre-programmed reactions. At its heart and core, the whole focus of mindfulness is about awareness. Whether that be awareness of a sensation in your body or of some other external subject, the objective is the same. The objective is to focus your mind away from the everyday thoughts of your mind.

So if you find that you have actually stopped noticing the worlds around or within you, spend some time reconnecting with your real intentions with life force mindfulness.

Nowadays it is very easy to lose the battle with Social Media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Medium, Pinterest, Tumblr, and various other apps taking hold of your life. Even though you may well have reduced your screen time with digital well-being tools, you might have noticed that your attention span has decreased, or that you become seemingly quickly bored by a topic and feel the need to swipe onto the newest fad. Consider for a moment that it is your mind which is winning the battle, and continues to draw you back to scrolling and swiping through Social Media.

If though, you wish to know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, your brilliance and dark sides, then you need to discover some quiet time in your life. Discovering some quiet time means more than closing the app or turning off your smartphone, it is about really bringing some renewed focus to your way of thinking. Truly quietening your mind can be extremely beneficial for your well-being and quality of life. Choose a technique such as meditation, mindfulness or the more advanced practices such as cognition that can help you to boost your attention span and at the same time provide you with ways to assist in quietening your mind.

When your life seems to be rushing by and everything around you seems to be happing too fast or out of your control, make the effort to stop for a moment. At that instant in time, with the world on pause, ask yourself, is it the world that is busy and hectic, or is it my mind? You might actually discover that the fact is, that your mind is overfilling your life with innumerable and quite often unwanted and frequently groundless thoughts or other contrivances. With some of these thoughts paused, you now have the opportunity to reestablish control of your mind to make your life truly less hectic.

No matter what is going on in your life, you can still choose to be aware and mindful. It is all about choices – you have the power within you to choose how to respond, rather than reacting. The power is within your grasp; pausing your mind provides the opportunity for silences and active intellect to take charge. You can then make informed decisions on how to react to any situation in your life.

Mindfulness can be applied almost anytime and anywhere, be that standing in a queue, sitting at your desk or carrying out household tasks. You can apply aspects of mindfulness through your breathing or observation of sensations in your body.

Mindfulness at its most basic principle is becoming aware, though few of us have considered the winder context this implies. As you work to apply Mindfulness all day, take the opportunity to grow your experience. As you can become aware of your breathing or sensations in your body, you can progress to become aware of your own thoughts. As you increase your awareness, observe how your thoughts arise within your mind and how your reactions can lead to seemingly unconscious thoughts. The more that you become aware of all aspects of your life, the more profound your mindfulness experiences will be.

As anyone who practices mindfulness, you must face the challenge of the aspects which you have pushed aside. While it is an admirable practice to improve your focus in life by pushing aside other thoughts, emotions or feelings, you need to take a deeper challenge. The challenge is to realise that pushing aside any thoughts, emotions or feelings, does not make them disappear. When pushing them aside, they continue to exist on the periphery of your consciousness.

 

You need to understand these aspects within your life so that you can then move beyond them. Moving beyond them, you can no longer react to the stimuli which they produce. However, if you leave them unattended within the recesses of your mind, they are like the proverbial Pandora’s box. As such, any emotional aspects not appropriately understood or banished completely from your mind, can lead to many unforeseen problems.

You may well have taken advantage of mindfulness techniques to stop, pause, to become aware of what is taking place in the moment. You might have leveraged meditation as a reprieve from your emotions, thoughts and feelings. What is it that makes you act, respond, think, believe and feel in the way in which you do? What is the trigger which presses your psychological or subconscious buttons? The answer to these inquiries might be far more complicated than you initially conceived, as you view your place in the larger cosmos.

There is much more that is not seen than can be seen. Take into consideration that everything in the universe is energy. Welcome to the world of actuality and real facts. Absolutely nothing within the cosmos is by fortune or accident, all adhere to well-prescribed patterns and circulations of energy which form the basis of all matter, thoughts and our reality.

Many of you may have systematically made use of mindfulness techniques to stop, pause, to become aware of what is transpiring in the moment. Alternatively, you may have leveraged meditation as a respite from your emotions and from your thought and feelings.

However, what is it that makes you act, respond, think, believe and feel in the manner in which you do? Realise that absolutely nothing within the cosmos is by accident, all follows well-prescribed patterns and flows of energy which form the basis of all matter, thoughts and our reality. So consider for a moment how these unseen or unrecognised energies could influence you daily and trigger emotions or feelings hidden deep with your psyche.

Frequently people struggle with mindfulness or meditation by aspiring to eliminate all the thoughts from their mind. Realise that making this effort to clear your head is likewise a thought. Discovering the silence in between your thoughts can be a really powerful technique to assist you to calm your mind and attain aspects of meditation.

As an alternative to focusing on the thoughts which you are attempting to clear from your mind, focus on the silence in between each thought. All the while, as you keep on focusing on the silence in between the thoughts, observe the silence expanding. Continue to focus on this silence in between your thoughts to ensure that it thrusts an increasing number of your thoughts to the edges of your mind. Gradually this silence will expand to grant you some calmness of mind, from where you can move ahead with your other mindfulness or meditation activities,

When focused with intention, your thoughts are the most commanding. When your thoughts do not have focus, it is like light travelling through a prism contrasted to being concentrated by a magnifying glass. While light can transit through either the magnifying glass or the prism, what occurs afterwards to the light is really different. The aforementioned analogy holds true for your thoughts. Discover how to focus your thoughts, instead of letting them be scattered. The techniques which are incorporated in mindfulness, as well as meditation, can assist you to focus your thoughts; with higher levels of focused thoughts (Ekagrata) being possible through the refined process of Life Force Cognition.

A number of us have embarked upon a mindfulness journey with the aspiration to alleviate stress and anxiety or attain some calmness in our lives. Using mindfulness, to afford awareness to the here and now offers you the chance to be watchful of your own thoughts, emotions & feelings, in addition to perspectives of the world around you.

A lot of your thoughts do not register consciously, yet you are reacting to these thoughts. Make every effort to seize any kind of negative or unfavourable thoughts before they fully form within your mind. Drive such thoughts out of your consciousness so they do not become part of your life. As beneficial or valuable thoughts register, capitalise their value by bringing them to the fore.

Your conscious mind absorbs and stores information and reacts to that information, whether it is right, wrong or indifferent.

Apply IOEA (Inhale, Observe your breath, Exhale, Awareness of your thoughts) to change your programmed reactions.

Uncover how to regulate your mind, as opposed to your mind, emotions & feelings becoming the master of your life. Tapping into the energies of your Life Force, via meditation, mindfulness or cognition can help shift you out of the patterns of your unconscious reactions; releasing you from your mental constraints. Applying these techniques in your everyday life can aid you to transform your mental wavelengths to be calm, balanced and remain in control.