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Did he really think I was going to find the type of happiness and fulfillment I was after in a bottle of prescription medicine?
but I struggled with the endless thinking. It felt as if my mind was permanently switched on, going round and round like a washing machine.
I felt as though I was always drifting into unnecessary worry, frustration and sadness.
they had a tendency to spin out of control every now and then. And when they did, there was nothing I could do about it.
there was the constant reminder to “just relax” and “just let go.” Well, if I knew how to “just relax” and “just let go,” then I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. And as for sitting thirty or forty minutes at a time, forget it.
It’s hard to deal with grief at any age. We’re not trained for it, there’s no formula for it, and most of us get by as best we can. For me that meant doing the only thing I knew how—pushing everything down inside, and hoping I would never have to deal with the feelings of loss and sadness that had so inconveniently arrived on my doorstep.
This is exactly how I dealt with m father's passing.
like anything else in life, the more you push against something, the more tension you create. And eventually that tension has to find a way out.
that tension, those feelings that had been ignored, time and time again, started to find their way to the surface. At first it was just uncomfortable, but before long it felt as though they were touching every single aspect of my life.
Sometimes it was inspired and the thrill was exhilarating, other times it was painful and the result was humiliating.
What mattered was going out there and doing it, not thinking about it, not worrying what others might think, not even being attached to a particular result, just doing it.
Often in life we get so caught up in the analysis, the dissection of every possible outcome, that we m...
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the more we live mindfully, in the moment, the more we start to get a sen...
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Carrying a map is one thing, having someone to show you the way is quite another.
With increasing coverage of meditation and mindfulness in the media, many people seem to be in a hurry to define its purpose. But the truth is, you define the purpose by deciding how you choose to use it.
Since 2004 the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended the use of an adapted program of meditation (or mindfulness as it’s known in the medical world) for those at risk of a relapse of re-current depression.
in order to get meditation, you need to do it.
for genuine change to take place a certain amount of openness is required, a willingness to investigate.
Stories make difficult concepts easy to grasp, and forgettable instructions easy to remember.
so training the mind with meditation can make the area of the brain associated with happiness and well-being thicker and stronger.
Mindfulness means to be present, in the moment, undistracted. It implies resting the mind in its natural state of awareness, which is free of any bias or judgment.
It’s usually when we’re caught up in all the little things that we start to make mistakes.
when you get distracted, you make mistakes.
Meditation is simply a technique to provide you with the optimum conditions for practicing the skill of mindfulness.
ten minutes of resting the mind each day can feel like enough.
For some reason we’ve come to believe that happiness should be the default setting in life and, therefore, anything different is somehow wrong.
acknowledge that it’s the mind itself that defines your experience. This is why training the mind is so important. By changing the way in which you see the world, you effectively change the world around you.
if the mind is always racing from one thought to the next, then our ability to focus will be seriously impaired.
It’s pretty hard to switch off when you’re permanently plugged in.
Mindfulness is about learning how to change your experience of that lifestyle.
