Personal Benefits

• Focus
  Our ability to direct our attention becomes more reliable and flexible so that not only is it easier to maintain our attention on a task, situation, or entertainment, but also we gain the ability to widen our awareness to take in a more panoramic perspective. Mindfulness also helps us regain focus more quickly after distractions.
• Creativity
  Rather than being something to strive for, creativity arises spontaneously from the space of wakeful presence and the courage to go beyond familiar patterns. Fresh ideas can emerge as we think outside habitual boxes and make previously unseen connections.
• Resilience
  When faced with disturbing situations, familiarity with our own patterns lets us recognize when we are stuck so we can touch in to a sense of wakeful presence. This makes it easier to maintain emotional balance and move into the next moment less encumbered by our history.
• Clarity
  Becoming more aware of the patterns of our ongoing stream of thoughts and emotions, and seeing how fickle they are, we begin to recognize more quickly the activity of spinning a story to suit our biases. This insight offers the possibility of taking a bigger perspective, one that allows us to see reality more clearly, discerning what will truly benefit as opposed to what may just feel good.
• Confidence
  The more we come to trust our ability to rest in wakeful presence, the less we feel the need to strategize and defends things. We begin to feel that whatever happens, we will be able to tap into our inner resources and meet life wholeheartedly.

Societal Benefits

• Recognizing Commonality with Others
  We begin to see that all people inhabit a cocoon of habitual patterns that inclines them to certainty that they’re right and other people are wrong. We see how we all try to find happiness and avoid pain. Having seen our own patterns, we see how tendencies play out in the lives of others, thus leading naturally to compassion.
• Seeing Beyond Storylines
  On issues about which people can seem to inhabit totally different realities, we recognize how such stark differences arise from stories people tell themselves about the world around them. Without losing our ability to discriminate between what’s helpful and what isn’t, we’re on the lookout for the good intentions of others, even if we don’t agree with their methods.
• Discovering Society is Workable
  Since society isn’t something outside of collective individual experiences, we realize that the more we work with our mind, the better we’ll function with others. Seeing the effects of making friends with ourself through meditation, we realize that we’ll never change other people’s minds by telling them how muddled up they are. Instead, we look for common ground and practice patience, confident that the real enemy is confusion and that the world around us is workable.

Meeting Your Mind
Carol Hyman

There is a great longing within each of us. We long to discover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find our unique way of belonging to this world.

Bill Plotkin

Practicing Mindfulness

When we practice mindfulness, instead of believing everything we think, we begin to get familiar with our habitual patterns. With practice, we begin to see through the filters our habitual patterns impose to the world beyond, fragmented though it may still appear given the speedy momentum of our minds.

Discerning Thought Patterns

Eventually, we discover within us a background of awareness that underlies the ever-changing content of our busy minds. Just as the sun illuminates the objects of the outer world, the light of awareness reveals the patterns within us that color our version of reality, and thus allows us to discern with greater clarity the patterns that exist in the world around us.

Meeting Your Mind
Carol S. Hyman