To live mindfully… is to bring greater awareness to each activity, to be more present to each moment, and to catch subtle experiences that all too often go unnoticed.

Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind
Roger Walsh
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.Mindfulness Has Five Benefits

1. Interpersonal Sensitivity
   Mindfulness makes us more present to each person we meet, more aware of the other person’s feelings and many messages conveyed by subtle body movements and vocal tones. This allows us to attune to their motives and emotions and to be more empathic with their feelings.
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   Empathy is the ability to share another person’s feelings. Empathy is an especially crucial skill, and research shows that meditation is one of the few methods known to enhance it.
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2. Refining the Senses
   There is much talk in spiritual circles about giving up sensory pleasures, but much of this discussion is superficial and mistaken.We don’t necessarily need to give up sensory pleasures, but we do need to give up our attachment to them. Sooner or later any attachment causes suffering, and sensory attachments are no exception. Free of craving, we can enjoy our pleasures without fear or worry.We also need to refine the senses by honoring each experience and bringing to it a careful, gentle, and penetrating awareness or mindfulness.
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   Refined Senses Offer Three Major Gifts
   1) They enhance the appreciation and pleasure of each moment.
   2) Because each experience is more rich and satisfying, there is less craving for more experiences. The appreciation of quality experiences replaces the raw hunger for quantity — the glutton becomes a gourmet.
   3) Refining the senses is an excellent mental training that fosters beneficial qualities such as concentration and calm.
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3. Knowing One’s Mind
   As awareness matures, it is able to observe not only the outer but also the inner world with increasing precision. Much that was formerly unconscious becomes conscious. Making the unconscious conscious has been the essence of meditation for thousands of years, and meditative awareness can penetrate far below the levels of psychotherapy.
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4.  Freedom from Automaticity
   Awareness can break the chain of dependent origination in the instant after a crisis. This deconditions and weakens the habits of craving and aversion, and thereby liberates us from our own conditioning.
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5. The Healing Power of Awareness
   Mindfulness heals. Many of the unhealthy and self-destructive things we do spring from automatic, unconscious responses. We feel anxious and find ourselves smoking, feel lonely and suddenly realize we’ve finished a box of chocolates, feel hurt by a casual remark and damage a friendship by lashing back automatically. These responses are born of mindlessness and can be prevented by mindfulness.
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   Mindfulness allow us to guard the mind. To be mindful and guard the mind means we are aware as we reach for a cigarette, chocolate, or harsh word and can therefore choose whether to continue or to make a different response.

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Be always mindful of what you are doing and thinking. So that you may put the imprint of your immortality on every passing incident of your daily life.

     — Abd’l-Khaliq Ghijdewani, 13th century Sufi

Living Our Modern Lives, We Want to Do Multiple Things at Once…

Our frantic minds reflect our frantic lives as we try to fit more and more into each day. We constantly do two or more things at a time. We dress while listening to the radio; prepare a meal while planning our day; then eat the meal while reading the paper and watching television. We listen to the radio while driving and at work talk on the telephone while preparing a report. Our lives feel fragmented, our minds are agitated, blood pressure is raised, and our attention span is shortened.

Thomas Merton, one of the twentieth century’s most influential Christians, summarized the dilemma we face:

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace.

Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind
Roger Walsh

Guidelines for Healing the Past

• Undo any damage. If you caused pain or harm, it is wise to undo it wherever possible. For example, if you hurt someone’s  feelings, you may want to apologize; if you stole something, it may be appropriate and healing to replace it or pay for it.
• Aim for solutions in which everyone wins. The ideal solution is one in which everyone involved gains and learns from the process. For example, if someone hurt you, it is far better to gently explain that the behavior was hurtful than it is to attack. Ideally, both of you will learn from and be healed by the interaction.
• Avoid attack. It is terribly tempting to retaliate when someone hurts you. The painful result, however, is usually only a dizzying spiral of ever-increasing anger, attack, and counterattack.
• Communicate. Simply telling someone honestly and openly about your pain can be remarkably healing. This kind of communication is so effective that it forms the basis of the healing offered by religious confession, psychotherapy, and self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
• Learn. As always, learn as much as possible from your experience. For example, when you have resolved a dilemma, see what worked and what didn’t, so you can proceed more effectively in the future.

 

Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind
Roger Walsh

Something in the American character does not like patience. A culture of ambition makes it difficult for us to hold still. Patience seems to put a damper on the spontaneity and freedom we so cherish. A consumer society’s dependence on impulse buying and the media’s accommodation to short attention spans do not foster the development of patience.

Befriending painful emotions demands patience. Patience prepares us to lead our lives wide awake, to taste our negative emotions rather than simply swallowing our pain. The disciplines of patience transform our painful emotions into positive passions for life.

Transforming Our Painful Emotions: Spiritual Resources in Anger, Shame, Grief, Fear, and Loneliness
Evelyn Eaton Whitehead & James D. Whitehead

The book is a psychological and spiritual exploration of the positive potential hidden in our painful emotions, showing how so-called bad feelings can be good news.

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Evelyn & James Whitehead

James and Evelyn Whitehead have been long associated with the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago, where they regularly offer academic courses and short workshops. They have coauthored a dozen books which have been translated into several languages.

James Whitehead is a historian of religion with a concentration in pastoral reflection and the links between virtue and moral emotions. Evelyn Whitehead is a developmental psychologist with a special interest in the connections between psychological growth and spiritual maturing in adult life.

The Whiteheads also provide programs at various university and other educational settings throughout the United States and internationally.