9 Attitudes of Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn
9 Attitudes of Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindful Attitudes by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Attitudes of Mindfulness. These are the 9-Attitudinal Foundations of Mindfulness. They can be practiced at The Mindful Coach – Self Care.
1. Mindful Attitudes of Non-Judging (more …
Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences that we are all normally caught up in, and learn to step back from it. When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover and be surprised by the fact that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.
2. Mindful Attitudes of Patience (more …
Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time. A child might try to help a butterfly to emerge by breaking open its chrysalis. Usually, the butterfly doesn’t benefit from this. Any adult knows that the butterfly can only emerge in its own time that the process cannot be hurried.
3. Mindful Attitudes of Beginners Mind (more …
The richness of present moment experience is the richness of life itself. Too often we let our thinking and our beliefs about what we “know” prevent us from seeing things as they really are. We tend to take ordinary for granted and fail to grasp the extra-ordinariness of the ordinary. To see the richness of the present moment, we need to cultivate what has been called a “beginner’s mind,” a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time.
4. Mindful Attitudes of Trust (more …
Developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings is an integral part of meditation training. It is far better to trust in your intuition and your own authority, even if you make some mistakes along the way than always to look outside of yourself for guidance.
If at any time something does not feel right to you, why not honor your feelings?
5. Mindful Attitudes of Non-Striving (more …
Almost everything we do is for a purpose, to get something or somewhere. But in the attitudes of mindfulness, this striving attitude can be a real obstacle. That is because meditation is different from all other human activities. Although it takes a lot of work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is non-doing. It has no goal except for you to be yourself. The irony is that you already are.
6. Mindful Attitudes of Acceptance (more …
Acceptance means seeing things as they actually are in the present. If you have a headache, accept that you have a headache. If you are overweight, why not accept it as a description of your body at this time? Sooner or later we have to come to terms with things as they are and accept them. Often acceptance is only reached after we have gone through very emotion-filled periods of denial and then anger.
These stages are a natural progression in the process of coming to terms with what it is.
7. Mindful Attitudes of Letting Go (more …
They say in India there is a particularly clever way of catching monkeys. As the story goes, hunters cut a hole in a coconut that is just big enough for a monkey to put its hand through. Then they put a banana inside of the coconut and hide. The monkey comes down, puts its hand in, and takes hold of the banana. But it seems most monkeys do not let go.
Often our minds get us caught in very much the same way in spite of our intelligence. For this reason, cultivating the attitude of letting go, or non-attachment is fundamental to the practice of attitudes for mindfulness. When we start paying attention to our inner experience. We rapidly discover that there are certain thoughts and feelings and situations that our mind seems to want to hold on to.
8. Mindful Attitudes of Gratitude (more …
Gratitude, there is a complex relationship between thoughts, moods, brain chemistry, endocrine function, and functioning of other physiological systems in our bodies. While an in-depth discussion of this relationship is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that our thoughts can actually trigger physiological changes in our body that affect our mental and physical health. Basically, what you think affects how you feel (both emotionally and physically).
So if you increase your positive thoughts, like gratitude, you can increase your subjective sense of well-being as well as, perhaps, objective measures of physical health (like fewer symptoms of illness and increased immune functioning).
9. Mindful Attitudes of Generosity (more …
The mindful attitude of generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust. It provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation.
As an inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings. Such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice being generous with the feeling of being deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation. To simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.
“We human beings have multiple ways of knowing the world, inwardly and outwardly.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
Source- Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., pages 33-40
Mindful Attitudes and Commitment: The Foundations of Mindfulness Practice
“It is only when the mind is open and receptive that learning and seeing and change can occur.“
To cultivate the healing power of mindfulness requires much more than mechanically following a recipe or a set of instructions. No real process of learning is like that. It is only when the mind is open and receptive that learning and seeing and change can occur. In practicing mindfulness, you will have to bring your whole being to the process. You can’t just assume a meditative posture and think something will happen or play a tape and think that the tape is going to “do something” for you.
The attitude with which you undertake the practice of paying attention and being in the present is crucial. It is the soil in which you will be cultivating your ability to calm your mind and to relax your body, to concentrate and see more clearly. If the attitudinal soil is depleted, that is, if your energy and commitment to practice are low, it will be hard to develop calmness and relaxation with any consistency.
If the soil is really polluted. That is if you are trying to force yourself to feel relaxed. You demand of yourself that “something happen,” nothing will grow at all. Then you will quickly conclude that “meditation doesn’t work.”
A New Way of Looking
To cultivate meditative awareness requires an entirely new way of looking at the process of learning. Since thinking that we know what we need and where we want to get are so ingrained in our minds, we can easily get caught up in trying to control things to make them turn out “our way,” the way we want them to. But this attitude is antithetical to the work of awareness and healing. Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are.
It doesn’t require that we change anything. And healing requires receptivity and acceptance, a tuning to connectedness and wholeness. None of this can be forced, just as you cannot force yourself to go to sleep. You have to create the right conditions for falling asleep and then you have to let go. The same is true for relaxation. It cannot be achieved through force of will. That kind of effort will only produce tension and frustration.
A Positive Attitude
If you come to the meditation practice thinking to yourself, “This won’t work but I’ll do it anyway,” the chances are it will not be very helpful. The first time you feel any pain or discomfort, you will be able to say to yourself, “See, I knew my pain wouldn’t go away,” or “I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate,” and that will confirm your suspicion that it wasn’t going to work, and you will drop it.
If you come as a “true believer,” certain that this is the right path for you, that meditation is “the answer,”. The chances are you will soon become disappointed too. As soon as you find that you are the same person you always were and that this work requires effort and consistency and not just a romantic belief in the value of meditation or relaxation, you may find yourself with considerably less enthusiasm than before.
In the stress clinic, we find that those people who come with a skeptical but open attitude do the best. Their unmindful attitude is “I don’t know whether this will work or not, I have my doubts, but I am going to give it my best shot and see what happens.”
So, the attitude that we bring to the practice of mindfulness will to a large extent determine its long-term value to us. This is why consciously cultivating certain attitudes can be very helpful in getting the most out of the process of meditation. Your intentions set the stage for what is possible. They remind you from moment to moment of why you are practicing in the first place. Keeping particular attitudes in mind is actually part of the training itself, a way of directing and channeling your energies so that they can be most effectively brought to bear in the work of growing and healing.
9 Attitudes of Mindfulness
Nine attitudinal factors constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice as we teach it in the stress clinic. They are nonjudging, gratitude, patience, a beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, gratitude and generosity. These attitudes are to be cultivated consciously when you practice. They are not independent of each other. Each one relies on and influences the degree to which you are able to cultivate the others.
Working on anyone will rapidly lead you to the others. Since together they constitute the foundation upon which you will be able to build a strong meditation practice of your own. We introduce them before you encounter the techniques themselves. So that you can become familiar with these attitudes from the very beginning. Once you are engaged in the practice itself, this will merit rereading. It will remind you of ways you might continue to fertilize this attitudinal soil. So that your mindfulness practice will flourish.
Source- Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., pages 31-33
More Mindfulness- https://themindfulcoach.com/
Respectfully,
Heidi & Ross
Please, BookMark. 🙂
G Ross Clark C.C.P.,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,
Email- TheMindfulCoach@gmail.com,
Training- MBSRtraining.com