Benefits of Mindfulness

Non-Identification, Impermanence
• Viewing thoughts, feelings and sensations as passing events in our field of awareness, rather than over-identifying with them or becoming attached, repelled, or overwhelmed by them.
• Learning to experience thoughts, feelings and sensations as phenomena moving through our awareness, rather than experiencing them as "me," or the whole of my reality.
• Knowledge of impermanence allows greater tolerance for unpleasant internal states (e.g., letting feelings come and go like waves).
• Recognizing mental events as passing phenomena contained in our awareness (e.g., "just thoughts")
• Helpful metaphors: sky-like awareness, ocean (stillness beneath the waves), hub of a wheel.
Present-Moment Experience
• Brings us out of "automatic pilot" mode, allows us to make aware and conscious decisions about responding.
• Turning towards present reality gives us more choices, "degrees of freedom."
• Brings us into our immediate experience can help ground us, helps with rumination and panic.
• Reminds us of our aliveness, our vitality.
• Being centered in the present moment, we become more connected and engaged in our lives, and we may begin experiencing our daily activities and interactions as less mundane and more meaningful.
• Focusing on one thing at a time, rather than multi-tasking, reduces stress and can even improve our relationships.
• Becoming aware and grounded in the present moment allows us to fully engage in the richness of moment-to-moment experience.
• Each moment, each breath, is a chance to begin anew.
• We learn to handle things "one moment at a time." Being present with "just this breath" can be grounding and calming.
• Focuses attention on moment-to-moment experience, and away from ruminative cycles of thoughts that tend to bog us down in negative mood states and can contribute to anxiety and/or depression.
Turning Towards Experience
• Bearing with our experience, rather than trying to get rid of it.
• Different way of responding to inevitable unpleasant experiences in life.
• Through direct exposure, we learn that our emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations are not so overwhelming and frightening, and that they will eventually pass.
• Allows us to explore and tolerate a broad range of thoughts, emotions and sensations.
• Allows us to be present with our experience rather than avoiding or escaping, contracting or pushing away.
Expanded, Clear Perspective
• Learning to see clearly depends on the ability to dis-identify from automatic patterns and beliefs.
• Affords a different place from which to view the present moment.
• Fosters greater cognitive and behavioral flexibility and less automaticity.
• May help us observe values and choices and reflect on them with greater objectivity.
• Open, intentional awareness can help us choose behaviors that are congruent with our needs, interests and values.
• Helps us to develop acceptance and act with wisdom, intention and perspective rather than in a reactive or knee-jerk fashion.
• Trains the mind to be less reactive and more stable, helps develop patience and acceptance, and builds and deepens the mind's strength and concentration.
• Practicing "bare attention" and maintaining equanimity helps us gain balance and perspective regarding what is going on around and inside us. Slowing down and becoming aware, we see things more clearly.
Acceptance, Making Space
• Softening, allowing, opening
• Acceptance, not fighting against
• "Pain X Resistance = Suffering," "
• The "two arrows"
• "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional"
• It is not as much the pain itself, but our own reaction to it that causes our suffering
• "What we resist, persists"
• Cannot always change or control our external circumstances, but mindfulness can help us relate differently to life's "ups and downs."
• Different than approval or resignation; rather, involves acknowledging our present experience, because it is already here.
• We see that all "problems" come down to the same basic issue: wanting things to be different than they are. Mindfulness helps us to develop the awareness to be able to accept the things we cannot change and to take skillful action to change the things we can.
"Getting to Know Your Own Mind"
• Learning the workings of your mind
• Getting to know the mind's habits and the way it may be causing our suffering
• Recognizing "tapes in the mind"
• Provides a chance to look dispassionately at the reactions and habits of your own mind, at its fears and desires.
• Helps us see through our likes, dislikes, and opinions to experience things as they actually are.
• Helps cultivate compassion, because we recognize that we all have the same basic nature, and that the suffering we experience is, at its core, the same as that experienced by all beings, regardless of superficial differences.
"Being" Mode
• Time to sit quietly and "just be," rather than actively "doing," increases our sense of peacefulness and well-being.
• Gives us time to dwell in a state of deep relaxation
• "Being mode" is accepting and non-conceptual, in contrast to "thinking mode" and "doing mode."
• Trains the mind to be less reactive and more stable, helps develop patience and acceptance, and builds and deepens the mind's strength and concentration.
• Some problems cannot be "solved" through conceptual or analytical thought.