Posts

Showing posts from August, 2012

Get Out Of Your Head - The Mindful Way

Image
Researchers are finding out that mindfulness has been shown to increase happiness. Originally a Buddhist term, the word mindfulness  is now becoming as ubiquitous as the word Zen. But what exactly is it? Going to the gym and running on the running machine while watching TV is not being mindful. Going through a Qigong or Kung Fu form while concentrating on the breath and the movement is. I’m not judging the person on the running machine. It’s okay to be mindless every now and again, but if our goal is to be happy then factoring in more sessions of mindfulness and less sessions of mindlessness will help us to achieve this.  A student came to me the other day and said that she’d been meditating for 20 minutes every morning but she didn’t feel any different. For true transformation to occur, we need to integrate mindfulness into our day to day life. The Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, advises us to use a ringing phone or a red traffic light as a tool to remind us to come back to ourselves and