One of the questions I get asked the most about mindfulness is how to transition the practice of meditation into application in daily life. People often report that even when they make time to sit and meditate on a somewhat regular basis they have difficulty connecting that practice with their everyday life experiences.
In order to fully benefit from a meditation practice we must not only go through the motions of sitting on the mat and/or doing a guided practice, but also make the effort to learn about meditation and reflect on the practice. It’s the difference between knowing what a hammer is and understanding when and how to effectively use a hammer to build a birdhouse. Unfortunately, the more that a principle or practice becomes commodified the harder it is to trace it back to its roots and the more it becomes about the rote repetition of a task. It is vitally important to ask ourselves why we come back to practice and how that practice affects us.
The most important aspects of meditation and mindfulness are not about clearing your mind or focusing on your breath, but about the underlying principles that create the foundation of why and how we practice. Mindfulness and meditation are not about being comfortable, relaxed, or at peace with the world, though those things can certainly be auxiliary benefits of a practice. Instead, meditation is an open invitation to build compassion, non-judgement, and radical acceptance of discomfort. The discomfort may be around parts of ourselves or others that we dislike, or aspects of the world and our experience in it that are not to our liking.
A truly mindful way of being requires ongoing work, it is never complete, and it is always evolving. It requires us to build a routine around checking in with ourselves consistently. A mindful life requires us to incorporate and practice the following principles:
Non-judging: shifting out of the evaluation of experiences based on our likes, dislikes, and personal biases.
Non-striving: shifting out of goal-oriented behavior in order to allow an experience to unfold.
Acceptance: accepting each moment and experience exactly as it is rather than how we wish it would be or fear it might be.
Curiosity: bringing a beginner’s mind to each experience, slowing down, and allowing ourselves to fully be present in what is happening rather than moving through on autopilot.
Non-attachment: allowing ourselves to let go of clinging to a particular goal, outcome, fear, or experience. Acknowledging at every experience is finite.
Compassion: genuine compassion for our own and other people’s lived experiences rooted in shared connection and humanity.
Patience: willingness to dedicate as much time as it takes without rushing to a goal or end point in an experience.
All these principles create the underpinning of mindfulness and meditation. They are also deceptively challenging to practice because they require letting go of our ego, need to succeed, and inherent bias. There is no mastery in mindfulness, only ongoing practice.
If you’d like to practice and learn more I recommend checking out the writings of Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Jon Kabat-Zinn. If you’d like to learn more about how to incorporate mindfulness to support your mental health, don’t hesitate to reach out!