Mindfullness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is a state of being fully present in the moment. We spend much of our time so identified with our inner world of compulsive thoughts and feelings, that we rarely realize the depth and breadth of our true nature as pure awareness itself. By coming fully into the present moment we can reconnect with the timeless dimension of our own deepest Being. Connecting with this dimension of Presence is a beautiful experience that is available even in the midst of our stress filled world.

As we begin to quiet our minds and let go of our automatic reactive patterns, our deeper feelings, values, priorities, and opinions begin to emerge naturally. This enables us to live our lives with greater richness, depth, and authenticity. The more Presence we can bring into our lives, the more in touch with ourselves we become.

Making the unconscious conscious is a theme in many forms of psychotherapy. In traditional psychoanalytic treatment, this job rests exclusively in the hands of the therapist. Mindfulness meditation, however, is a way of teaching ourselves to recognize our own reactive patterns and scripts. When we see our reactive patterns from the spaciousness and equanimity of a mindful state of mind we are less likely to act them out blindly or become emotionally unbalanced. For example, even a vicious attack from our inner critical voice can melt away through the simple power of grounded mindful awareness.

Mindfulness is a way of relating to our inner experiences in the moment based on acceptance and letting go. This allows us to separate the wheat from the chaff in our own experience. Once old habitual patterns of thought and feeling are recognized and let go, deeper experiences of our own wholeness have room to shine through. The meditative traditions have different names for this wholeness such as our True Nature, Original Face, and Wise Mind. In this way, mindfulness becomes more than just a way of dealing with unskillful reactive thoughts and emotions, and can become an open doorway leading us to deeper discovery of ourselves.