Mindfulness

[PartTimeBrewer]

              I am starting a new thread here mainly for purposes of my own catharsis. It is my intention, at least at this point, to make regular contributions. Of course, if anyone else has anything to add, they are more than welcome. If you have any input, please contribute.

              Over a year ago I decided to deal head-on with my self-diagnosed adult attention disorder, (ADD). The inability to stay focused was becoming too stressful. I found myself sitting around watching the clock tick, yet I couldn’t keep “on task” with any project I started. Nothing was getting done and just starting something was becoming depressing.

              The smart thing to do was probably to get professional help, so instead I decided to try to heal myself, at least as a first try. Cognitive therapy and pharmaceuticals (UGH) might be the approved way to go but I decided to try meditation first.

              18 months and countless self-help books later, I still can’t bring myself to a regular, formal meditation program. But, along the way, I discovered informal mindfulness. Yes, I know it is the “Fad” right now. It is hard to navigate modern social trends without “tripping over” somebody extolling the benefits of mindfulness.

              Let me add my voice to the chorus.

[Angharad]

Hahaha, brilliant, PTB! Limericks are grand!

I laughed at the "squirrel" reference--Draughn and I used to pepper our conversations with "squirrel!!" and other such interjections as both a source of mirth and a form of mindfulness. ツ

Your limerick inspired me to prolong the wonderful silliness:

Once a young Buddhist named Earl
went diving for wisdom's bright pearl.
He found it at last,
and snatched it up fast,
yet continued to be quite a churl. 

[Baia]

Just dropped by on the way to the Wall of Gratitude to see what was new here.

Great thoughts!  I have a lot of affinity with most of you.  Life has been a big adventure, searching for answers, wandering off the path and finding my way back.  Very recent years have been interesting since my family realized our high functioning autism that has been affecting most of us in varying degrees forever.  Knowing this has brought us great comfort and a place to start from in solving our own problems using different tools that have become available to our differently wired community.

Maybe it's because I'm pretty old now (74), but I am feeling a lot calmer-- even with the constant drama being stirred up around us on a daily basis.  I check into the Wall of Gratitude almost every day and I also engage in a clearing activity that I call "unshopping".  LOL!  Three years ago I started a course through Daily Om called A Year to Clear What Is Holding You Back and I'm in my third year of that.  There have been a lot of break-throughs for me and my family during that time and it hasn't been any one big thing but lots of little bits of effort over time.  Then every once in a while, my personal glacier calves a big chunk off. It moves slowly, but the days seem to be moving by more quickly lately, so over time, there is a lot of progress.  

Every so often, I find a new resource and I add it to my tool kit.  The very first counsellor I went to after I was diagnosed with a situational depression steered me to the work of Albert Ellis and ever since then I have been open to new tools to use in what I could call building the house of my life.  Just like you can't build a house using only a hammer, or saw or a set of plans, I can't build my life with only one kind of life tool.  Without a doctor's prescription I found a treatment that worked for my fibromyalgia and now my doctor just monitors me for things that she knows about. She's young so her goal is to be my doctor when I reach 100 years old.  I have no objections to that now although sometimes I thought that those who have gone on already were the lucky ones.  Clearly I no longer suffer from depression!

This year I decided since time was going by so fast, I might as well give Weight Watchers another try.  I have so much to do and the freedom to choose how I spend my time in my retirement that I find that I don't have the same compulsion to eat to "keep up my strength" that I used to have.  Now I drink a lot of water to stay hydrated and that helps my mood a lot!  And I sleep when I feel tired instead of eating. I am being successful at intentionally losing weight this time and I'm happy that I don't have to pay too much attention to the process.  Regular exercise is still a challenge and I'm working on that, too.  Mindful eating is a big part of being successful for me now.

So thank you, PartTimeBrewer for starting up a new thread on Mindfulness.  I appreciate all of the tools I can get for living my life.  And I do like to share the tools that I have found as well.

[PartTimeBrewer]

Thank you for the kind words. And also thank you for the new resources. My local library has The Road to Tolerance by Albert Ellis & I will look into it, as well as the DailyOm.

[Angharad]

Thank you, Baia, for the resources. I've already bookmarked DailyOm and the Albert Ellis Institute. I'll enjoy exploring both.

[Angharad]

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."- Paul Romer

[PartTimeBrewer]

Mindfulness is more than mere awareness. It is purposeful awareness, being immersed in the current state of your object of focus, without judgement and returning to it whenever the mind wanders away (and it will).

[PartTimeBrewer]

Below is a link to one of the better sites available on mindfulness. It is more about how mindfulness provides real benefits than the actual 'nuts and bolts' of how to do it. The whole left/right brain thing is probably too simplistic but it still gets the point across.

http://theweek.com/articles/647984/how-mindfulness-makes-brain-happ...

[PartTimeBrewer]

The benefits seem to be of two types. First there is the reduction of stress and anxiety by realizing that many of our run-away thoughts are unjustified. But it was the second benefit that caught me by surprise when I started the practice (and still does). It is the sense of spontaneous wonder that comes when I just open my awareness to everything around me, without judgement.

[Angharad]

WOW--great article, PTB! Surprisingly, it detailed what I've been doing all my life--and ineptly trying to explain to loved ones that they should do--which is to recognize your emotional reactions (left brain) and then overlay them with the objective "facts" of any situation (right brain). Only in that way can people be (mostly) free of the sustained wrong thinking, hurt feelings, and knee-jerk reactions, and their consequences, which plague us as a species. I never knew that was the neuroscientific explanation of "mindfulness."

Thank you for the link. And thank you for relating how that information has changed you.  

[PartTimeBrewer]

"As soon as we wish to be happier, we are no longer happy"  -  Walter Landor

[Angharad]

“Do every act of your life as though it were the last act of your life.”- Marcus Aurelius

[PartTimeBrewer]

"In today's rush we all think too much - seek too much - want too much - and forget about the joy of just being."  -  Eckhart Tolle