What is Mindfulness Meditation?

Mindfulness meditation is a technique to orient the performer’s mind to focus on some previous own experiences at the present moment, like the thoughts, sensations, emotions, etc. This meditation resembles mental training process and hence used as a tool for the treatment of stress, tension, trauma, etc.  Combination of yoga postures and breathing exercises are the common modes of mindfulness meditation offered in training sessions.  The performer is made to keep the thoughts away from the routine chatter of the mind comprising n number of thoughts passing by. The performer is habituated to control the thoughts, emotions or the activities of the body through this meditation.

Why Mindfulness Meditation?

Mindfulness meditation brings one’s wandering mind to a single focus. This helps in balancing the emotions and brings clarity of thoughts. This itself provides relaxation to the individual, as the jumble of junk thoughts in fact burden one’s mind and long term exposure to thoughts dominated with negativity makes oneself mentally and physically stressed. This is the major cause for many of the cognitive disabilities like mental stress, depression, dementia, etc. depending on the intensity of the negative thoughts as well as the personality of the individual. All these problems drastically affect the normal social skills of the individual leading to spoiled relationships across family and friends. Normal medications cannot help in regaining the lost skills in such individuals and hence tools like mindfulness meditation are necessary to enable them to build up the social skills and upkeep their moods and emotions.

How to perform Mindfulness Meditation?

• Decide What or Where to Focus the Mind : Generally, a piece of soothing music,  repeating recitation, breathing or counting beads are used as the target focus for the mind.
• Select a Comfortable Posture : Like any other meditation,  posture should be preferably upright, relaxed, not rigid, and with normal breathing. Closing the eyes will help in minimizing the distractions. Once settled in the upright posture, the performer should focus on own body, and immediate surroundings and be conscious about the posture. Now the performer is ready to start with the mindfulness meditation.
• Focus on Breathing : The performer needs to bring his/her attention on the breathing process and start experiencing the sensations of breathing in and breathing out. The breathing should be kept slow and steady. The performer now should be able to feel the passage of air through the air passage, movements of the chest, and how it provides a relaxed feeling to the mind. The performer should be keeping track of the distractions and deviation of the attention from the breathing process at this stage. Whenever any distraction happens during the meditation, one should bring back the focus to the breathing process.  Through practice, the mind gets habituated and the frequency of distractions get reduced. This is an indication of the progress of the performer in mindfulness meditation.

Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation

The immediate and the most obvious outcome of mindfulness meditation is the feeling of calmness in the mind and the ability to focus the mind on any object or activity. This ability helps in stress management and balancing the emotions during tension, depression or overjoy. Over the long term, mindfulness meditation enhances the work efficiency of the performer. Even physical pains on body parts can be relieved through this relaxation technique. Therefore, it is useful in healing many psychosomatic disorders among the people.