Hi
I have been practicing mindfulness over a year now
Every morning I try do at leas12 minutes
It is good for anxiety, stress, depression
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What is mindfulness?
What is mindfulness , how do you practice it?
Basically it is meditation
Turn off TV and breath deeply
Relaxation
Blanking your mind and just living in the here and now
Concentrating on your breath etc
I’ve tried meditation before but I found it very difficult to clear my mind of distracting thoughts.
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Yes but it’s a skill
Practice
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Mindfulness is being present in the moment, gently and compassionately. It is based on a Buddhist form of meditation and is often practiced through conscious breathing.
It has a lot of benefits for anxiety, depression and PTSD sufferers, and can help with other mental illnesses as well since it generally creates a bit of distance between yourself and your thoughts, emotions and such. It can allow you to reclaim your responses and learn to live from a center of wisdom and free choice, rather than being swept along by your thoughts or feelings.
If you do decide to try it, keep in mind that it doesn’t agree with everyone. Starting with short sessions of a few minutes and building up from there is a good idea.
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To do mindfulness meditation place yourself in a seated position that you are comfortable with and your back is straight.
Close your eyes to eliminate the distractions you see around you. Take a breath in. Follow that breath as it comes in and goes out. Do not try to control the breathe just observe. Take in another repeat, and another repeat and so on.
As you are following these breaths going in and out, thoughts will come to your head, recognize that this is just a thought, say to yourself, thinking and send the thought away.
Imagine that you are standing in a stream, as you stand in the stream the gentle flow of water is constantly there, just like your breathing.
Your thoughts are like the fish that swim by, you become excited at once to see them, but you are not fishing, only observing. The fish are there for a moment, some linger longer than others but eventually swim by.
In mindfulness meditation we don’t force yourselves to have a blank mind, only a mind that is at pease with itself.
Hope this helps
Sapphire
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Move slow enough to remember where you put the car key & your bills are due the 15th of the month. Quit eating when you feel full…
Been working on mindfulness for a bit now with my therapist. It does help me stay in the now… challenge what’s not real… let the voices flow through and not get caught in my brain.
It’s been helping with anxiety attacks as well.
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I was introduced to the body scan meditations 40 years ago, then the breath awareness meditations, the focus-on-a-point meditations, the movement meditations (like Tai Chi), blah, blah and blah. It wasn’t until I’d exited the terror tunnel for the fifth time in 2003 that I began to use them just “hang with” the panic attacks when they came up… not understanding then that (at least according to Peter Levine, one the great experts of PTSD) the “panic attacks” were just discharges of the stuffed energy stored in the whole PTSD complex. When I’d wake up from a nightmare, or slide down into a (manic-) depressive dive, or have a “panic attack,” or just sense myself getting anxious, I’d just hang out with the sensations without trying to “fix” them, or escape, or distract myself, or take a pill.
Then I met Krishnamurti for real and came to understand that the whole point was to observe to notice to recognize to acknowledge to accept to own to appreciate to understand… and that if I did that, the feelings got digested automatically, and the “trap” I thought I was in just “evaporated.” I kept doing the same thing every time I found myself in the trap of my beliefs: I just noticed them, recognized them for what they were (just ideas, just thoughts, just mental events; nothing more), acknowledged that, accepted that, owned having them, appreciated why they were happening, understood them… and poof… they just disappeared.
I had to read Dan Siegel, Art Deikman, Roberto Assagioli, Alan Watts, Charles Tart, Stephen Levine, Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trungpa, and yet more Krishnamurti to clarify those experiences so that I was more able to “be” with them as time passed. It was one of those gotta-learn-to-walk-before-you-can-run deals, where the “structured” meditations were the walking. Now, however, I just race through the 10 StEP mantra knowing what each of those words means experientially. Sort of “touching each concept lightly.” And things get… lighter.
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Moved to Recovery.
Pixel
(Wearing moderator hat)
Mindfulness is helpful for dealing with anxiety and some other symptoms.
" the force is strong with you "
take care 
I wish I could relax with meditation. But every time I try it I just keep hearing a creepy sounds of my stomach. 
Do you get them if you place your hands one above the other covering the stomach? That way you’d feel the sensations of your stomach more than hearing them!
Some people find this warmth relaxing. You can then bring your concentration back to your breathing whilst feeling the rise and fall of your abdomen!
For some, penicillin is life saving; for others, it induces a harmful reaction. Just because your friend or family member responds to a pill a certain way, does not mean you will respond in the same way. The same is also true with mindfulness: for some, it may be very effective or it may not work at all, for others, there may be harmful effects.
Mindfulness has been separated from its roots, stripped of its ethical and spiritual connotations, and sold to us as a therapeutic tool. While this may not deny its power as a technique to change our state of consciousness and with implications for mental health, it arguably limits its “naturalness”, as well as its potential – at least as originally intended.
Many Buddhists are critical of the use of mindfulness for purposes which are very different from the radical shift in perception they aim for — the realisation of “emptiness” and liberation from all attachments. Instead, as Giles Coren recently claimed, this technique has been turned into a McMindfulness which only reinforces one’s egocentric drives.
@notmoses can sz people sit quiet 4 sec…can they enjot meditation…
i used to do bipasana a buddiest form of meditation …but i couldn’t.later i changed to dynamic meditation it by osho.where u have to breathe intensely deeply as fast as u can then u yell shout cry laugh what ever u feel like doing
u can express .it seems very effective.but i couldnt enjoy it
does people having more psychosis couldnt concentrate of sit still???
The history of Osho’s dynamic meditation is actually really interesting. He maintained that modern man had picked up so many bad habits that the old meditations like vipassana and mindfulness would take far too long to clear the mind, and so he devised more drastic meditations, to help clear the energy channels more quickly. If anything that may be more true today than it was in the 1970’s, when he first started giving the dynamic meditation to followers.
But you’re right that the standard Buddhist meditations are very difficult for people with sz, because of the amount of sitting in stillness that’s required. Maybe for them Osho’s dynamic is more accessible.
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I suggest a book by Joseph Goldstein “Mindfulness.” The book covers every possible aspect of the subject in great detail.
Meditation is easy for me though I have SZ. Psychoanalysis in the seventies makes it so.
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