Mindfulness Meditation Essay

Day six, January 23 I was able to fall into the meditative state meditating for 15 minutes easily.

Almost everyone is preoccupied with happiness but yet the population seems to be increasingly unhappy. As society and human experience changes we can’t help but ask ourselves how can we fix an increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied society? Mindfulness meditation is a progressively popular solution to this issue. Mindfulness meditation stems from Buddhist tradition and is a practice that includes focusing one’s attention. Does mindfulness meditation have real psychological effects? And if so can they help improve quality of life? Many studies have been conducted proving that mindfulness meditation does have real psychological effects and can help individuals live a more meaningful and happy life. This can be proven through research related to neuroscience, depression and happiness.

Meditation is very difficult to describe and can only truly be explained once experienced. It is the practice of mental concentration leading ultimately through a sequence of stages to the final goal of spiritual freedom, nirvana. The purpose of Buddhist meditation is to free ourselves from the delusion and thereby put an end to both ignorance and craving. The Buddhists describe the culminating trance-like state as transient; final Nirvana requires the insight of wisdom. The exercises that are meant to develop wisdom involve meditation on the true nature of reality or the conditioned and unconditioned elements that make up all phenomena. The goal of meditation is to develop a concept in the mind.

Effective mindfulness meditation requires training and practice and it has distinct measurable effects on our subjective experiences, our behavior, and our brain

For the amount of time that I was engaged in anchoring my mind to the current moment I noticed that there was a constant battle between myself and my mind, meaning there was strong urge to latch onto the thoughts and find meaning in them rather than just allowing myself to observe these thoughts. According to Chodron (2013) there are five reasons to meditate and one of the reasons is to cultivate attention towards every moment in our lives, which is important as she state “that we have allot of resistance to just being there!” (Chodrom, 2013, p. 4).

Damaging and out of control thoughts can rob us of the ability to enjoy our present. Once you have practiced mindfulness you begin to find yourself automatically pushing aside these crushing thoughts and paying attention to your senses and the world around you. Your mind is more powerful than you can imagine and I invite you to harness that energy by having a look at this step by step guide that will show you how to get started with mindfulness in just a few minutes. This is a skill that could truly change your life and help you break out of

Where will my busy life take me and when will it feel worth it? 8 am, I was getting ready for work, 9am-5pm I was at the Vision Care Center, 6pm-11pm I was at the Express at Town East mall and by the time I got home, I was already fed up with life but had three courses to finish by the end of the month. Obstacles were everywhere and my mind was the worst one. I will try making an effort to view and think more positively. I hope to have a better perspective about everything around me. I will squeeze in dinner with the family and find a day off to feel a bit of freedom. The resources I could start to use more is the library, instead of getting home from work and feeling tired, maybe the library would motivate me to stay awake and finish more exams/assignments. Overall, I’m really glad that I had the chance to experience this particular assignment because it triggered me to see that the world doesn’t have to feel like such a busy place. Having this time to type out my thoughts is the freest I’ve felt in a while.

Let's start with music. While working with the meditation in silence can work, I find that it tends to work better with some gentle music in the background. I have a few rules I use when I'm selecting such

Habit 1 : Be Proactive. The Habit of Personal Vision. According to Covey, this habit reflects our innate ability to take charge of our lives. We are not simply products of in-grained stimulus- response reflexes. We have the ability to take charge, plan ahead, and focus our energies on things we can control instead of reacting to or worrying about things over which we have little or no control. This habit allows us to rise above the ebbs and flows of the tides of our day-to-day lives and direct our lives.

"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."

Children and adolescents in the United States face different psychological challenges, such as anxiety disorders, depression, attention deficit disorder, as well as many other psychiatric diagnoses (Bloom, Dey, & Freeman, 2006). The prevalence rate of children diagnosed with a mental disorder is alarming. According to Merikangas et al. (2010), 22.2% of American children and adolescents get diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder that is severe enough to impair their ability to attend school and learn (Bucci, Marques, Oh, & Harris, 2016). Kids that are plagued by various psychological illnesses may experience a difficult time concentrating and staying focused in school. Additionally, the over-accumulation of toxic stress, either due to the pressures of schools or environmental (i.e., difficult exams, poverty, household dysfunction, etc.), can have negative and detrimental effects during childhood, as well as adulthood (Bucci et al., 2016).

Many people think that mindfulness meditation consists solely of sitting still and thinking about nothing for twenty or thirty minutes and are put off by the thought. In fact, mindfulness

I want to have control and realize how I spend much my time and being aware of how I deal with my feelings and thoughts; take for instance, staying to study instead of going out with friend to have fun. Another strategy to reduce it is to find out how I currently spend my time. I have to use these strategies and apply them first of all in my behavior and then in all the daily

Before taking the class, and before really understanding the benefits of mindfulness, I must admit, I did not really take mindfulness exercises seriously. I tried a few exercises, led by a phone application, but I constantly wondered what these exercises were supposed to achieve. I always thought to myself, “I know what happens around me, being mindful is great, but specific exercises for this seemed exaggerated.”

You can meditate wherever you are - whether you walk, take the bus, waiting for the doctor, or even in the middle of a busy business meeting.