Mindfulness online
Table of contents
Introduction What is meditation 5
Session 1 The autopilot 12
Session 2 Dealing with obstacles 23
Session 3 Meditation in motion 30
Session 4 Attention to breathing 36
Session 5 Dealing with difficult situations 42
Session 6 Acceptance: allowing what is there 48
Session 7 Not going along with thoughts 53
Session 8 Here and Now 63
Session 9 The rest of your life 70
No part of this book may be reproduced and/or made public by means of print, photocopy or in any way whatsoever without the prior written permission of the author, Karin Lepelaars.
Dear Reader,
This training is intended to introduce you to mindfulness, so that you can discover what a life of attention can mean for you. Many people are constantly living “in their heads”. As a result, many things happen on autopilot. As a result, you sometimes miss the experience and the real experience of NOW.
It is an experiential training in which you can explore how you can be fully present in the present moment. It can be a new way or a deepening to experience life from this awareness. Sometimes life can be quite challenging and we may even feel like we are losing control. Mindfulness can help you to move with resilience. To get and stay close to yourself. You learn to approach life with an open attitude. During this training you will be given several techniques. Exercises in which you sit or lie down, where you are invited to focus on an object of attention such as breathing or your body and then always notice if you have been carried away by your thoughts. It also contains very practical exercises. Where you will do things with attention. Some will fit you, others might be less fitting. I myself learned to meditate in 1994 and it is now interwoven in my daily life and being. It has enriched my life enormously and I wish you the same. The exercises can help you become more aware. To develop an open, curious and above all a friendly attitude towards yourself and the world around you. I wish you a beautiful journey of discovery. You are very welcome!
MEDITATION
Meditation is very simple.
It’s just sitting down and staying with your attention on what’s there.
What you hear you hear, what you see you see, what you feel you feel and what you think, you think.
What’s there is there
Don’t hold anything and don’t hold anything back.
You can’t do it right and you can’t do it badly.
You can learn in it and not progress in it.
What is there can be different at any time.
Knowledge and experience are irrelevant here.
In this sense, there can be no teachers or masters.
No one is an authority in what is here and now.
Introduction
What is meditation?
Many people associate meditation with monks ,cults, incense or “floaty stuff”. There is also the image that it is difficult or can only be mastered with a lot of dedication. The reality is different. Meditating is simple and easy to learn. Anyone can learn it, but you’ll have to find out for yourself if it’s right for you.
Meditation is increasingly being used as a stress reduction and more and more meditation opportunities are being offered in prisons, government institutions, at work or in gyms. Most top athletes have a mental coach, top managers are advised in popular management books to meditate and politicians go into retreat. Meditating works, is actually not that difficult, vague, scary or only suitable for some people.
Meditation has been around for thousands of years. When they first meditated is actually unclear. The first truly demonstrable meditation history begins in India. Through faith rituals that required high concentration, Vedic priests increasingly came to understand that we and the divine are one. This insight has inspired many spiritual seekers to this day. Buddhism and Yoga later emerged from the Vedic periods.
According to Buddha, meditation ensures that we can release ourselves from the suffering of the mind. In yoga, physical exercises are a first stage in the path to enlightenment. The seventh step in the path of a yogi is meditation. From India, Buddhism and yoga spread to China and Tibet. This gave rise to new movements such as Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism in which meditation is still a very important element. In the west, it was first the Christian monks who lived in seclusion in Egypt and Palestine. Under pressure from the church, meditation remained outside the practice of faith from the 15th to the 19th century.
Mindfulness originated from Buddhism and became known thanks to the American microbiologist Jon KabatZinn (1990). At the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1978, he began teaching courses in stress management to pain patients who had been assigned by their doctors. These patients had been told to “learn to live” with the pain. They were referred to Jon Kabat-Zinn to learn how to deal with the pain and did not know that they would learn meditation techniques.
Despite the skeptical attitude of some participants, the meditation exercises led to very positive results. The exercises ensured a reduction in physical and psychological complaints for them. In addition, they changed their self-image and their attitude towards the world around them in a positive way.
Since then, this therapy, which was described as ‘mindfulness’, has helped many people with various physical and psychological problems. Mindfulness appears to be effective in reducing all kinds of complaints and by meditating daily, complaints can also be prevented (Teasdale, Segal & Williams, 1995).
Mindfulness; A ‘Western’ form of meditation
Mindfulness offers a more Western-oriented form of meditation (stripped of religion) that better suits our way of living, thinking and experiencing. Through mindfulness you learn to deal with stress and tension differently in a practical and effective way. If you apply the mindfulness techniques, it becomes easier to stay calm and clear in difficult, stressful situations.
In mindfulness meditation, the intention is to focus attention, for example on the body, breathing or on the sounds you hear. By focusing your attention, you learn to let go of thoughts, sounds or unwanted bodily sensations more easily, in order to be less or no longer hindered by them. Through regular practice, you gain more and more control over what you focus your thoughts on. This makes it easier, for example, to stop worrying thoughts: at such moments you consciously focus your attention on something else. By practicing meditation you learn to ‘tame your mind’, as it were.
Another and innovative aspect of mindfulness concerns ‘letting go’. Many types of therapy focus on talking about thoughts and feelings. Through Talking about it is trying to change thoughts and feelings. From mindfulness it is reasoned that, by talking about it, you pay extra attention to these thoughts and feelings. This allows you to maintain them. Therefore, it is better to let go of the thoughts and feelings by focusing on something else. By distancing yourself from it, the perspective and feeling changes. You stop ‘feeding’ thoughts and feelings, so you are less at the mercy of them.
Effects of meditation
By meditating we make our mind clear and sharp, this promotes your concentration, it helps you to focus better on your personal goals, intuition, reduces stress and tension, it can reduce worrying behavior, you feel happier, it helps you in your personal growth and development. It can help you to unlearn bad habits such as smoking. It has a positive effect on the people around you. All you have to do is meditate regularly; This requires patience and perseverance. You help yourself best by making it a fixed pattern. Make it part of your daily rhythm.
Everyone experiences a moment in which you are in a deep state of relaxation, contentment and awareness. The worries of everyday life are gone, our minds are clear and focused and we are completely absorbed in the moment. That’s the core of meditation. By practicing meditation we can learn to return to the present moment. We no longer have to depend on a beautiful sunset, infatuation or sports performance to get more of these experience moments of happiness. We can also learn through meditation to relax quickly and effectively, improve our ability to concentrate and develop a deep sense of contentment and happiness. Meditation is an extremely powerful technique to take your personal or professional life to the next level. No matter what you do, meditating is better!
Meditation techniques are successfully used to:
• Relieve stress and tension
• Improve health and speed healing
• Improve focus and concentration
• Develop self-awareness and personal growth
• Increase your creativity and intuition
• Unlearn bad and unhealthy habits
• Grow mentally
• to live in the here and now •achieve acceptance
For some, meditation and other spiritual techniques are used as an escape from reality. But we use it more to train our mind, to live our lives more consciously and to bring them to a higher level. By developing attentiveness and attention, we become more aware of everything that is going on in us and what we experience. We no longer run away from our feelings, fears, frustrations and insecurities, but learn to welcome and accept them. This is the opposite strategy of ostrich politics.
Living in attention
When I sit, I sit. When I stand, I stand.
If I go, I’ll go, the man said.
But so do I, the other interrupted him.
No, the first responded.
If you’re sitting, you’re already standing. If you’re standing, you’re already walking. And when you go, you’re already there
