Mindfulness Meditation

If you think of meditation as a huge tree, mindfulness is one of the biggest branches with many smaller branches. Mindful eating is one of many types of mindfulness meditation.

As an example of how we can be mindful in our ordinary lives, let’s consider the act of eating. Do you sometimes eat meals while you’re doing something else? Perhaps you eat while talking to someone, watching television, reading, or while you’re distracted and thinking about something else.

When we don’t pay attention to the food we eat, we aren’t mindful and we cheat ourselves out of enjoying and savoring the experience. By eating mindfully, we enjoy our food more and tend to feel satisfied with smaller portions, which can be a bonus for someone trying to manage their weight.

When to Use This Technique

This mindful eating meditation can be used anytime you eat.

Why it Works

This meditation can be an especially enjoyable experience, and therefore, one you’ll find easy to incorporate into your everyday life. When we eat with full awareness, we enjoy our food more, are less likely to over eat, and digestion occurs more easily because practicing mindfulness reduces anxiety, which can interfere with digestion.

The Technique

You can do this meditation alone or with someone else. I recommend that you begin by practicing alone. After you have some experience with the practice, you might consider inviting a friend to join you. If you do, be sure to explain that the purpose is for you both to have your full attention on eating. That means no talking during the time you and your friend are practicing the meditation.

Eliminate Distractions

To eat mindfully means giving your full attention to the experience of eating. Your attention is not on television, reading, music, or your cell phone, and it’s not on any worries or planning for other activities.

You’ll increase your chances of being successful with this meditation if you first eliminate any potential distractions.

• Find a place to eat where you’re unlikely to be disturbed.
• Eliminate as many potential distractions as possible. For example, turn off your cell phone, music devices, and television.
• Make sure you have everything you need at your eating spot, so you won’t need to interrupt the experience to get something.
• Make your eating spot pleasant and clutter-free.
• Prepare tasty, nourishing food that you enjoy.

Experience Your Meal

Sit down and take a moment to look at your food with appreciation.

• Notice the color, texture, shape, and appearance of the food.
• Smell the aroma. Notice if the aroma is strong or mild, spicy or sweet.
• Take in the sights and smells of the food without any thought. No judgments, evaluations, or analysis. Just experience your food visually and aromatically before you begin to eat.
• As you eat, take smaller bites than usual. This makes it easier to digest your food and gives you more time to savor the flavor and feel the texture of the food.
• Focus on the taste and the sensations the food creates in your mouth. For example, is the food crispy and crunchy, or soft and squishy? In essence, I’m asking you to be like a child and play with your food a little.
• When you swallow your food, notice the sensation of the food as it travels down your throat. Notice if the physical temperature of the food is warm, chilly, or room temperature.
• After you finish eating, take a moment to enjoy the sensation of being full and satisfied.

If you would like more information on this technique check out this article

What We Learned Today

Even eating can be a meditation. Simply place your awareness on the experience of eating. The important things to remember are to prepare so that you reduce distractions, and to devote your full attention to your food and the act of eating.

A Question that Sometimes Comes Up Is

I tried eating mindfully, but I didn’t notice any difference, except that I ate slower. What am I doing wrong?

You have done nothing wrong. Just as you wouldn’t expect someone who has never exercised to become toned and healthy after one exercise session, don’t expect to strengthen your awareness in one or two meditation sessions.

Be patient with yourself. As with most meditations, simply allow yourself to be aware of whatever you’re experiencing. In this case, simply experience eating.

To your health,
Totally Meditation

It’s common to judge other people, situations, and events. Judging is so routine that it can become an automatic reaction. But judging comes at a high price to our well-being. Holding judgmental thoughts constricts our ability to enjoy life when our expectations of how things should be aren’t met.

Do you find yourself judging others? Most of us do at one time or another, no matter how good our intentions. Do you also sometimes judge yourself? How we treat others is often a reflection of how we treat ourselves.

If you find yourself judging others, you are most likely judgmental and critical toward yourself, though you may not be aware of it. Use the techniques in this and other classes to become less judgmental towards yourself. An added benefit is that you’ll likely become less judgmental toward others.

Notice that as you take your attention from judgmental thoughts, you feel lighter, freer, more open. As you release judgmental thoughts, your ability to fully experience life expands.

When to Use This Technique

Judgment is prevalent in our society, so you’ll find many occasions to use this meditation. The more you practice, the more effectively you’ll recondition your mind and the better you’ll feel.

Why it Works

This technique works because you’re consciously bringing your awareness to judgmental thoughts, rather than acting on them unconsciously. Becoming conscious of judgmental thoughts is the first step in reducing your reliance on them.

The Technique

Not everyone learns or processes information the same way. In this meditation, I’ll provide three techniques you can use to practice letting go of judgmental thoughts. Try all three techniques and use the ones that work best for you.

Notice a Judgmental Thought, But Don’t Give Your Attention to It

• Make yourself comfortable and relax.
• Allow yourself to observe your thoughts with complete acceptance.
• If you recognize a thought as being judgmental, be it toward others, yourself, a situation, or even this meditation, accept that the thought exists and let it be.

One way to determine whether a thought is judgmental is to notice if the thought triggers a physical reaction such as tight muscles or an emotional reaction.

• Simply recognize the judgmental thought and allow it to pass. By doing this repeatedly, you’ll recondition your mind to reduce judgmental thoughts.

Replace a Judgmental Thought with a Descriptive Thought

When you find yourself being judgmental of someone, even yourself, replace the judgment with a description of the behavior and its consequences. For example, if you were to see someone throw trash on the ground, you might have an automatic thought that the person is a slob. Instead of accepting that judgment, try changing your thought to a more descriptive one, such as “that person littered.”

Replacing a judgmental thought with a description of the behavior will neutralize the judgmental thought.

Focus on a Positive Aspect of the Situation

Next time you have a judgmental thought, focus on an aspect of the situation that you find to be positive or that you can appreciate. For example, if you’re out for a walk and notice dandelions growing in cracks in the sidewalk, you could take a moment to appreciate just how strong and adaptable they are.

What We Learned Today

Judging others and ourselves does not benefit anyone, especially ourselves. By bringing awareness to our judgmental thoughts, we can learn to neutralize them and train our minds to focus on more beneficial thoughts.

A Question That Sometimes Comes Up Is

I observed my judgmental thoughts, but they kept coming back. What should I do?

First, when learning any meditation technique, drop any judgments and expectations you have of yourself. This can take practice. After all, you’ve probably been making judgments for a long time. With practice, it will become easier.

Accept whatever you experience during meditation. Some days will be easier than others. For example, emotions and moods can interfere with or enhance the experience, and, let’s face it, some judgmental thoughts will be easier to let go of than others.

If judgmental thoughts continue to show up, let them. Practice letting your thoughts come and go, and practice ignoring or dropping a thought when you recognize its judgmental nature. And remember to try the different techniques presented. Some may work better for you than others.

To your health,
Totally Meditation

Have you ever found yourself resisting a thought? Or noticed a thought and wondered where it came from? Thinking is a blessing and a curse. Thoughts make it possible for us to create, imagine, and solve problems. But when they control our experience of the world and we accept them without question they can skew our perspective of the world and cause stress. Practice finding the quietness between thoughts with this meditation.

Your thoughts are not you. You’re the one who observes, experiences, and gives meaning to them. We have more control over our thoughts and our experience of them than we’re aware of.

In this meditation, you’ll learn that by releasing your thoughts, you can find a quiet spot in your mind. This is where you can find yourself.

When to Use the Quietness Between Thoughts Technique

Use this meditation when your thoughts are so active that they seem to consume your whole awareness. This meditation will help you learn to find gaps between thoughts and bring your awareness to yourself in those gaps.

When you learn to observe your thoughts, and let them come and go on their own accord, you’ll find moments of profound peace in the space between your thoughts.

Why it Works

When we observe our thoughts without engaging with them, they lose their potency and start to fade. Thoughts gain power when we give them our attention. They also gain power when we try to resist them, or conversely, when we become fixated on them.

Giving your thoughts your attention is like throwing gasoline on fire. This meditation teaches you to change your focus and thus quiet your mind.

The Technique

While this meditation has a couple of steps, I think you’ll find that’s it’s not complicated. I find it does take practice though. First, allow yourself to relax and focus on breathing. Second, observe the thoughts that come up. As you notice your thoughts coming and going, bring your attention to the sliver of silence in your mind between those thoughts.

Relax and Breathe

• Sit in a relaxed position and close your eyes.
• Focus on your breathing, observing the flow of your breath and the accompanying sensations in your body as you breathe.

Just be aware of your experience. Whatever you experience, let it be. There is no need to control or change anything. Simply notice. (Over the next few weeks you’ll likely find that it will become easier to allow your mind to become quiet as you meditate.)

Observe Your Thoughts

• Observe your thoughts as they pass in and out of your awareness.
• Don’t resist thoughts that appear, even those that make you uncomfortable. Sometimes when you try to block a thought, your mind is drawn back to it.
• Observe your thoughts with a sense of curiosity, just as a birdwatcher views a bird from the distance.
  While thoughts have many triggers, such as physical sensation, emotion, memory, or even a habitual way of thinking, you are not your thoughts.
• When you observe your thoughts with objective awareness, you might notice that you can remain neutral and calm whether a thought is pleasurable or disturbing.
• Practice allowing thoughts to come and go without getting involved with them. You don’t have to finish a thought that comes up. Try letting a thought drop away without finishing it.

Notice What Happens as You Observe Your Thoughts

• As thoughts come to your awareness, simply continue to observe them.
• What happens to your thoughts when you observe them objectively?

When a thought fades away, what do you observe before the next thought arrives?

Experience the Quiet Space Between Thoughts

• Thoughts arise from nothingness and fade into nothingness, which is what you experience when one thought has faded, and the next thought has yet to arrive. You experience nothingness.
• Place your attention on this nothingness.
• This is your quiet space where you can find peace and quiet whenever you wish.
• With practice you can increase the time you spend in the quiet space.

What We Learned Today

By simply observing your thoughts, and becoming aware of the space between thoughts, you can slow your mind and experience peace.

Follow up to Quietness between Thoughts:
A Question that Comes Up Is

“I found it difficult to be quiet and observe my thoughts. What should I do?”

You may be stuck on the definition of “observe.” To observe your thoughts simply means to be aware of them. Sometimes people think that to observe their thoughts they must use effort. Instead of forcing yourself to be observant, relax and simply notice your thoughts as they pass through your mind.

If you find a specific technique doesn’t work for you, go to another meditation that you have more success with. One reason we give you a variety of meditations is to offer you a chance to explore possibilities and to find techniques that work best for you.

Although I encourage you to try all the meditations more than once, some techniques are bound to work better for you than others. For example, I personally found it difficult to notice any space between thoughts the first several times I tried this. Now I can relax and notice the thoughts as they come and go without effort.

Another thing to note with this meditation is that often the space between thoughts can be very fleeting, that is common.

To your health!

Many people associate meditation with sitting on a mat, pillow or chair. However, meditation, especially mindfulness meditation, can be practiced almost anywhere, including the shower or bath.

Most of us have busy lives, and going through our day to day activities it’s easy to lose our awareness of the present moment. For example, instead of experiencing how it feels to cleanse and refresh ourselves in the shower, we can become caught up in thoughts about problems, future demands, or adding tasks to our mental “to do” lists. Not only do we lose the experience of the shower, but our thoughts can make our already cluttered minds even more cluttered.

Why not spend your shower time cleansing both body and mind? By cleaning your mind, I mean being mindful of what you’re experiencing in the moment rather than being caught in an endless stream of thoughts. And because you’re doing this in the shower, you’ll also experience the healing effect that being in water can bring. Not only will you free up your mind, but you’ll become more in touch with your body.

When to Use This Technique

Though this meditation is intended for the shower, you can use it in many everyday situations, such as when you’re washing dishes or cleaning the floor.

Why this Works

If you can take your awareness from your thoughts for even a few minutes, your body will react by stepping down the stress hormones, and you’ll more fully experience the moment. In additional, water has a calming effect for many people, which is one reason we feel revitalized and refreshed when we take a shower.

The Technique

When you’re in the shower this week, take the opportunity to practice mindfulness and make a commitment to experience the act of taking a shower. Focus on the sensory aspects of this simple act.

Participate fully in your experience. Don’t engage in thoughts. Thoughts will appear, but you can ignore them and bring your focus back to the sensations of showering.

There is no right or wrong way to practice this meditation. Simply be aware of the experience of showering instead of allowing yourself to become lost in your thoughts. Allow yourself to experience non-effort. By that I mean don’t attempt to make anything happen. Just pay attention to whatever is happening right now.

If your thoughts intrude, imagine that they are being carried away by the flowing water, and then return your attention to the experience of the shower.

Following are a few ideas for what you might notice:

• Feel the water streaming off your body. Notice if thoughts slow down as you focus on the sensation of the water on your skin.
• Listen to the sound of your breath.
• Listen to the sound of the rushing water filling the air.
• Smell the scent of the shampoo and soap.
• Feel the sensations of your bare feet against the shower floor.
• Focus on the feeling in your scalp as you massage the shampoo into your hair.
• Observe the water as it glides over your body.
• Feel the texture of your washcloth and soap as it glides across your skin.
• Observe the water as it flows down the drain.
• Watch water drops splatter as they make contact with the shower floor.

Do you feel lighter? Notice how your awareness opens up as the flowing water removes the clutter from your mind.

What We Learned Today

You can enjoy meditation, and gain the benefits of a daily meditation practice, without taking time from your schedule. As you gain practice with this mindfulness meditation, you can apply the technique to other ordinary tasks, such as washing the dishes or hand-washing clothing.

Follow up to Shower Meditation:

Question That Comes Up Is

When I tried this shower meditation, I couldn’t stop my thoughts. What do you recommend?

Allow and accept all your thoughts, even the uncomfortable ones. Accept your thoughts as they come, and keep bringing your attention back to the physical sensations of the shower. The thoughts will eventually lose their power to attract and hold your attention. The only power our thoughts have comes from the attention we give them.

To your health,

Connie