Mindfulness is…..
/A wonderful read from mindful teacher Lisa Wellstead
“Real Mindfulness is found through your BODY, cultivated through the sacred doorway of the senses and often through a process of inquiry and quiet reflection (*and ideally through your shared presence with a live instructor).
Mindfulness is a relationship you cultivate with your thoughts, emotions, patterns, conditioning, and behaviors. It's a path to understanding why you do what you do. It's a pathway to more choice and less reactivity. It has to be experienced to be understood and even then, words can't really describe it.
It's also not a magic bullet.
It doesn't create a perpetual state of happiness or bliss but it can make you considerably happier and well-balanced with far less life drama and exhaustion. It can enhance self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
And for a young soccer coach trapped in a cave with his team last year, mindfulness was proven to help be a life saver for 12 precious kids. Mindfulness definitely saved mine not too many years ago.
But the real daily practices of mindfulness are not on your phone or your meditation cushion; but in your daily LIFE-- your relationships, and your work.
Your life IS the practice. You just have to slow down long enough to pay attention.
(And that app you depend on, may just be another crutch.)
Mindfulness is as much of an art as it is a healing science.
Meditation... is just ONE of many tools we use in mindfulness training, in service to a way of being fully embodied, openhearted, integrated, in balance, and awake. Many people dont know enough about it yet to understand the depth of what that actually means. My personal practice reveals something greater time after time.
Mindfulness training can be messy, scary, imperfect, and sometimes unpredictable. Even in a lighter, more playful course it takes courage to enter the body and mind fully.
Mindfulness IS so much more-- beyond just meditation-- reducing it to that is doing it a major injustice. “
- Lisa Wellstead, Mindfulness Educator