What can you tell me about mindfullness?

Don’t think about it.

Harp is probably giving a similar response as I type, but you obviously meant “Mindfull Meditation”. Here is a LINK
I don’t know anything about it myself.

Mindfulness is keen attentiveness to inner and outer phenomena, a heightened noticing, but without then spinning out into discursive thought about what has been noticed. It requires that the focus remain on reality as it unfolds moment by moment.

Just as an example, mindfulness applied to anger would remark the arising of the feeling of anger, but instead of then engaging in a constant review of the circumstances that provoked the anger, it would stay with the the sensation of anger itself as it unfolds, noticing the physical sensations associated with it, watching them swell and then recede. Unless they’re constantly refueled by mental rehearsal of the cause of the anger, the sensations always fade quickly. This is non-attachment, just letting phenomena come and go, neither inviting them, nor pushing them away, just noticing.

It feels like standing right out on the cowcatcher of a speeding train, keeping the eyes fixed forward, letting the landscape rush past without trying to grasp at this or that along the way. If we swivel our head back to catch a longer look at something that just passed, then we lose contact with that onrushing reality.

The way Buddhists typically learn this skill is by meditation that focuses on the breath. Put simply, the attention is pinned to the act of breathing; not analyzing it or philosophizing about it or manipulating it, just experiencing the act as it unfolds. All thoughts and feelings that arise while doing this are simply noted and released, bringing the attention constantly back to the breath. That formal meditation has to be complemented by an effort to maintain attentiveness through all other activities as well.

As for attitude, humility, patience and determination are what count most in the mindfulness business.

I took an 8-session course on Mind-body Connection. (One evening/per week.) I found that having some structure and a leader was very helpful.

The premise is based on several decades of work by Dr. Joh Kabat-Zinn, and iencorporates meditation, yoga, relaxation exercises and small things like chewing a raisin mindfully (noticing its texture, taste, etc) rather than stuffing a handful into your mouth.

The books are very interesting but better when used in a course. One of the best things I have done …well-worth the money. Several hospitals have his tapes available on their closed-circuit TV in patients’ room..I seem to remember that U. Mass Medical Center in Worchester, MA. was among them.

http://books.google.com/books?id=enSxAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:Jon+inauthor:Kabat+inauthor:Zinn

edit: incorporates.

think of nothingness. sit with ur leg crossed and position ur centre of gravity in the middle with your head upwards.

Cocentrate on ur breathing. 3 steps. breath in and out and count till 10. count and breath in and out till 10. Omit calculating and imagine urself breathing in and out colorful air. Feel the air moving around ur body, touching ur nostrils. Examine ur body, if there is uncomfort in certain area, pay attention to it. Remove all disturbance from ur mind after that and make urself comfortable. do not force breathing.

by meditating u achieve a state of mindfullness.

Do not try to cross only one leg; don’t worry about the colour of the air; look for discomfort rather than uncomfort and do not – I repeat – do not dwell on the differences between u and ur and you and you are.

To gail’s timely caveats I would add that if you’re thinking of nothingness, then you’re certainly not thinking of nothingness. And treat discomfort just like everything else that comes up; notice it, then let it go and get back to work.

Question: does merely being present, like when playing music or dancing count? I find these to be times when I don’t “think.” I have no idea of my opinion of myself, and it is, of necessity, a kind of eternal now—no sense of what may come; no memory of what just happened.

Interesting. I never knew this had a name.

This is how I handle my emotions…

That is exactly what mindfulness is. To go back to the train metaphor, being up there in front, right where This is, your self and all your concerns and memories are somewhere back in the train behind you. You can access them if you need to, but when you do, you turn your back on This. Up at the front, with the eyes forward, there’s only This.

One of my roommates in college described it perfectly without knowing what he was saying. He said, “When you’re up on the ladder and you need more paint on your brush you drop it down to the guy below you. Then when he tosses it back up to you, there is that perfect moment when the brush seems to stop in mid air before it starts falling again.
That is when you grab the brush.”

I’m learning some mindfulness techniques to help me deal with obsessive thoughts (OCD). It was described to me as living in the moment, completely. Not thinking about the past or future, which is what tends to be the cause of our worries. So it’s to live solely in this moment right now, experiencing and observing your emotions (not analyzing), focusing on what is happening around you. I personally find it really difficult to stay in the moment, but I’m working on it.

One of the techniques involves observing something in the immediate environment and describing it to oneself internally, in as much detail as possible. “The chair is green, patterned, the seat is fluffy, it looks comfortable, there is a white pillow, there’s a thread hanging off the arm, etc. etc.”

Harp; I like and agree with everything you say except for the train metaphor. The cow catcher isn’t called that for nothing. Here we do have wandering cows occasionally.This may become oops.

My teacher told us that we would suddenly catch our minds wandering a mile down the road. Note it uncritically and let it be, as you said so eloquently.

Read The Power of Mindful Learning. It’s a great book.

It is something I try to do every night to get to sleep. I have a very difficult time reeling in my thoughts while in bed, and I can stay awake all night just thinking. I have to “trick” my mind, by singing a lullaby or doing slightly complicated math problems (in my head…hubby is already asleep!) I find my mind wanders away frequently, and I just come back to the song/math again. If I am successful, blissful sleep is my reward. I have yet to be able to incorporate it into my waking world, except in periodic meditation.

I think that is a great method. Every faith has a technique for tuning out the conscious mind. Repeating the Hail Mary, Om Shanti, Hare Rama Rama or Allah u Abha all strive towards the same purpose of allowing the consciousness disconnect a bit.

Over the summer I was intrigued by the idea of the Cricket’s Song. Just focusing on the crickets is another great way to access that meditative state.

This is actually different from the mindfulness that Harp described above, but still a great practice that allows me to be more aware.

Being entirely aware of your thoughts and why you are doing what you are doing.
Living each moment for what it is, a moment and not a cause of the past or prediction of what is to come.

Several people have mentioned being aware of one’s thoughts. Either I do that much of the time, or I have no idea what that means. I don’t do it when the thinking is stopped, usually when I’m doing something physical or all-absorbing.

So what is this awareness of one’s thoughts?

Learning how to handle thoughts is the hardest part of mindfulness training. Our tendency is to go through our environments and our daily routines by following the habitual scripts ingrained in us by endless repetition. Running on “auto-pilot” like this allows us to devote a minimum of attention to present circumstance, and frees up the attention to focus on the world of thoughts, memories, ideas and feelings, which is where the attention naturally gravitates.

Typically, then, we live with our attention divided between our thought world and the tangible world. Now, thoughts are actually an integral part of the “here and now” that is supposed to be the focus of mindfulness. The arising of thoughts is as real and natural an event as any other in the tangible world, and is to be acknowledged and accepted in mindfulness training. But thoughts have the power to draw us into their narrative, and it’s when we get caught up in that narrative (which is essentially the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world) that we lose touch with the actual unfolding of reality.

Mindfulness training teaches us to recognize when we’re living out of our actual experience of the reality in front of us now, and when we’re living out of our well-rehearsed ideas and feelings about the world. That requires being vigilant about thought. We have to learn to see early on when a thought arises, acknowledge that it’s there. That act of recognition is very important; it enables us to choose whether or not to engage that thought or just to let it pass. Until we can see the arising of the thoughts, we’re inevitably drawn into their narrative whether we want to be or not.

That vigilance toward thoughts is a natural consequence of the vigilance toward everything that defines mindfulness training. Thoughts may still arise when we’re full engaged in the experience of the moment, but we’ll see it coming because of our engagement. It may be something that needs thinking about; if so, we can choose to do that. Or it may be something that we recognize as just one of our tired old habitual riffs that never does us any good, in which case we can simply leave it alone and let it blow away, as thoughts do when they’re deprived of attention.

I’d recommend Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful books. Especially Peace Is Every Step.
His books are short, sweet, and potent!

You may be confusing Mindfullness with Mindfulness. You can find out the difference between the two here

You are right in that it involves becoming aware of your thoughts and letting them come and go without being attached to positive or negative ones.

The easiest way to go about it is to bring your attention to your breath and what your physical sensations are right now. Meditation helps to strengthen mindfulness practice and you just keep bringing your attention back to the present moment again and again. By doing this you gain insights into your thought patterns.

Good luck :)