What is Mindfulness and How Effective is Meditation

It is believed that with the help of meditation, you can bring various benefits to life, rebuild your thinking, get rich and even recover from serious diseases. The idea of ​​meditation as a magic pill is very common, and now every second person has tried to meditate at least once in his life. Although mindfulness is a type of mental self-regulation , blind faith in meditation can, on the contrary, lead to depression, isolation, and other negative consequences. Let's try to figure out why this is so.

Recently, such a concept as " awareness " is gaining more and more popularity . From the screens one can hear “be aware”, but many do not even understand what exactly this means.

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Today, it has become popular to strive for living life in awareness, teaching spiritual practices and systems of self-knowledge. At the same time, the number of proposals increased in response to demand. Now meditation is not only practiced by everyone, from teenagers to billionaires, but tens of thousands of specialists are also offering training in this practice, from really literate to complete amateurs who are hungry for profit.

Mindfulness researchers believe that with the right approach, it is mindfulness that will save humanity for the next 200 years. Chad-Meng Tan, author of the bestselling book Joy from within. A source of happiness available to everyone, "who previously conducted meditations for Google employees, believes that with the help of meditation practices it is possible to achieve" world peace. "

Concentration on the present moment allows you to feel every moment of life, live every moment, think less about nonsense and accept the world as it is, in all its diversity.

Adepts of mindfulness believe that it is this way of living life that is necessary for the modern world with its competition, lust for power and in many ways a cynical attitude towards life.

Mindfulness practitioners have successfully sparked this idea on others, quickly bringing it to the masses. The dissemination of ideas about meditation is facilitated, on the one hand, by the origins of meditation, which have a halo of ancient Eastern culture, and on the other hand, by neurobiological research.

The idea of ​​using meditation to improve life has become very popular, it has been covered for a long time in the media, but in 2017, 15 scientists stated that the practical benefits of meditation are not superior to a healthy lifestyle or exercise.

The practice of mindfulness is a kind of Buddhist Vipassana practice. Researchers in the field of philosophy and spiritual development believe that without a spiritual foundation, any meditation is just a physical act.

Remember the 10 deep breaths calming technique ? Meditation works in much the same way. Firstly, it is breathing, and secondly, silence, sounds of nature or soothing music, i.e. everything that isolates us from irritants and pacifies.

Thus, using meditation as a physical practice, a person can really experience relaxation and tranquility, which is already quite good, but "abuse" of it can lead to the fact that he will simply go away from his own problems and what requires his attention and decision-making ...

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Increasingly, deludingly, people use mindfulness practices as therapeutic self-help in order to escape from problems when they need to get together and take real actions on the way to a solution, although in reality, mindfulness is needed in order, on the contrary, to get closer to the inner I, to learn to identify and live your feelings and accept all your emotions, whether good or bad.

It is important to approach everything wisely, not to reach fanaticism. Mindfulness practices can both help a person get closer to themselves, their feelings and emotions, understand themselves and others deeper, and lead them to self-delusion, depression, isolation and spiritual avoidance.

People who use practices to disconnect from their experiences and drown out emotions, as a rule, are afraid of getting closer to others, do not trust people, and consider relationships with others dangerous.

Critics believe that the proliferation of mindfulness practices has led corporations to use them to their advantage and to the detriment of their employees. Instead of the specialist being able to express his dissatisfaction with the irregular schedule and defend personal rights and boundaries, he is offered to breathe, calm down and accept the situation as it is.

For the first time this term was introduced by the psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Miles Neal. McMindfulness is the use of mindfulness practices to achieve quick results, creating an entire market for products on a given topic, but out of the philosophical and ethical context.

In other words, the practices are used as short-term coaching methods to help disconnect from experiences and achieve goals. People who are obsessed with "achievement" can abuse these methods, thereby harming their mental and spiritual health.

Many adherents of meditation and other practices believe that spiritual development involves reuniting with nature, abandoning sound thinking in favor of intuitive feeling. That is why the phrases “live in the moment”, “enjoy the wind blowing in your face”, “feel all the beauty of the surrounding space” are often found in modern literature on meditation.

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The modern mindfulness practices that most people use are romanticized and simplistic, lacking the depth and significance of traditional meditation.

In the era of technology, every day a person receives a huge amount of information, his attention is scattered, so concentration is very useful for him . There is a lot of evidence that meditation can increase concentration and emotional stability, but there is a difference between concentration, in which depth and thought process, and analysis (which is undoubtedly beneficial), and the concept of “be here and now ”, which, on the contrary, involves avoiding the thought process in the current time.

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