What is Mindfulness?
What is Mindfulness?
The Buddha developed the noble eight fold path to enlightenment:
1) The right view,
2) Right thoughts,
3) Right speech,
4) Right action,
5) Right Livelihood,
6) Right effort,
7) Right Meditation/Mindfulness,
8) Right Concentration.
This seventh part of the eight fold path is called Mindfulness. Especially this part was translated into a 8 week program by Jon Kabat-Zinn (5 June 1944). He is the founder and former Director of the Stress Reduction Clinic of the health center of the University of Massachusetts, to which he was attached as a professor. He teaches (Mindfulness), a technique to teach people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and disease. He called his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. His mission is to attentional control training in conventional medicine and in society.
Kabat-Zinn has made important contributions to modern healthcare. He did research into the interaction between body and mind and to the clinical application of attentional control training for people with chronic pain and stress related complaints.
Kabat-Zinn began in 1979 with the teaching of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts. Kabat-Zinn worked initially with that finished their treatment patients with chronic pain and/or stress complaints, to teach them to cope with their pain and their concerns and grief about that. MBSR is eight-week course. In it learning patients in a different way with their complaints to go. It uses a combination of meditation and hatha yoga, which is about to be aware of the moment ("here and now").
How can it help you?
According to the Buddha, mindfulness is the seventh step of the in total eight steps to enlightenment. Mindfulness has been translated in the early seventies by the American Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn in a 8 weeks program. He mixed Buddhist philosophy with forms of meditation and combined with hatha yoga. Especially people with stress and burnout symptoms benefited enormously by this 8 week program. Being in the moment is a central theme in the program. You will become aware of your automatic pilot, your automatic thinking and behavior patterns. Becoming aware of your physical and emotional feelings and your mental activity. The awareness process will develop as follows: recognition, acceptance, transformation and implementation in your state of being.
Through the yoga and mindfulness classes you follow the path to your inner self. This helps create more inner peace and enables you to listen better to your inner voice. By increasing your self-insight you will become more conscious. A more conscious life helps you make better choices for yourself, which helps you live a better life. Through yoga and meditation you get closer to the source of everything, the universal force or energy. The source consists of love and compassion, and logging into this universal energy makes you, among other things, develop cheerfulness. This doesn’t happen overnight, but I gladly invite anybody to come and follow a class to see if it works for you.