Meditation & Mindfulness

It’s important to note that mindfulness is not meditation and meditation is not entirely about “clearing your mind of all thoughts” it’s about recognising those thoughts and learning to “control” them…

Both will take practice and neither work instantly, although you CAN get benefits almost immediately just from understanding what’s going on and bring aware of it!

Mindfulness is really all about being in the present moment focusing and enjoying the thing that you are doing right now. As such it’s activity based. If you are being mindful of the current activity (walking, sitting, brushing your teeth) it’s harder for your brain to think about things from your past (depression) or worry about things in your possible future (anxiety). Mindfulness can be done immediately and at anytime… Eg right now, what are you doing? What are you seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. Not  memories not what you will feel later, what’s going on right now…

Meditation has elements of the above in that in that you are focusing on the meditation that you are doing, often on your breathing. But with meditation you are specifically focusing on the thoughts in your head. Meditation is better done in a quiet environment and whilst sat still and for a more extended period of time (most find the best benefits after about 40 minutes, but you can do it (after practice) in a few minutes… Meditation is all about recognising the thoughts inside your head (that chatter) and accepting that it’s there, but just thanking each thought and asking it to come back later. You brain will need plenty of practice before it starts to understand that it doesn’t need to fill your kind with reminders and questions any more.. It’s like a child asking “why” but rather answering all the questions, you need to say “daddy is busy right now, I’m happy to answer all your questions in the morning, but right now I need you to go to bed” at first it’s REALLY hard and painful, but after a while the child will understand what you are trying to do and will give up, when it knows it can’t win the fight….

More meditation practice during the day will help you use the same technique to night to quiet the chatter and allow you to relax the brain enough to allow you to sleep…

Again imagine a child running around like a crazy thing and then suddenly you try to say to them “go to sleep right now”… It’s never going to happen, this is why we read them bedtime stories and insist on them having quiet time before bed, it’s all about getting the child to slow down and relax and signal to the child’s body that it’s time to sleep, no different for you as an adult, but we no longer have a parent around making us slow down!!