I’ve been searching the internet a lot lately. I’m noticing meditation apps, products, and activities being touted as the next best thing. One thing I’ve found interesting is an entire subset based around mindfulness. This new idea that being mindful is something separate from meditation itself. I do understand how mindfulness training could benefit any and everyone, my concern is why mindfulness instead of meditation? In building a meditation practice over years of fits and starts, I’ve noticed that being mindful seems to be a residual effect of the practice itself. Some may disagree, and I venture to guess that not everyone will get to mindfulness in the same way. Maybe you find it in your art, your bicycle, your gardening, there really is no limit to how one comes across the great feeling that resonates due to tuning in. I guess I’m mostly apprehensive because of our societies proclivity towards outcome rather than process. My bias as bad as there’s, I assume that sitting to meditate and going through the consistent ups-and-downs that tend to happen causing me to somehow “earn” this thing called mindfulness. I’ve even read recently that some are calling it mindfulness meditation. It takes a lot for me to not smirk at the idea. I guess plain old meditation isn’t mindful? There’s mindfulness retreats, mindfulness classes, even mindfulness for recovery and addiction! The truth is mindfulness and meditation go hand-in-hand. I guess you could say it would be synonymous to health and nutrition. But the truth is meditation is a path towards a mindful life. I see it in some ways like lifting weights to get in shape rather than having surgery to look like you lifted weights. I’m not for or against the latter, I’m just saying. This idea that traditional means such as yoga and meditation isn’t the obvious way to mindfulness is a bit perplexing for traditionalists in some ways. I guess it’s the old chicken or the egg idiom that we are chasing here. We always want to know if some (our) way is better than the other. That we are correct and other ways are wrong. But with all due (self)respect, I guess it doesn’t really matter does it?
Slow down and live