What is Mindful Meditation?
This awareness includes your thoughts, how you feel, and physical sensations. Meditation is focusing on a single object, thought, or activity in the pursuit of a calmer, clearer state of mind. Mindful meditation is the combined practice of mindfulness and meditation that helps in stress reduction.
Mindful meditation minimizes the “noise” of everyday life—whether it’s external distractions or internal chatter—by training your mind to focus on the present moment. Here’s how it works:
- Focus on the Present: Mindfulness is a non-judgmental state of being fully aware to what’s happening right now. This awareness includes thoughts, worries, judgements; how you feel, anger, anxieties, and negative self-talk; physical sensations and pain; technology and social media; and/or even surrounding sounds. Focusing on the here and now contributes less energy to the negatives or anxieties and allows a more mental “quiet” phase. The quieter the mind becomes, the more interaction with the world around you changes.
- Non-judgmental Awareness: In mindfulness, increased awareness of thoughts, emotions, and sensations is complemented with the absence of labeling them as good or bad. Acknowledgement of these thoughts, emotions, or sensations encourages acceptance without a stress response; they are recognized and allowed to pass without judgement. This breaks the stress cycle of overthinking an issue that triggers the mental “noise.”
- Improved Attention Control: Practicing regular mindfulness can strengthen the ability to direct and sustain attention. Practice encourages the development of an “anchor” or a return to controlled mental quiet. The anchor could be as simple as a deliberate breathing style. The more mindful meditation is practiced, the easier it is to return to that anchor when distractions arise, therefore making it easier to block out stress associated noise.
- Reduced Stress and Anxiety: Learning a non-reactive, mindfulness meditation also reduces the physical stress response. When you’re more relaxed or in control, the mind’s noise decreases thereby allowing a more calm and focused state.
- Cognitive Reframing: Through mindfulness, you can become more aware of thought patterns and your response to worry, self-criticism, or stressful situations. Cognitive reframing changes how a situation is perceived. As you recognize which thoughts tend to generate the noise, you can begin to reframe or release them, rather than getting stuck in them.
- Increased Self-awareness: The more mindful meditation is practiced, the easier to tune thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences to a less stressful event. Increased self-awareness allows the identification of mental “noise” and external environmental stressors, making it easier to find your anchor, and selectively deciding where to focus your attention.
You can try out mindful meditation with this short video (less than 3 minutes) from The Mindful Movement.
Practicing mindful meditation creates an inner stillness. This stillness helps block out mental clutter and promotes clarity, focus, and calm. The “noise” mindful meditation interrupts is mental clutter. Taking a moment to focus on the present moment begins to clear out the clutter and triggers that add to the daily grind. Mindful meditation doesn’t occur overnight. Practice for even a few minutes a day or multiple times a day builds the foundation toward a more centered and quiet state of being.