With Mindfulness practices, we can recognize our bad habits and repetitive harmful friendships or romantic relationships that are no longer good for us and say goodbye to them. Mindfulness practices only show us what is in our mind and our pattern without judging or analysing it as good or bad. Once we notice our patterns, it becomes easier to see it as it is and make a different and better choice. This may not be easy at first. Mindfulness practices don’t promise us a rose garden, but it helps us to seed weeds, clean our garden, and plant roses that will bloom over time.
What can we gain with meditation?
Meditation helps us to slow down and connect to ourselves.
Do we have to be calm all the time? No, of course. It would be an unrealistic target for anyone. But what we are mainly doing with meditation is responding to anything happening around us or our inner world from a wiser perspective instead of reacting automatically. If we stop acting automatically, we can connect to our authentic selves and feel more joyful and peaceful in our lives, which might also reduce stress level and pressure on us.
We also explore thought patterns in our minds with mediation. Thought patterns are negative or positive, a habit of thinking in a particular way or using a particular assumption. For example, if someone has a thought pattern that he believes he never completes the work and hit the target while working on an important project or he always burns his hand while cooking, the mind will try to make it happen and act as per this thought pattern. It is the mind. Whatever you believe, the mind tries to make it happen. If you want to transform this thought pattern, all you need to do is to notice it first and let it go, do not follow it, nothing more, and do not try to change it or force yourself not to think of it. It creates more resistance in your mind. It is that simple. So mindfulness and meditation is based on observing and letting go. There is no analysis in mindfulness practices because any analysis would create another conditioning based on the current conditioning of the mind, so it is copying and reproducing itself if you like. I will explain the transformation of the mind in detail in another blog post.
Lastly, meditation is the best technic so far for observing the mind and its map.
So you might think it is a religious practice, a mystical thing, or something else that makes you stop trying it. But It is just conditioning of the mind again. Try to be open-minded and give it a chance; you will not regret it.