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The practice of mindfulness can easily be applied to daily life, even during the most challenging of times in your life and also in your most pleasant encounters. Being mindful is an act of self-love because you take the time to go to that sacred space, which is within you, and here you plant the necessary seeds of love in your own garden that you tend to.
Mindfulness as an Observer
Mindfulness is not only something you can practice for your own wellbeing, it can also be practiced with compassion and understanding for others as well. But first, we need to know how to apply the techniques. We start by realigning our breath with focus on our thoughts, becoming the observer who separates himself from pursuing identification through the thoughts all the time. Sometimes you might fall down that rabbit hole and rationalize that your thoughts are the actual truth. But they aren`t. I have a quote about exactly that topic.
“If there are two people involved in a discussion or a quarrel, there is his truth, her truth and the truth itself.” – Tiaga Nihal Kaur
As an example you can visualize your thoughts as being in a movie theater, you sit down and the movie starts. You are presented frame by frame on the screen that emits light that bounces from one object to the other, and into your eyes through the pupils. If you can imagine that the motion picture is your play of thoughts and you are sitting on the chair as the observer, then this can help to bring a distance from identifying with your thoughts. Each passing second, you have thousands of thoughts firing through neural pathways in your brain, some of these thoughts are conscious but most of them remain subconscious. If you can practice becoming the observer while your thoughts flow and overlap from thinking about situations from the past or the worries of the future, you have reached a level of mindfulness.
Cudos.
“Like a runner, tennis professional, or Olympian doing drills of some kind, meditation trains our mind. Meditation allows our brain to create new pathways for efficiency. Meditation allows our brain to repair itself. So, like a band-aid that protects a wound, meditation protects our brains from the everyday effects of internal or external stress and damage.” – Katrina Everhart
Re-Aligning Your Thoughts
Re-align your words to tune into loving-kindness for every sentient being. When going for grocery shopping yesterday I was thinking about the importance of smiling, and how that can spread positivity and wellbeing for others, as for ourselves. The quality of a smile that connects us to people, renews our spirits and heals the world. The world is so much greater with light and loving-kindness in your heart, and it truly makes strangers a part of the oneness that most of us have forgotten all about.
Acts of Kindness Helps Your Depression and Anxiety
If you act and think about directing your flow of thoughts to engage in understanding and compassion towards people, that will lead the way to interconnectedness to everything that is nature. The other positive side-effect is that it makes you blissful and there is no care in the world in that moment of mindfulness. In a recent study from 2017 published in by Seth J. Gillihan, Ph.D. says that “Helping others can relieve anxiety and depression“. The article further states that “Analyses showed that a greater focus on self-image goals was linked with more relationship conflict and a worsening of symptoms during the 6-week study period. In contrast,compassionate goals were associated with lower levels of symptoms and less relationship conflict. Therefore engage yourself in acts of kindness for others and help yourself on the way to recovery. Then you are also planting those seeds of love in your own garden, and your garden will flourish and bloom with the scents of summer, sun, and seeds of love.
You are in total control of your own mental body and emotional well-being, how you allow yourself and your physical body to feel is the directed focused attention of the seeds of love that you plant in your own garden and for others to grow in. We are weeds if left unattended, water your minds eye with positive affirmations and plant flowers in the minds of others.
Resting in The Neutral Mind
Mindfulness can also be very confronting because we are unfolding what has been “stuck” in our subconscious mind for a long time, and when we breathe deeply with the focused attention in meditation, where we might have some troubling thoughts about confronting what is laid in front of us during mindfulness practice. For example, I was practicing my sadhana every day for 11 – 22 minutes for 70 days. Oh my, in the first stage of the Ganpati Meditation, I was a sobbing puddle of tears filled with fear with a lot of resistance in my body, my mind, and my emotions. It was a struggle to encounter all my thoughts about releasing all the negative pent-up emotions that I subconsciously had been wanting to repress. I wrote every day in my meditation journaland I thought I should show you how confronting it was for me personally to meditate during the first days.
Sorry about my handwriting, I have written my text from my journal below and I have also corrected my writing a little bit.
Day 1. total of 22 minutes.
“I was from before familiar with the mantra ” Sa Ta Na Ma ” but this kriya is a bit longer. ” Sa Ta Na Ma ” is a transformational mantra while ” Ra Ma Da Sa ” is a deep healing mantra. I loved the sound and the flow of the words, they just kept rolling out. In the latter part of the meditation, I started crying when Yogi Amandeep Singh started telling me to breathe in my navel center. I felt the release of tension and I just cried, I sobbed actually. I also cried on the heart center, which was much needed.”
Day 2. total of 22 minutes.
” I really needed this kriya today. I felt it was exactly fitted to fulfill my need to release and remove my inner blocks, both mentally, physically and emotionally. I could feel an immediate effect right after the kriya, in body spirit and prana (lifeforce). I noticed closely how my breath had changed its modality to a much calmer tone than before. Mentally I have started …”
Day 63. total of 11 minutes.
“The Train Analogy. We are much similar to trains. The train passes through their destinations and carries with it a load of weight, as our minds also do. We travel from one destination to the next with our burdens on our shoulders. If we only could try to open our minds to a new set of thoughts. The train leaves each moment and passes through the next, leaving destinations behind. And so do we, we carry much weight and could be better off leaving our worries behind. A heavy mind creates a heavy heart. Make your burdens in your heart as light as a feather so it can blow with the wind.“
As you can see from the excerpts above from my sadhana journal, my progress went from resistance, sobbing, nightmares to insightful truths of how we could live a more conscious life. And that actually makes it OKAY to have difficulties in the beginning of a meditation practice, it is also something you can`t avoid. It`s all apart of the process of that journey to self-discovery and also to rest in a balance of a neutral state of mind. In Kundalini Yoga we talk about The Three Functional Minds, and how it has three powerful functions, the Negative, Positive and Neutral Mind.
“The Neutral or Meditative Mind is the ultimate “win-win” mentality. From here you look at the whole play of life with compassion. The Neutral Mind evaluates the input of your Negative and Positive Minds. If your Neutral Mind is weak, you may have a hard time making decisions. You’ll have the habit of feeling victimized by life because you don’t know how to integrate your experiences and find meaning in them. You may have a hard time seeing beyond the polarities of life on Earth and tuning into the great cosmic scheme of things.” – The Aquarian Teacher Training Manual
/ Text below is borrowed from Yogi Bhajan Lecture: The 3 Functional Minds
“The Negative Mind instinctively protects you and alerts you to something that is wrong or is a threat. When the Negative Mind gives you a thought, normally the Positive Mind should tell you what can be useful or right about that same thought. It should provide a contrast and comparison. Instead, when your mind is full of intrigues, it begins to pull every memory from the subconscious that supports that thought from the Negative Mind. This produces a stream of thought, one stacked on top of the other. “It was dangerous then. Yes. It was also dangerous in 1961, 1963, 1972, 1978, 1982, etc.” Each repetition of similar feelings increases the intensity of the thought and convinces you that it is real.
Your Positive Mind has access to your subconscious and can use it to expand a thought instead of contrast it. If it acts this way, you can never reach your Neutral Mind to know who you are and what to do. The Positive Mind should say, “Well, this is the positive side of the real and apparent dangers.” Then your Neutral Mind can say to you, “That is the negative and that is the positive but this is you in relation to all of that.”
©The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan
The Voyage of Self-Discovery
Looking deeply at your own self is about going on a voyage of self-discovery, where you turn each pebble and rock, and not every encounter will be as nice as the other. But you are on this journey towards yourself, and what you will discover will be your soul.
– Tiaga Nihal Kaur
Are you one of those people that wake up in the morning and start your day by saying; “Thank you God for this beautiful new day, I am blessed to be filled with a purpose to love, and share my wisdom because today is a day for creators.” We are a masterpiece, our mind and our body that carries us through this world and life, where every movement of the heart can be expressed and enter as light into the hearts of others, relieving them of suffering and showing them the path of liberation. Let me tell you something, if you truly believe in an idea, let it breathe and wing this thought with action and set it free out to the world. You can be of service to this world by letting the tree of love grow within you as you are planting seeds of love and watering them mindfully. The branches of kindness that you share will spread all wide and reach into the nature of people`s hearts.
“Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds, seeds of joy, seeds of peace, seeds of mindfulness, seeds of understanding, and seeds of love, seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water. If you plant tomato seeds in your gardens, tomatoes will grow. Just so, if you water a seed of peace in your mind, peace will grow. When the seeds of happiness in you are watered, you will become happy. When the seed of anger in you is watered, you will become angry. The seeds that are watered frequently are those that will grow strong.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I hope that I have given you some inspiration and also insight into how you can apply mindfulness techniques to water your own garden. Eventually, we all will leave this earth with impressions left on the environment, may it be leaving the forest naked and cut off from their roots. Impressions on our family members, our friends, loved ones and people we encounter during our short stay here. Our grandchildren will hopefully have had an example to help them throughout their own lives, remembering how we pursued a life with kindness, compassion, and loving-kindness. Think about that when you encounter people that wants to connect with you, think about all those lonely souls that are desperate of healing and needs to reconnect with themselves again to be fully happy, think about your role in that exchange of energy and how you could communicate mindfully so that person feels they are gifted with a renewed view of life. There are many hearts out there left thirsty for love and compassion, because they have failed to feed their own dreams and was unable to open the door to their own possibilities. So my challenge to you is to leave impressions on the hearts of the clouded and fettered minds that attach themselves to sorrow. Open their worldview, introduce them to a journey to self-discovery, smile for them, share your words of kindness and do it with the heart of a blue whale.
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With loving kindness,
Tiaga Nihal Kaur.
Namaste ॐ
