A light in the darkness

  We have all heard about mindfulness in the present era. Mindfulness training, mindful meditation, mindful yoga practices, etc.  Mindfulness means moment-to-moment awareness of one's experience without judgement. I have read this many times, but within myself I always felt I didn't understand it fully. What do you mean by moment-to-moment awareness? The American Psychological Association says that mindfulness means an awareness of one's internal states and surroundings. What do we mean by awareness of one's internal states? This means that you are fully present and aware of your experiences, i.e., your senses, feelings, and thoughts, without being overly reactive and judgemental. (see here ) This insight took me those days of my life when I was learning to be mindful. Comparing those blissful days to my present days, I can sense the difference. I can understand the change of feeling that has taken place and the thoughts that have been rumbling in my brain. When I star...

  In my previous post I had been talking about self-compassion. The formula Dr Kristin Neff has given is Self-Compassion = Self-Kindness + Human connection + Mindfulness Now, compassion means sympathetic consciousness of other's distress together with a desire to alleviate it. (taken from  https://www.merriam-webster.com/ ). So, self-compassion means sympathetic consciousness of one's own distress together with a desire to alleviate it.  Kindness means the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. (taken from oxford languages dictionary .) This means that in order to be sympathetically conscious about one's own distress, I need to be friendly, generous, and considerate to myself. Three questions arises here a) How can I be friendly to myself? b) How can I be generous to myself? c) How can I be considerate to myself? In order to understand this topic, I have referred to these study materials. a) Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself b...

In my last post I talked about accepting ourselves as we are. This brought me to a place called transparency. "Am I transparent to myself?" Can I say, "I am the same from the back as I am from the front"? This took me years to answer because I was never the same. I still remember those days when I would smile and talk to people and speak rubbish behind their back. This was the aftermath of what I received from others. I could sense this quite early before it was uncontrollable. I never wanted to be bad like this, but I became. My heart started to hate myself because this was not what I wanted to be. At this moment, my inner voice said to analyze what went wrong rather than to blame and hate yourself. Every time I would try to do good, the badness I received from others stood before me, and I pulled back.  These incidences flew me to all those people who did me wrong, and I was madly angry at them. They never asked me sorry. I was able to forgive them because I made ...