Developing Mindfulness
Developing mindfulness is key to working transpersonally it is not just a question of asking a client to work in a transpersonal frame, but very much a matter of working from a transpersonal perspective rooted in our own experience. These practices can greatly enhance the work of a hypnotherapist, bringing a richness and helping develop our intuition.
Meditation is a way of changing ourselves. People come to meditation from a variety of different starting points. Some want to just become a little more relaxed, others want to use meditation as a tool for changing themselves. Meditation does both of these things and more. Most of all meditation helps us change.
We can change ourselves because we can notice ourselves. We can notice what is good and useful in our own minds and behaviour and develop it. We can notice what is unhelpful and limiting and overcome it. Meditation is a way of doing this very directly by working with our minds on our minds
All meditation practices are founded on awareness. We start by learning to be aware of ourselves in a very rich and engaged way. This rich and engaged awareness of what our experience actually is in the present moment, accompanied by a sense of purpose and direction we call mindfulness. All meditation practises are mindfulness practices. We start by noticing our bodies, are they comfortable? Is our posture useful and appropriate for what we are doing or is it wasting energy and causing us discomfort? Then we notice our feelings and emotions, just acknowledging our mood, being receptive to how we feel. And then we can ask ourselves what our mind is like: are we appropriately concentrated or is our mind wandering off making it difficult for us to do what we are trying to do?
We can also be aware of our surroundings and how they affect us, and other people. We are not static, we are changing all the time reacting to our environment our thoughts and feelings, very often more or less unconsciously. However we can guide our physical mental and emotional energies in directions that are more useful and enhancing to ourselves and others. This constant guiding of our energies can produce profound and lasting positive change. The true aim of meditation is to be always working with our minds in this way, constantly guiding and directing them to more potent and creative states. Our minds create the world that we live in so the benefits are clearly very great.
The foundation for this process of continually transforming life and mind is formal sitting meditation practice. This is for most of us completely indispensable.The first practice The Mindfulness Of Breathing is designed to develop a calm and clear engaged awareness of ourselves. This awareness will help us to become more integrated with a clearer stronger sense of who we are and what our purpose is.
To begin with, we need to learn to just sit with awareness. The more regularly we can do this the more effective our practise will be. It takes time and patience to train the mind to establish a meditation practice. But gentle persistence will bring great rewards.
