Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World

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The Three-minute Breathing Space was created to deal with such situations. It’s a mini meditation that acts as a bridge between the longer, formal meditations detailed in our book Mindfulness and the demands of everyday life. Mindfulness teaches you to take the long view, to put your thoughts, feelings and emotions into a broader context. And when you do so, your most frantic and distressing thoughts simply melt away of their own accord, leaving behind a calm, clear, insightful mind. nor is it ‘opting out’ or detaching yourself from the world. It’s about connecting and embracing life in all of its chaotic beauty, with all of your faults and foibles. You’ll find written instructions here (they’re worth reading to familiarise yourself with the technique). A person whose mind isn’t wandering, isn’t meditating….. Lifeischaotic, but if you follow the mindfulness meditations in this programme you will become more resilient and less anxious, and develop the courage necessary to make difficult decisions, create new ideas and to follow them wherever they should lead.

Use the hidden foundations of mindfulness to rediscover calm and reclaim your life in our chaotic worldMeditation improves heart and circulatory health by reducing blood pressure and lowering the risk of hypertension. It also reduces the risks of developing and dying from cardiovascular disease and lowers its severity should it arise. 11

Tang, Y., Ma, Y., Wang, J., Fan, Y., Feng, S., Lu, Q., Yu, Q., Sui, D., Rothbart, M., Fan, M. and Posner, M. (2007), ‘Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, pp. 17152–6.

A: Of course, this is entirely down to your own preference. People can get a huge amount of value from simply following the programme in the book by themselves. Mindfulness improves attention span, working memory and
reaction speed. It also enhances mental stamina and resilience. 2 You’ll find written instructions here (they’re worth reading to familiarise yourself with the technique). To see how it unwittingly ties itself in knots to create anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion. Proven effective at treating anxiety, stress and depression, the practices in Deeper Mindfulnessoffer a new and more fruitful direction for both novice and experienced meditators. It also allows the rest of us to approach life with renewed strength, vigour and equanimity.

Colzato, L. S., Ozturk, A. and Hommel, B. (2012), ‘Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring train- ing on convergent and divergent thinking’, Frontiers in Psychology, 3:116, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116; Greenberg, J., Reiner, K. and Meiran, N. (2012), ‘“Mind the trap”: mindfulness practice reduces cognitive rigidity’, PLoS One, 7(5): e36206, doi: 10.1371/ journal.pone.0036206; Capurso, V., Fabbro, F. and Crescentini, C. (2014), ‘Mindful creativity: the influence of mindfulness meditation on creative thinking’, Frontiers in Psychology, 4:1020, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01020. It teaches you to observe how your thoughts, feelings and emotions rise and fall like waves on the sea.Williams and Penman nail it when they describe how we can run from life (and ourselves) but we'll never escape. DEEPER MINDFULNESS holds true to its name: the authors expertly point out how to identify those critical driving forces in our lives - feelings, and how feelings feel - but importantly have provided a pragmatic path and clear steps that we can take to leverage our minds to live better lives. Based in deep wisdom and written with compassion This book walks you gently through the beautiful, messy process of being human, and teaches you how and why all can be well’ Sir Kenneth Branagh. Mindfulness is very beneficial for chronic pain. Studies show that pain ‘unpleasantness’ can be reduced by 57 per cent. Experienced meditators can reduce it by 93 per cent. 12