I Find Peace Like This
The famous sentence “You are what you eat” has been around for quite a while now, but still there is alarming amount of people with no awareness or concern about their diet.
Although Mindfulness has become really popular in the last years, the word may still seem a bit abstract and confusing for some people. Often it sounds like it is some kind of challenging practice just for the chosen ones.
“I am in pain! It hurts so much I cannot get up in the morning, I cannot live a normal life”, you may hear this on a daily basis as more than one person out of ten is constantly experiencing chronic pain (this is if we generalise based on the research made by National Institutes of Health in the USA, and assume the rest of the world’s population is in the similar pain conditions).
How did I become interested in meditation for older adults? When I recently faced how my grandfather turned into a baby after he had a heart attack at the age of 86, I started looking for solutions of how to ease his burden of pain and anxiety and make his mind lighter and the last years of his life happier.
In the past years all around the world Mindfulness and meditation have become very popular and implemented in different school settings.
There is one simple exercise which I like to do on workshops: I ask participants to write kind wishes for themselves and others from the group. In most of the cases what usually happens is that people forget to write wishes for themselves, or they “leave them behind”, until the end of exercise and then write something quickly as possible without much thinking.
To have a mindful mind means to practice paying attention, being aware of your surroundings, feelings, moods, your body, different sensations you experience in the present moment without judging or analyzing it, just simply being aware of it here and now.
I have to confess I have been on a journey of self search and self realization for some time now. It started and is still unfolding as a gradual awakening- mostly to reality, of becoming a little more conscious of aspects of myself, of how all is interconnected and one does not live as an isolated self sufficient cell. It started as a quest journey of inner peace and in recent years it began to manifest more on the outside.
The most sophisticated people I know – inside they are all children. Jim Henson
The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness. Lao Tzu
