Mindfulness Monday - Just the Facts!!

Happy Monday Steemians!!
I decided on something a little different today. We've covered (prior to the Monday segments, the essentials of Mindfulness. (If you want the links to those post, feel free to ask and I'll edit this post and add them at the bottom.) Which lead me to start the Mindfulness Mondays.

I do a fair amount of reading on various things. One I obviously keep up on is the practice of mindfulness. I look for articles on both sides. In general, the media will take something that is good and positive a find the negative side as to why you shouldn't do something. With any decent to good research you should always look for both sides and make an informed decision. Since my last post I have been trying to do my due diligence in finding the negative effects of mindfulness. Here are some of the issues I have come across When I do a search on the negative effects of mindfulness, I get results for mindfulness meditation. As we have learned, or hope we have learned, mindfulness is not meditation, but you can do a mindfulness meditation. Then I am leery of the websites I find. The Guardian is not a 'top notch' paper, whereas if something were from The Huffington Post one would expect a little bit more impartiality. All the pieces I read were all 'opinion' pieces. Even an article in Psychology Today was very vague and off topic. They all seem to make this one major mistake. Mindfulness is NOT mediation. All the articles I have read over the past week all were directed at the dangers of mediation.

In this article from Psychology Today First of all it is an opinion piece from the author's blog. That is the equivalent of what I post, except I don't pretend to be an expert in the field.

Mindfulness practice usually involves some form of meditation, with or without a spiritual locus. Its goal(link is external) is to create and maintain a nonjudgmental and nonreactive state of awareness.

So, sorry for the typos in the quotes.. doing a copy paste to make a point. Mindfulness does not usually include a meditation. In fact, I think we've covered very little on mediation as a form of being mindful or coping. You can go back through my mindfulness series where I breakdown what mindfulness is. I do not recall any part of those 5 posts or any of the research I did that said the words nonreactive state of awareness. I did say that it's goal is to refocus yourself to a non-judgemental state to not let your feelings control you to take control back and not beat yourself up (judge) yourself or someone else due to that outburst of feelings and emotions.

There were a few more things that I went on to read and again, the author is taking it as mindfulness is mediation and it is not. Then reading through some of these articles, I remembered why the definitions I gave in the very beginning were so completely different to these articles. What I am actually trying to work on here is Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MSBR) which was created in the 70s by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Yes mediation is listed but not as a primary means. It's purpose is to break the negative thought cycle, bring you back to the current moment, back to the NOW and not judge yourself for losing control, getting angry, having a PTSD flashback (like we can control those when they happen).

When you work with guided meditations and hypnosis, you do have to be very careful. What if you had a bad memory locked away that you don't remember and it comes out? Then what do you do? I caution anyone who does past life regression, communicating with your higher self and the like. Those tend to be the ones that can open the proverbial 'can of worms' When doing meditations for mindfulness you need to make sure that is what they are for. They should be no longer than 30 mins and that's long. It's designed to use as a coping technique. Just as the breathing exercises we covered and the self-talk down, my Monday postings, or my favorite which I used on a friend. I yelled 'Squirrel' She stopped took a breath, started to laugh and asked me what that was about? I responded with...where's your panic attack? She kind of grinned and said it was gone.

So above everything...check, double check and even triple check. For every good article there is are 3 that go against it and most of it is garbage all the way around (my opinion only because I wanted hard evidence.)

Please share your thoughts and comments, I really would love for this to be more supportive and post on what you guys want rather than trying to figure out different things to address without repeating what we have covered. If not...It's going to end up being MEME MONDAYS and we know we don't want that ok a couple of memes maybe.

Here are past 'Issues' if you would like to catch up
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6

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