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What is mindfulness? Let us begin with a simple test. Find a United States coin, it does not matter what denomination. Examine the coin for thirty seconds then put the coin away.
Remembering the coin, do you recall whose profile or face appears on the coin? What mint date appears on the coin? Was the edge of the coin smooth or rough? What appeared on the coin's reverse ? What words are imprinted on the coin? Did you correctly answer most of the questions? If you did then you are mindful. If you had trouble remembering do not feel bad because you are in the majority of United States adults.
Have you ever had one of these moments? Where are my car keys? Why am I always in a hurry? Why can't I remember what I went to the store to buy? Why do I eat when I am not hungry? Why cannot I go right to sleep at night? Why does my back hurt? An unsettled mind drives mindless behaviors. A pebble thrown into a pool of water creates ripples. Our modern multi-tasking lifestyle unsettles our thoughts, emotions, and focus. The ripples echo within our mind making it difficult to focus on the moment or the task at hand.
Most adults in the United States have so much noise going on within their minds that they cannot relax. Even when most people have nothing to do they may feel anxious. The anxious feeling can send your body into overdrive making some people adopt destructive or unhealthy behaviors. This mental noise can also dull our senses, wear us down, makes our body hurt, and confuses our natural ability to distinguish what is real from what is false. If left unchecked some people can loose emotional vibrancy and succumb to panic attacks or depression.
In the home mindlessness leads to lost car keys or burnt dinner. In business mindlessness can lead to failure at least or catastrophe at worst. The ancient Chinese and Japanese elevated mindfulness to an art. The word Zen or Chan means to think or be mindful.
Now retrieve the coin and go back and answer the questions from before and experience mindfulness.
BACK or Go Deeper?
In Tibet, Zen Buddhist monks remove their robes, wrap themselves in wet sheets, and then sit outside exposed to freezing weather. Are they crazy? No they are practicing mindful meditation. The monks descend into a deep meditative state focusing their minds on raising their body temperature. Within a few minutes the sheet they are wearing begin to smoke as if on fire. Using just the power of their mind they raise their body heat not only enough to survive the frigid wind, but also high enough to also dry the sheets. The ability to focus the mind with such complete sharpness to the exclusion of all else is not unique to Tibetan Buddhist monks.
What some people call meditation others call prayer. Consider the counsel of Jesus Christ to his disciples in Matthew 6:6 as taken from the ancient Eastern text. "Enter into your inner chamber and lock your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret shall himself reward you openly."
In the gospel of Mark Chapter 14 verse 32 to 37: Jesus being filled with anxiety and doubt about pending events went into the garden of Gethsemane with three of his apostles. In the garden, Jesus prayed for one-hour. Consider these two passages in context. When Jesus said to enter into your inner chamber and lock your door and pray, then why would he choose an open garden as the place for his most reverent prayer? It could be argued that perhaps Jesus was speaking metaphorically when he said inner chamber, not meaning a physical room, but instead deep within one's own heart and mind.
Long before Buddhism or Christianity came to China there was Taoism or the followers of the Way. The founder of Taoism is known only as the old master (Lao Tsu). Lao Tsu reportedly said this about meditation, "Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind become still. The 10,000 things rise and fall while the self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature..." In another passage within Lao Tsu's teachings he said, "In meditation go deep into the heart."
In India the Buddha taught noble truths for forty-five years. Many of his lessons were later written down in the Dhammapada around 325 B.C. About the mind the Buddha said, "The flickering, fickle mind, difficult to guard, difficult to control - the wise person straightens it as a Fletcher straightens an arrow. Like a fish that is drawn from its watery abode and thrown upon land, even so does this mind flutter.
How is the relevant to the human condition of our modern face paced world? Consider this, when pharmaceutical companies manufacture a new drug they must test the drug for safety and effectiveness. One way drug companies accomplish this is through a double blind test using a group of people. Say for instance a drug company wants to test a new high-blood pressure medicine. The drug company selects 99 people who have high blood pressure for the test. The company divides the 99 people into three equal groups. One group gets the new drug, another group gets a sugar pill, a placebo, and the last group the control group gets neither. After the test period, the drug company examines the differences between the three groups to see if there is a marked improvement of the group that received the new drug versus the other two groups. If the group that took the real drug does better than the other two without any marked dangerous side effects the drug is considered safe and effective. Yet among the group that received the placebo some of the people got better too. How is this possible? If the person who took the sugar pill had the ability to control their high blood pressure without aid of a drug why did they wait until the test to use this unique ability? This was the ah-ha moment that occurred in the 1990s that brought about a new paradigm in medicine that blends ancient wisdom with new technology. What a person thinks or believes can have both a positive or negative effect on the mind and body. This new paradigm is called integrative medicine.
Integrative medicine is practiced at many major medical universities and hospitals. A 1998 U.S. News and World Report Survey found that 27-percent of United States Hospitals use integrative medicine techniques. In 2001, the National Institute of Health (NIH) opened a completely new branch called CAM (Complementary Alternative Medicine). The CAM unit of the NIH funds studies the effectiveness of mindful meditation, yoga, tai chi, qigong, acupuncture, acupressure, healing touch, and herbal medicine. One major finding from the CAM studies is the effectiveness of chemotherapy when integrative medicine techniques are applied using the qigong chi-cycle and mindful meditation. When chemotherapy for aggressive breast cancer was incorporated with qigong and mindful meditation the survival rate went from less than 20-percent to 75-percent.
In qigong there is a saying, "the body will believe what the mind tells it."