The question that comes up clearly for me, after the rousing discussion on yesterday’s post, is whether meditation is a precondition for mindfulness.<\/p>\n
We all understand the concept of mindfulness — what Ram Dass refers to as “Be here now”. It is the ability to directly experience and enjoy the moments of your life, to see, hear, taste and touch what is around you, rather than needing to continually guard the gates of your psyche, and therefore remaining trapped inside your own internal emotional mindstorm. Openness to the people and experiences around us is certainly something that just about everyone wants.<\/p>\n
But is it literally true that meditation is to mindfulness as physical exercise is to strong and limber muscles, or (to cite an example with which I am familiar) as practicing the guitar is to mastery of the guitar? If we want to be able to experience our lives calmly and openly, letting experiences in without requiring them to be strained through a defensive filter, then do we need to devote a certain amount of time every day to meditation? Or can mindfulness be attained in any other way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The question that comes up clearly for me, after the rousing discussion on yesterday’s post, is whether meditation is a precondition for mindfulness. We all understand the concept of mindfulness — what Ram Dass refers to as “Be here now”. It is the ability to directly experience and enjoy the moments of your life, to … Continue reading “Preconditions for mindfulness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7308,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions\/7308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}