For centuries many cultures have studied variations on what is sometimes referred to as “mindfulness”. There are many forms of meditation and ritual practices which aim to increase our ability to, as Ram Das put it so eloquently, “Be here now”.<\/p>\n
When we are tired, distracted, overwhelmed, our mind tends to go around in circles, darting from one place to the next, obsessing over what some person said to us last week, or that email we never returned, or a bill we haven’t payed. Lots of negative energy, buzzing around in our head like a swarm of locusts.<\/p>\n
Practices that aim to increase mindfulness work to replace those useless and self-defeating thoughts with a calm focus on the present — on being here in this moment, breathing, aware, alive to the present.<\/p>\n
As with any form of exercise, results appear only gradually over time. But exercise is not the same as knowledge. After all, we can become physically fit without knowing much about anatomy or biology.<\/p>\n
So rather than talk about how to do such exercises, suppose we talk instead about how they work. What is the mechanism in our mind that we are training when we engage in mindful meditation? What psychic muscle, precisely, is becoming stronger?<\/p>\n
To be continued…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For centuries many cultures have studied variations on what is sometimes referred to as “mindfulness”. There are many forms of meditation and ritual practices which aim to increase our ability to, as Ram Das put it so eloquently, “Be here now”. When we are tired, distracted, overwhelmed, our mind tends to go around in circles, … Continue reading “A question of balance, part 3”<\/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":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15745,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15744\/revisions\/15745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}