Hmmmm

Mindfulness and the development of core qualities

Kabat-Zinn9 describes seven attitudinal qualities that underpin mindfulness practice which are both the stance we bring to the practice and a consequence of it. These qualities are:

• Non-judging – opening to an awareness of the stream of our inner and outer experience; to the ways that we tend towards automatically judging it and reacting to it and learning to step back from it. Kabat-Zinn9 describes this as a ‘stance of an impartial witness to your experience’

• Patience – an understanding that things can only emerge in their own time.

• Beginner’s mind – a willingness to see everything as if for the first time, and the ability to bring freshness, clarity and vitality to experience in each moment rather than seeing things through a fog of preconceptions. In this way mindfulness practice enables us to develop a perspective on our experience that is not based on our history.

• Trust – developing a faith in the validity of one’s own thoughts, feelings and intuition. Mindfulness practice offers a structure and a process for enabling one to witness personal experience and an encouragement to rely on the validity of this evidence. 3

• Non-striving - an attitude of willingness to allow the present to be the way it is. One is explicitly not trying to fix problems through mindfulness. Non-striving is ‘having no goal other than for you to be yourself’9 as you currently are.

• Acceptance – an openness and willingness to see things as they actually are in the present moment which sets the stage for acting appropriately in one’s life.

• Letting go – the development of an ability to acknowledge the arising and passing of experience without becoming entangled in the content of it. Mindfulness practice puts a particular emphasis on coming to know our conditioned tendency to hold onto the pleasant and reject the unpleasant and to see the ways in which this perpetuates our difficulties.

I definitely have to work on those.

Popularity: 5% [?]