Mindfulness, Meditation, and Mind Fitness by Joel and Michelle Levey l Tips for Meditation l Peace of Mind l Ways to Live Better l How to Meditation l Ways You Can Meditate

Train Your Mind

When you train your mind, you rewire and reshape your brain, and increase your capacity to creatively and compassionately influence your world of experience and relationships. The more you practice mindfulness, meditation, and mind fitness the greater your capacity to transform your life, your relationships, and your world. As your mindfulness deepens, four recognitions will become apparent: 1. Impermanence: Every experience is transient and ever-changing. 2. Dissatisfaction: To the degree that you try to hold onto or grasp any changing experience, you will experience suffering. This is like psychic rope burn – the more your grasp, the greater the suffering! 3. Selflessness: Upon careful examination, every experience, and every experiencer, dissolves, into a vast network of meaningful relationships. 4. You will begin to glimpse a dimension of mind that is empty, clear, and unimpeded like the sky. Boundless!

Meditation

Meditation classically refers to a broad spectrum of methods, disciplines, and practices for training our minds and reducing our neurotic tendencies and misconceptions, while cultivating and strengthening our capacity for living with greater wisdom, compassion, patience, balance, mastery of attention, and other virtuous qualities of heart and mind. Properly understood, there are no distractions. Mindfulness and meditation can be practiced in every moment and circumstance of our lives. At its core, mindfulness is not different from love. We attend to and are mindful of what we care about. The deeper our mindfulness, the more naturally our heart-mind opens to loving kindness—the greatest healing force there is.

Seeing

Look out through your eyes… and know “seeing”... listen... and know “listening”.... Here, now, awake to this moment... Be mindful that others, just like you are seeing...breathing....wishing to be happy and well... and dedicate your practice to inspiring them in this awakening. Sustain this quality of mindful clear presence as you move through the world. Mindfulness teaches us to not only be mindful of our own breathing (or seeing or listening), but to also be mindful of all other beings breathing, seeing, and listening in the world around us. By deepening and expanding your practice in this way, you may naturally expand and evolve to allow the emergence of a deeper sense of compassionate kinship and interdependence with all living beings.

Various Methods

All the various methods of Mindfulness, Meditation, and Mind Fitness have three essential elements: ATTENTION: is the quality of mindful presence. Wake up and be here now! INTENTION: is the quality of mind necessary to sustain the focus of attention: Intention allows you to live and meditate “on purpose.” ATTITUDE: allows your practice to be truly sustainable: Experiment with bringing a deeper sense of openness, curiosity, patience, courage, and compassion to your practice. As your mindfulness matures and progresses, the wisdom it reveals liberates us from the illusions of a separate, solid, definable self, and teaches us to stand strong, to live in the power of an open question, and be comfortable with the uncertainty and ambiguity of our lives.

Breathing in

Breathing in, I calm my body and mind…

Breathing out, I smile…

Calming…

Smiling….

Here...

Now...

Receiving...

Radiating...

Twenty one thousand six hundred times a day we breathe in… and we breathe out. With each breath, this simple practice can deepen, affirm, and refine the balance and integration of wisdom and compassion that bring to our lives and our world. This can be practiced while sitting quietly or carried into action as you mindfully flow with the breath through a myriad of activities and interactions of your daily life. Align and attune your body, speech, and mind with focusing phrases synchronized with the breath that help you to stream mindful presence as you move through the world today.