The Reason For Mindfulness

6 Jan, 2015 | Mindfulness, Personal, Self Growth

As mentioned in my goals for 2015, over the next year I want to become a practitioner of mindfulness. This is something I have done only a few times in 2014 and would like to engage in with more regularity over the coming year.

The strongest reason I have heard for practicing mindfulness is best said by Matthieu Ricaud in his talk The Art of Meditation (from 3.26):

“You are not born knowing how to read and write, how to ride a bicycle, how to play tennis and how to play Mozart. Thats clear. There has been a huge amount of training, effort and discipline in acquiring those skills. Now we absolutely agree on that. Nobody minds, although we don’t always appreciate it, to go to school for a number of years, to have professional training, and if we are interested in playing a musical instrument or becoming an athlete to spend the necessary effort for it. We do that because we see  ahead the potential benefit of it for our health, our pleasure, our flourishing and therefore we say ‘this is worth doing’. It is therefore kind of strange that we assume basic human qualities, like peace of mind, kindness, compassion, resilience, emotional balance that they will be at the optimal state, just like that, just because we wish them so. They will be at the normal state, like someone who has never trained to play the piano, like someone who has never trained to run systematically, so that they could eventually run a marathon. Yes we know how to walk, we know how to run a little bit, but this is far from expressing the potential we have, maybe just 10% of the potential. So would it be true to say the same thing for the mind, and possibly, one of our dramas is that we vastly under estimate the power of the transformation of the mind, or actualising another 90% of that potential.”

Related posts:

  • Active Mindfulness - Personalising mindfuless practice, by making it more active.
  • 3 Daily Habits - Where I look at three worthwhile habits; reading, writing and meditation.
© 2022, stevanpopovic.com