How Mindfulness Gives You Freedom

[leightremaine]

How Mindfulness Gives You Freedom

By Leigh Tremaine
http://leightremaine.com/how-mindfulness-gives-you-freedom

Mindfulness—the practice of consciously directing our attention in the present moment, without reactivity or distraction—restores the full power of choice and therefore freedom. Mindfulness can also be used to free us from the distractions, conditioning, addictions, habits, beliefs, and reactivity that limit us. While a lot of people think of themselves as free—especially if they live in a democracy—the reality is far from that—unless they are practising mindfulness.
How We Become Trapped—Even in a “Free” Society

The mind is a powerful tool, helping us to develop intelligence and knowledge, and to create amazing feats of achievement and ingenuity, exemplified by the advances in technology, science, and civilisation. These feats of achievement are then often quoted as examples of how humankind has set itself free from the yoke of primitive living.

Yet, when we look around us in our advanced societies with all the modern technological commodities that are made available to us in the Spectacle of Materialism, including the smart phones, computers, and televisions that dominate our lives and entrance us, can we really say that we are free? When we are stuck in the same reactive behaviour patterns, year after year, continue to mindlessly support destructive and unsustainable patterns of living, and as a species behave more like the proverbial flock of sheep, are we actually free?

Our consciousness becomes trapped the moment we cease to be present in our authentic self, and instead react to the thoughts and emotions that pass through our mind. Often the process takes place automatically—hence the term automatic thinking—and often below our conscious awareness. We have 50,000 thoughts a day on average, each of them emerging into our mind space and competing for our attention. How many of them did we just let pass away from us like ripples in a pond, and how many of them did we attach to and react to, limiting our freedom?

The most insidious of our thoughts and emotions grow by feeding on our attention and creating a positive feedback loop that causes us to become more and more reactive to them as they grow. Desires and fears are a great example of this. When we have an inner vacuum created by our lack of presence in our authentic self, these desires and fears rush in to fill that vacuum and give our lives some kind of meaning or validation, and so we lose our freedom to them and become motivated by them in inauthentic acts of living. The unsustainable and largely unquestioned pattern of mass consumption in mass society is an example of this. Another example is the fear of being authentic, where we conform to artificial cultural norms and the expectations of others in order to meet the approval of others and obtain the benefits of doing so.
How Mindfulness Can Set Us Free

Mindfulness sets us free by interrupting the automatic process of reactivity, and by bringing conscious awareness to what would otherwise be a largely unconscious behaviour pattern. Mindfulness gives us the free choice of where to place our attention, rather than letting that attention be taken hostage by reactive thoughts and emotions. Once we have full choice where to place our attention, we can choose our thoughts, beliefs and feelings freely, and choose how we behave, from the perspective of our authentic self. Mindful, authentic living then becomes possible, and so does a more peaceful, sustainable, and fulfilling world.

But just how do we become mindful and centred in our authentic self in order to live authentically? The process begins the moment we become aware that we have choice, that we can direct our attention consciously, and that we are not our thoughts, emotions, or roles, but a centre of being and awareness. With this self-awareness, we can change our behaviour and become more mindful and authentic.

Where our freedom has been held captive by our attachments to desires or our aversion to fears, the process will initially be a challenge in some areas of our lives, where we come face-to-face with our reactive resistances. Where we develop the enthusiasm and commitment to authenticity, we will grow through self-development and break through these resistances in the fire of self-realisation. In some cases, where the enthusiasm and commitment has yet to be built, we may retreat and continue to live reactively until we mindfully revisit the resistance with enlarged enthusiasm and commitment.

Overcoming our resistances so that we are no longer dominated by our reactive attachments and aversions takes boldness, and can be scary—especially if we stand to lose something that we are very attached to. But in our greatest challenge there lies our greatest reward—the reward of living authentically and becoming ultimately fulfilled through the freedom of self-realisation. This is where mindfulness bears its greatest fruits.

I hope you enjoyed this article! For more of my mindfulness articles, visit http://leightremaine.com/?s=mindfulness You can also follow me at http://www.facebook.com/leightremaine and http://www.twitter.com/leightremaine

[watson2182]

thanks for posting this sir. i learned something about your post. i will read the articles also.