Everyday Mindfulness

I started proper 10 minute mindfulness sitting nearly everyday from about October.
At first I really struggled to try and clear my mind, and was actually very sucessful and could spend minutes at a time with a thoughtless mind.
It kept being stressed to me that this wasn't the point and I gradually stopped trying so hard to think of nothing,and just acknowledged thoughts as they came to me. I started to realise that the important thing is to train my mind to recognise what and when thoughts are in my head.
My daily awareness has grown to the point where now I find myself saying, sometimes out loud, I am now thinking about 'X', or oh look, I am thinking about 'Y' again.

The real benefit for me is the fact that I am starting to become aware of thoughts I didn't realise I had. Paranoid thoughts where I think someone is talking about me, or can read my mind, or is laughing at me because of a choice I made or thought I had. I can now see these thoughts for what they are, delusions. My mind grasping at facts and trying to build some kind of reality out of them, a reality which isn't real.
I knew I had been paranoid when younger but thought I had got over it. How wrong I was.

I am really amazed at how well mindfulness is working for me. I am becoming mentally and physically fitter as I manage to identify negative and unwanted thoughts and feel really optimistic about the future.

Nick

what a brilliant post, the realisation of how mindfulness 'works'.
thoughts aren't facts, just thoughts!
really uplifting reading this.
mick

Nicko wrote: I started to realise that the important thing is to train my mind to recognise what and when thoughts are in my head.

Sounds a lot like mindfulness to me.

That's an interesting point about the mind being empty of thought. I, too had that sensation a few time; I can bring it on through adjusting the breath in meditation, rather than leaving the breath to breathe itself.
However I realised that the point is to deal with thoughts, so you need to be having them! I tend to let a thought come through and then acknowledge it before returning to the breath. Lots of my thoughts seem to be mental images of places, but as they start to develop from this simple beginning, they go off down all sorts of irrelevant paths and become more complex.

Thoughts will continue to arise. There's no getting away from that. The blood circulates. The hair grows. The breathe ebbs and flows. Thoughts come and go.
For me, it's about noticing thoughts without becoming attached to their content. The mind loves to weave a narrative. Mindfulness teaches us that we have a choice in this; that we can observe the thought stream without being dragged away by it.
Practice is, of course, key.
All best,
Jon, Hove