The request for a conscious life is born only in a developed person who begins to feel his inner world and pay attention to his experiences, emotions, thoughts, desires and begins to trace an inexplicable relationship between his inner state and his results in the outside world. This is the request of a person who not only wants to satisfy his basic survival needs, but also wants to develop and get true joy and pleasure from life, from self-realization, from interaction with other people.

Mindfulness allows you to act effectively and at the same time enjoy life, realizing your potential, noticing problems at the stage of their occurrence and quickly and effectively resolving. You can only manage what you are aware of. Therefore, awareness is the key to managing your life! Mindfulness allows you to control your body, emotions, thoughts, your attitude towards people and your life.

What is awareness?

Mindfulness is a total and non-judgmental immersion of attention in the processes taking place in our life (physical, mental and psychological) and their awareness. Awareness is a searchlight of attention directed inward, which illuminates a problem or some process, makes it clear, visible and understandable. At this moment, we do not condemn and do not evaluate the phenomenon, person, feeling, action, but simply observe. A conscious life is a real life, a life without conventions, imposed values, desires and behaviors. Being conscious means seeing yourself and the world around you as they really are.

What you get by practicing mindfulness in life:

• Recovery. A conscious attitude to the body will help prevent diseases and come to recovery, because by listening to our body, we begin to give it exactly what it needs.
• Inner balance and harmony. Being aware of your emotions allows you to control them.
• Realizing your potential. Realizing our desires, over time we learn to distinguish between true desires and imposed ones. And realizing true desires, we begin to reveal our essence and our uniqueness.
• Freedom to be yourself. Being aware of our thoughts, desires, feelings and actions, over time we become free from nested programs, patterns, negative attitudes and become more successful and happier.
• Improved relationships with others. Mindfulness allows you to see a person as he is, and not to interact with an invented image.
• Opening intuition. A conscious attitude to one's inner world opens intuition. Often the body and nervous system give us signals, warning us of the possible consequences.
• Improving the standard of living. A conscious attitude to your thoughts will help create positive changes in life, as conscious thoughts give rise to conscious actions.
• Brightness and interest in life. Mindfulness makes life interesting, not boring and mundane. After all, every moment is unique and beautiful, but not noticing the beauty around, we plunge into a series of endless gray everyday life with dreams of a vacation.
• Increasing energy levels. By returning our attention to the present moment, we return to ourselves our energy, which we used to waste on scrolling through thoughts, situations and experiences from the past or fears for the future.

Thus, awareness allows a person to become alive and real, to do what comes from the soul, and not imposed by anyone, therefore, to realize oneself and experience true joy and happiness from this.

How to develop mindfulness?

On this path, one can constantly improve, collecting threads of attention and, over time, realizing more and more. You can start with the simplest, but it is from small but constant efforts that a great result is formed.

The simplest mindfulness practices

1. Breathing practice. Focus your attention on inhaling and exhaling, not interfering, just watching. This practice calms, immerses in the present moment, relaxes.
2. Mindful eating. When eating, focus on its taste. Holding a piece of bread in your hands, try to realize how it got to you, how much effort and time it took to cook it, grow wheat, collect, grind flour, package, bake, how much effort and labor was invested in this small piece. And what is its value.
3. Focusing on your feelings. In order to have time to live your life, and not do everything automatically, you can dive into the present moment every hour or two. You can set a timer on your watch. And when the bell rings, leave your affairs and immerse yourself in the present moment, asking yourself “What do I feel now?”, go through the body, relax the tension, follow the breath for 5-10 minutes. This practice does not take much time and perfectly restores strength during a busy day, refreshes.
4. Ball of awareness. Imagine a transparent sphere in the chest area and focus on it and ask yourself: “What do I really want now and what will please me?”. Then start filling this balloon with nice images. This opens access to the true desires of our Soul. The same practice can be used to determine the true desire or the imposed one. Place the image of desire in this ball of the Soul and listen to the sensations. If they are pleasant and joyful, then the fulfillment of the desire will bring you joy, if not, then most likely, the desire is imposed by someone.
5. Conscious work with negative emotions. If you're feeling negative feelings, turn your attention inward and ask yourself, "What am I feeling, where in my body am I feeling this?" Then concentrate your attention there and begin to exhale consciously until the emotion dissolves. Over time, you will be able to quickly dissolve negative emotions with your awareness.
6. Awareness of your thoughts. If you tend to get involved in negative thoughts and spin them for hours, then try the simple but effective rubber band exercise. Put a rubber band on your hand and as soon as you catch yourself getting involved in negative thoughts, not much, but noticeably pull the rubber band and click your hand. Consciously switch your attention from bad thoughts, as the famous Scarlett O "Hara said, “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” but not now. Remember that thoughts are vibrations that form a field around you and what you think about attracts to yourself.
7. If a person annoys you. Any person responds within us with some feeling or state. For example, we read or listen to someone and feel something inside us resonate and resonate. We feel good feelings towards a person. But it also happens that you look at a person, and something unpleasant, annoying is born inside, which does not find resonance inside. As you consciously walk through this sensation, find and locate a spot in your body, and then begin to relax that tension until it goes away. As a result of practice, you will notice that the attitude has changed to neutral and no longer hurts you. It works very effectively, and with practice it is also very fast.
8. Body awareness. The body always begins to signal us about violations, but we are so absorbed in our affairs or thoughts that we often do not notice this. Until the strongest signal is turned on - pain, which indicates that the destruction is already serious. The main cause of destruction and disease is the contraction of body spaces, which most often occurs during times of stress. Constriction does not allow energy to flow calmly and relaxed. This is the same as constantly walking with clenched fists. Blood and energy stagnates and problems begin over time. A very simple bodywork practice can be done before going to bed. You need to lie down comfortably and begin to slide your attention over your body, find zones of tension and consciously relax them, if the tension is very strong, you can breathe it in, imagining how you fill this zone with light with your breath. It promotes good sleep and wellness.

Improving in the practice of mindfulness, you can reach a new level of life. When you become aware of your body and its sensations, you understand that you are not the body. When you become aware of your thoughts, you realize that you are not thoughts. When you become aware of your feelings, you realize that you are not feelings. When you consciously relate to desires, you begin to distinguish the true desires of the Soul from those imposed by society. When you enter the state of the observer and begin to live in the present, then you become the master of your life, mind, body, thoughts and feelings.

Time flies and often we lose a lot. Looking for happiness and waiting for the moment when it comes. But are we always attentive to what happens to us?

Do we always have time to notice that suddenly something happened that we have been waiting for so long.

It happens that we do not notice how we got to work. Or, having come to work, it is not possible to remember whether they turned off the stove or not, whether they closed the door for sure. And these thoughts capture all our attention. Not allowed to complete work tasks.

What causes these memory lapses?

From the fact that when we turned off the iron and closed the door, our thoughts were somewhere far away. Maybe we were thinking about the upcoming meeting. Or maybe that the child has a matinee in the garden and you need to prepare.

In any case, we were not present at that moment in our real life, we missed important moments.

mindfulness

In other words, it is the ability to live here and now, to live every moment of your life.

How does it work in real life? This is a focus on the present moment. Usually, our thoughts hover somewhere in the future - we make plans. Or in the past - then memories from childhood, then we scroll through the conversation that took place a week ago.

Focus on the present moment and you will see many details. The smiles of the people around, how bright the light is where you are sitting, what the temperature is now, warm or cold hands.

It all depends on what you are looking at.

Mindfulness helps to redirect the thought-absorbed mind to the present moment. Your physical and emotional sensations.

Mindfulness is being attentive to everything that happens to you. Mindfulness calms and focuses, you become aware of every moment.

Dreaming about the future or remembering the past, we forget about the present. But it is important to remind yourself more often that people who live in the present moment are much happier and more confident.

Living in the here and now sounds pretty easy, but it actually takes a lot of practice. Mindfulness helps develop the skill of managing emotions. As a result, you will achieve control over emotions without suppression.

Your thinking will become clear and simple. Making a decision will become easier and more interesting. Even if you get into a stressful situation, you will be able to think clearly and see more options than someone who reacted to stress.

Have you ever experienced feelings so strong that they completely captured your attention?

Most often this happens during disputes and quarrels with loved ones. We make a promise to ourselves the next time we communicate with a mother or a child not to raise our voice, not to get annoyed. But here is another misunderstanding and we lose our temper. We say some words that we later regret. How did this happen?

We have lost touch with the present moment, we have lost touch with ourselves, with our emotions. They weren't aware of themselves at that moment.

Are you paying attention to your emotions? How do they influence decision making?

To become emotionally healthy, it is important to recognize your emotions, to be aware and accept them. Awareness of emotions is a step towards managing them. It is important to always be attentive to the present.

It happens that thoughts about a recent conversation or event occupy all our attention. You are not your thoughts. Your worries, fears, guilt and other negative emotions are not you, but just part of the experience.

If you are overwhelmed by emotions, you are at a loss, or you are ready to yell at another, the first thing to do is to stop.

Look around, look around, take a deep breath and watch. What do you see, what kind of people are around you, what do they do, what words do they say. What sounds do you hear and what smells do you smell. You are cold or warm. Perhaps at this moment you are on the street and there is rain, or wind, or maybe the sun is hot.

When you were in a beautiful place or experienced a joyful event, how many times did you think that it would end soon instead of enjoying the moment?

Or have you considered what awaits you tomorrow. Reflected on a conversation you had with a friend a few days ago. Often we think about something else instead of living the real life that is happening to us right now.

Use every opportunity to learn to enjoy every moment. Mindfulness is the responsible choice of your emotions.

The choice is whether we control our emotions or our emotions control us. This needs to be practiced.

This skill does not arise by itself, but it is possible to develop and develop it. After all, awareness allows us to change what we do not like, our automatisms, habits.

Life becomes much richer and richer, but at the same time calmer and more harmonious. After all, now you are in control of yourself and your life!

Be happy in every moment!

[specially for the School of Self-development "Start Life Again"]

Why is it so important to be aware of the emotions that overwhelm us, and what is the danger of completely merging with our own feelings? How does border splitting and hatred for an object that causes pain destroy all its good qualities in our mind and thereby destroy attachment? What are the differences between Western and Eastern approaches to working with negative experiences and what resources of consciousness should be used to learn emotional regulation? We deal with the practicing psychotherapist Maxim Pestov.

A lot of texts have been written about the phenomenology of awareness, today we will focus on its therapeutic functions and try to figure out why awareness alone is not enough to achieve mental well-being.

In general, in Gestalt therapy, awareness is one of the main mechanisms for complicating the psyche. Why is it needed at all? The answer is very simple - in order to be able to regulate your emotional life. There are two poles of its course: when the subject is merged with his feelings and completely captured by them, up to affective narrowing of consciousness and borderline splitting, and when he is able to react emotionally, while maintaining the opportunity not only to be in the process, but also to observe it. Awareness allows not only to participate in something, but also to see how it works. Being aware, I put myself in the center of what is happening, and not remain hanging out on the periphery. To use a metaphor, the mind without awareness is like a galloping horse. Awareness in this sense helps to remember that I am on a horse. After this discovery, we can control her instead of depending on her mood.

Read other articles by the author:

Awareness is the starting point from which emotional regulation begins. On the one hand, it starts a process that unfolds in time, and whose development we can observe, and on the other hand, it itself needs some supporting foundation.

It often happens that even when we understand the need for awareness, we do not realize it right away. For example, we lament that, having the necessary skills, we did not have the opportunity to use them. It is precisely for this that it is necessary to add to awareness such an ability as remembrance, which has a lot of connotations in the Western approach to understanding mental activity. For example, there is the term Mindfullness, which is better translated in this way, and not considered a synonym for Awareness. Mindfulness allows you to turn on awareness at the right time. In this sense, it corresponds to the concept of observing ego.

Another ability necessary for the functioning of awareness is the development attention or concentration. It is important not only to understand something there, but also to maintain awareness for a sufficient amount of time. From the point of view of common sense, contact with unpleasant experiences causes a natural intention to stop it as soon as possible. In the Eastern tradition, this desire is opposed by the ability to observe emotional reactions as objects of one's mind, while remaining uninvolved in these processes. In the Western tradition, the possibility of mental processing of unpleasant experiences is defined as non-specific ego power. Accordingly, attention develops along lines of clarity and stability, and thus gives awareness the necessary direction and stability.

So, we briefly described the "left and right hands" awareness. Now let's see what follows from this. In a procedural sense, awareness allows you to return to the experience of its inherent integrity. When we talk about awareness, we most often mean turning our attention to the bodily components of emotions. Psychotherapists sometimes call it grounding- when observing bodily sensations helps to reduce emotional overwhelm. This is partly because awareness leads to slowing down and thereby increases the accuracy and reduces the intensity of experiences. This is the first stage, finding yourself at the point where the path begins.

The next stage, which logically follows from the previous one, is called symbolization or the process of making sense. It is very important to be able to place your experiences in some context, since an emotionally difficult situation is part of the rest of life. Often an affect occurs when an experience is suspended in the air and isolated from background feelings. For example, the experience of anger can be especially difficult to bear if other emotions that are also present in the relationship cannot be accessed. This affective response is called border splitting when hatred of the "bad" object destroys its good qualities and thereby destroys attachment.

Read also:

It should also be remembered that emotions are a contact phenomenon, which means that awareness alone is not enough: it is important to associate the emotion with a need and with an object that could satisfy it. When emotions remain an “individual” process, with which the subject tries to cope on his own and does not “unfold” them into contact, then we observe a stoppage of experience. The extreme manifestation of this process is the onset of a state of mental trauma. Accordingly, the task of emotional regulation is to restore sensitivity during mental anesthesia, and not to support the avoidance of contact with negative emotions.

Awareness of the context allows you to make the transition to the third stage of emotional regulation, which we will conditionally call process thinking. By this I mean the ability to observe a complex emotion in terms of the past (the context of shared history) and the future (the potential for its development). If this does not happen, then the experience of an interrupted experience, in which it seems that the relationship is collapsing, or life is divided into before and after, strongly contributes to the development of an affect that floods the consciousness and finds its way out in reacting. And this method does not lead to an increase in experience, rather, on the contrary, it prevents mental processing.

Usually, we rarely think about the true causes of many of our reactions, actions, deeds, rarely think about what kind of world surrounds us. And even less often why we see the world the way we see it. Perhaps, if we take into account the fact that "how many people - so many ideas", our vision of the world, and therefore our reactions, are also not absolutely true and objective. Once upon a time in antiquity, a famous philosopher named Plato compared our world to a cave, and us to the prisoners imprisoned in it. Moreover, we are already born in this cave in such a way that the chains that bind us keep us with our backs to the entrance and allow us to see only the shadows on the wall in front of us, the shadows of what is happening outside. Therefore, we see only reflections, an illusion, and not reality itself.

What is the cause of illusions?

Have you ever thought that our world, the world in which each of us lives, is in some sense created by our own emotions? It is worth giving one simple example: if we are in a good mood, if we are happy with everything, doesn’t it seem to us that life is “beautiful and amazing”, and the people around are kindness itself, that everything around is painted in pink and blue, joyful tones? In moments of depression, resentment, fatigue, doesn’t the same life seem dull and disgusting to us, the same people are angry and opposed to us, and everything around us doesn’t seem gray, dirty, black, disgusting?

What has changed? Our emotions!

Let's try to understand the nature and functions of our emotions, remembering, however, that a person is not limited to them. The first thing we can notice is that although the range and shades of emotions are almost endless, in general they can be divided into positive and negative. There are things that cause us pleasure and joy, there are those that cause pain, fear, disgust ... Also, we can notice that the first reaction to what happens to us is precisely emotional. In a word, exactly through emotions we get the first idea of ​​things, it is emotions that evaluate them, and largely determine our attitude towards them in the future. Thanks to emotions, there are things that we "like" and there are things that we "do not like". But that's not all, and this is very important - there are things that for us, in a sense, do not exist, since they do not cause emotions at all.

Billions and billions of human beings live or have ever lived in this world, among them there are our loved ones, relatives, friends, just acquaintances, and an endless mass of those whom we have never known and will never know. All these people, great and small, noble and low, good and evil, outwardly are very similar to each other. However, looking at them through the eyes of our emotions, we will see that in our "cave" someone whom we are very afraid of or very fond of will turn out to be a giant, someone less significant to us will be smaller, while the rest will become almost invisible in general, merged into one distant common mass. As Vladimir Mayakovsky said: "Perhaps the nail in my boot is more terrible than the whole fantasy of Goethe". It can be seen that Emotions reflect the strength (but not the depth) of our personal connections and relationships with other people. and things. They show the degree of our personal interest, our personal participation, our personal involvement in this or that event. We experience this or that thing precisely because of emotions, they give us a direct sense of life they let us feel behind the acting or the action of a book hero real life and experience it as if it were happening to us. They draw us into their stream, making us from distant witnesses into original "participants" in events, sometimes fictitious, and we love or hate, unconsciously following the author's intention. Emotions connect our little "I" with that which surrounds us with very close, but invisible bonds of sympathy or antipathy. And we must admit that based on this emotional assessment, without realizing it ourselves, we build our ideas about the world, about people, based on it, we react and act. It is quite understandable that, being purely personal and depending on many changing conditions, both external and, especially, internal, little conscious of us, such ideas and reactions often turn out to be erroneous. And what we don't like, we call without much hesitation "bad" and what you like - "good".

Thus, emotions are the "conductor" of consciousness, coloring and transforming reality like a distorted mirror in a room of laughter, depending on our preferences, moods, habits. In everyday life, this causes many mistakes and disappointments, many hasty decisions and actions. The problem is that we do not separate things from their reflections in emotions, and while we judge and "analyze" our vague personal impressions, we think that we are analyzing objective reality. Naturally, the above cannot be taken as an unchanging reality for any person. As experience shows, the ability to separate your emotions from reality- this is a question of the inner maturity of a person, his life experience, his development.

In general, three stages in the development of emotional consciousness can be distinguished:

1. At the first stage our consciousness perceives the world through a changeable play of sensations. At this time, for a person there is only that which he directly feels, feels, sees, hears, touches. He is like an animal or an infant, unable to link impressions together and create a stable image or picture of reality. Of the huge number of existing internal and external factors, it reacts to the strongest, the one that displaces all the others, becoming a kind of center undeveloped infantile consciousness. A separate, individual "I", the one that thinks and makes decisions, is absent at this stage. More precisely, there is no separation between "I" and "not-I", the child does not separate himself from the world around him, given to him in his sensations. All actions, reactions are nothing more than the consequences of his sensations and reflexes or habits. Our "I" at this stage merges with what we are currently experiencing, and it is this one experience that makes up our entire world at the moment. Unfortunately, this condition does not always end with childhood, but only becomes more complicated, retaining its essence. It is worth remembering how often any more or less serious problem becomes the "end of the world" for us, and we no longer perceive anything besides it, it is the center of our infantile consciousness, it is our "I". Whether it's a toothache or an insult caused by someone, "I" is so weak that I can not resist the onslaught of "feelings".
2. Transition to the second stage occurs quite imperceptibly, unconsciously, when, in the course of its natural development, our "I" becomes stronger and more stable. At the second stage, when we have already learned to simply separate ourselves from our own feelings, and our life has ceased to be a pendulum swing between euphoria and depression, the emotional consciousness creates its own little world, in the center of which is our "I". Now emotions are the only link between "I" and "not-I". They reflect our personal attitude to things around us, our likes and dislikes. The world thus created is very narrow, subjective and egocentric. In it we confuse the objective world and our subjective impressions. It is to this stage that everything that we talked about emotions in the first part of the article applies to the greatest extent. At this stage, all known mechanisms of psychological defense, such as repression, are manifested to the greatest extent. Obeying the instinct inherent in the psyche, the emotional consciousness seeks to obtain maximum pleasure in any possible and accessible forms. And, at the same time, he tries to minimize all negative experiences, including those caused by memories of past failures and problems. It operates on the basis of the well-known "principle of pleasure", leading us away from the real perception of life. What you do not like is simply not perceived, denied, or very soon forgotten. But we perceive our ideas and the fruits of our own fantasies as something real and tangible. And this once again shows that in our still infantile consciousness, objective and subjective, external and internal are practically not separated. Consciousness and "I" are still under the control of emotions, we see only what we want to see. A simple example of this is sometimes our disputes, when we, foaming at the mouth, prove to each other something that we ourselves know nothing about, but it just seems to us that this is "exactly so." Or our "pink" illusions, when we believe that the whole world will change, as soon as we want to. The further way requires already significant conscious efforts. We need to try to understand the meaning of things and events happening to us, to get to their essence. Every time we make a decision, it is necessary to make an effort to stop and consider the case from all sides, not limited to the assessment that emotions dictate to us. It is necessary to make an effort not to consider yourself "always and in everything right." It is necessary to make a conscious effort to learn to recognize the true causes of our emotions, thoughts, ideas ... In general, self-knowledge is necessary.
3. The third stage can be called the stage of maturity. The "pleasure principle" is replaced by the "reality principle". A person is able to separate his "I" from his emotions and feelings, able to rise above them. He is also able to recognize where the objective world is and where his own feelings, thoughts, ideas are. At this stage, a person subordinates his emotions, feelings, thoughts to conscious control ... Emotions become conductors of much deeper states of the human soul. Directed in the right direction, they are one of the tools of a true creator, able to touch the very depths of the hearts of other people. This ability - most clearly manifested in genuine, truly great poets, musicians, actors, orators - makes possible the existence of art, as the ability to convey deep ideas, the essence and meaning of things. Let us recall, for example, Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Hamlet. It is probably difficult for us to understand this - how can one convey emotions without being themselves captured by them. But imagine a musician who, due to excitement and inspiration, cannot control his fingers, or a singer whose voice breaks from emotions. Thus, at this stage, emotions should no longer be uncontrolled reactions, becoming only a form for conveying an internal state. In addition to emotions, other forces of our soul come to the forefront of our life, our actions.. A person overcomes the chaotic, irrational influence of emotions, awakening the ability to understand and recognize the essence of things. The deeper and more stable factors of reason, intuition and will become the conductor of our consciousness.

And in conclusion, we can add that, as experience shows, the elements of all three stages are intertwined. No matter how contradictory a person is internally, nevertheless, he is a fairly complete system, where everything is interconnected. The development of consciousness is a continuous process that does not have clear and unambiguous boundaries. It involves many factors and forces, both external and internal, but only a small part of them is available for observation.

This the path of searching for maturity requires remarkable conscious effort. This is the path of self-education, and in a sense it is inevitable for every person. The only question left is time and desire.