I want to share with you an excerpt from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book: Wherever you go, there you are-Mindfulness Meditation for everyday life.
“Mindfulness requires effort and discipline for the simple reason that the forces that work against our being mindful, namely, our habitual unawareness and automaticity, are exceedingly tenacious… It is empowering as well, because paying attention in this way opens channels to reservoirs of creativity, intelligence, imagination, clarity, determination, choice and wisdom within us. We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quite. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Out actions are all too frequently driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realise we are headed for. Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us. This process doesn’t happen by itself. It takes energy. We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment “practice” or “meditation practice”.