Moving on this week to the fourth quality of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s attitudinal foundation of mindfulness, trust.
An important element of meditation training is developing a sense of trust in yourself and your feelings. It is worth risking making some “errors” when trusting your own authority, instead of always relying on external guidance. Trusting your inner wisdom and kindness is vital in all aspects of meditation practice but especially so when practising yoga. In yoga you need to listen to your own sense of how far to stretch and how long to hold a posture. Not listening to your body can lead to injury.
Meditation, and particularly mindfulness meditation, helps us to grow more intimate with ourselves. We get to know ourselves better by becoming more aware of the nature of our minds, our patterns of thought, feelings, body sensations and habitual tendencies. We develop a sense of how these all interlink. In this way we come to understand ourselves better and can become more fully ourselves. We can still be receptive and open to what we can learn from other people and sources but ultimately, we need to live each moment of our own lives.
We also need to trust in the process, that even when it feels nothing positive is happening in our meditation practice, there is still a benefit at some level from doing it.
In practising mindfulness, you are learning to trust and honour yourself. The more you nurture this trust in yourself, the easier it will become to trust other people more and to see their good qualities too.
If you are interested in learning mindfulness, I facilitate an 8-week Mindfulness for Wellbeing Course in Exeter and also offer introductory taster sessions.