Category: Need To Know

As one of the greatest of all emotions, gratitude can be cultivated easily and studies are starting to show that gratitude improves well-being. Your heart will open when you are aware and grateful for what you do actually have instead of what you don’t.

One of the most important attitudes to bring to your mindfulness is kindness. You can be more attentive, present and compassionate but the experience of it can be cold and hard, or you can apply some kindness to it to make it more kind, warm, caring and gentle.

True compassion isn’t based upon attachments or desires. To show compassion is to understand and recognise that you have your own limitations and flaws as does everyone else and to forgive yourself and others for their mistakes, negative thoughts and fears.

We all have the temptation to judge any experience as either good or bad because we all like feeling happiness and none of us like feeling sadness. Often your judgements are more based upon past experiences and less on what you are actually experiencing in this moment.

A reaction is something you do automatically when you experience something usually due to past conditioning. When you react you are usually at a disadvantage as you have less or no control due to you lack of a considered response.

If you imagine that every moment equates to a second in time, how many do you have left in total?

Being mindful is purely focusing and being attentive to what you are doing or experiencing now. Life is happening continuously around us all the time yet a lot of the time we don’t even notice because we aren’t concentrating or paying attention to it.

Mindfulness is just about deliberately paying attention to what is happening right now (the present moment) with some curiosity and kindness along with an accepting mentality.