You can always find this page at PaulDuignan.consulting/mindfulness-traditions

Introduction

1. Mindfulness is both the state of being aware of what you are thinking, feeling, experiencing and doing at any moment in time, in addition to being a specific technique that is used to help you be increasingly mindful more of the time.

2. Mindfulness as a technique has been used in many philosophy of life and spiritual traditions for thousands of years.

3. Modern medical and psychological research evidence shows that developing a regular daily mindfulness meditation practice is good for both your physical health and psychological wellbeing.

4. If you are wanting to develop your own mindfulness meditation practice, it can be useful to link what you are doing while trying to develop this habit with one of the philosophy of life or spiritual traditions.

5. If you embed your developing mindfulness meditation practice in this way, you can enlarge it from merely being a practice that you are doing to ‘fix’ yourself. If you just see mindfulness meditation as a practice to ‘fix’ yourself you are unlikely to continue with it for any length of time. Therefore, you will miss out on the long-term benefits of establishing a daily mindfulness meditation practice.

6. When linked to a philosophy of life or a spiritual tradition, your mindfulness meditation practice can become part of your ongoing, life-long self-development journey to become the best person that you can possibly become.

7. Integrating your mindfulness practice with one of the philosophy of life or spiritual traditions also means that you are more likely to find a community of like-minded people. You can meditate with these people and they can help you build, maintain and deepen your practice.

As soon as you start to look into many of the main spiritual traditions you will start to find talk of ‘God’ or a higher power of some sort. This can put some people off. However, if you look within most of these traditions, you will find that there is room for people to interpret ‘God’ in a variety of ways that make sense to them.

Please note that I do not necessarily endorse the content of the links below, or links out from these resources. When using them, you need to use your own judgement about their suggestions and content.

Philosophy of life, Spiritual Traditions and mindfulness

• The Sufi tradition. https://manaretreat.com/8-powerful-spiritual-heart-practice-of-sufi-meditation/

• The scientific tradition. https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/heart-and-soul-healing/201303/dr-herbert-benson-s-relaxation-response

• The Stoic tradition. https://modernstoicism.com/meditation-for-stoics-by-caleb-ontiveros/

• The Jewish tradition. https://images.shulcloud.com/7926/uploads/PDF-Files/Meditation-Docs/elementsofjewishmeditation5.pdf

• The Christian tradition. https://www.calminggrace.com/christian-mindfulness-exercises/

• The Yoga tradition. https://www.yogaoutlet.com/blogs/guides/how-to-practice-mindfulness-meditation

Please note when you are doing any type of psychological or self-development work, if you find yourself feeling overwhelming emotions, troubling thoughts or actions, you need to talk to a health professional.