MINDFULNESS

*The Quiet Room in the Reuters Times Square office, New York.*

This Beginner’s Guide to Mindfulness comes from the team at Mindarma, an Australian organisation helping Reuters journalists build resilience through an online training program. Reuters journalists can click here for details on how to register.

Key Points from Mindarma’s Beginners Guide to Mindfulness:

Mindfulness is about being in the moment. It involves bringing your attention to one thing at a time. This may be your breath. It may be your thoughts. It can be used by anyone and applied across all aspects of life.

Mindfulness brings life back to a manageable pace. Our smartphones have taken away many small mindful moments, filling the gaps with a stream of social media, news feeds, work emails and other distractions. Despite this connectivity many of us feel disconnected and worn out. Struggling to keep up, we rush, we multitask and we worry. Mindfulness can help you slow down and concentrate on what’s important.

Mindfulness saves you energy. Life is what’s happening now. Yet instead of being in the present we devote huge amounts of energy to rehashing stuff from the past or trying to get everything right for the future. Practice mindfulness and you may find you spend less energy getting worked up over pointless worries from the past or future. Instead you will enjoy what’s happening now.

Mindfulness teaches you to experience the good stuff. When you’re present and paying attention, you’re not thinking about the things you are supposedly lacking.

Mindfulness teaches you to be nicer to yourself. Mindfulness helps you act with greater self-compassion. When you let compassion take over from judgement, your inner critic becomes less significant. You become less focused on unhelpful self-criticisms and more at ease with yourself.

Mindfulness may seem awkward, stupid and annoying. To begin with, many people find practicing mindfulness a little awkward. When you sit still and start to examine your thoughts you may notice ones which say, “this is stupid”, or “why I am I doing this?” That’s OK.

Mindfulness can take a while to get comfortable with. Guided mindfulness exercises come in many forms. Some exercises focus on breathing and releasing tension from your body. Others help you interact with thoughts in a different way or bring compassion to yourself. Trying different exercises may help you discover what works for you. Regularly practicing mindfulness may make you feel calmer, more centered and less stressed. It can improve your ability to focus, bring better sleep and lessen symptoms associated with mental health conditions.

Watch this workshop on mindfulness practice, led by teachers from the monastic community founded by poet, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh. The workshop was hosted by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma in 2015.

A special half-day workshop on mindfulness practice, led by teachers from the monastic community founded by poet, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh.

In the following TED talk, Andy Puddicombe explains (whilst juggling) the transformative power of refreshing your mind for just 10 minutes a day.

Note that mindfulness may not be for everyone: Babette Rothschild, a leading American psychotherapist and prolific author on trauma, says practicing mindfulness can be difficult for someone with PTSD as well as anxiety and panic disorders. She notes in her 2017 book, The Body Remembers Volume 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment, that mindfulness “is not always helpful to those with PTSD and may even cause further dysregulation”.

“Teachers of meditation, yoga, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), chi gong, tai chi, and other mindfulness-based practices recognize that a significant portion of students who endure PTSD (and also a good many suffering from anxiety and panic) do not always do so well with a mindful focus—at least as traditionally taught in those programs. Nonetheless, all of these practices hold plenty of promise for trauma survivors and others with anxiety-based disorders. Modified by adjustments such as varying sensory focus, metering exposure, and helping individuals to tailor any mindfulness-based program to their specific needs, mindfulness can and does fulfill its promise of greater calm and peace of mind, also for people with these challenges.”