THE NINE ATTITUDES OF MINDFULNESS:

1. NON-JUDGING:
Non-judging is being in ‘observer mode’. Like an impartial scientist merely observing
something without labeling it as good or bad or whether you like something or not. You
are merely an impartial witness of your current experience. Non-judging requires us to
not label and try to change something. It means we drop any expectations and simply
accept the present moment as it presents itself. We suspend judgement.

If you take 15 minutes and observe how much you are judging something, you will
realise that we judge way more than we think we do. Notice what thoughts are coming
to you and merely observe how many thoughts are judgment related. Remember, you
are merely observing. Please don’t start to judge yourself for those judgements. This is
just an exercise in noticing, in order to become more aware. I recommend you to just
pause now for 15 minutes to do this and watch your thoughts. Simply observe this
judging quality of the mind without judgement. Just notice that it tends to do that. Set
an alarm to let you know when 15 minutes are over. Continue reading after 15 minutes.

Non judging also means that we stop thinking about and preempting the benefits of
practicing mindfulness. It is easy to fall into the trap of expecting results from your
actions. For most of us, it is what we have been taught to do most of our lives - to
keep an eye on the ‘prize’. Mindfulness however requires letting go of your
expectations. Because when we have expectations, we tend to compare them with the
present and are more prone to judge what is happening in comparison to your
expectations.

The habit of judging and categorizing keeps us in repeated patterns of thinking and old
patterns of behaviours. It locks you in unconscious behaviors that may no longer be
serving you. This week, be more aware of your thoughts and how and when you judge.
If you find yourself judging, just gently guide your attention to the present situation. So
instead of comparing and judging, you are merely taking note of thoughts, feelings and
sensations in each moment.

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2. PATIENCE:
When we are being impatient, we are not practicing mindfulness. Impatience is a sign
that you are living out some future event in your mind, and resisting the current
situation. In this attitude of mindfulness, we remember that we cannot force a flower
open for it to bloom. It does so in its own time. So we remember to let things unfold in
their own time, understanding that we do not have to exercises restlessness and
impatience as things unfold. We simply enjoy the unfolding of the experience. Things
have their organic life cycle which we can choose to respect.

When we forget this and allow our egos to come in, we loose patience. It's easy to lose
patience because things are not going ‘my way’. This can be viewed as the ego-self
which wants to take control.

Compassion and kindness is needed for yourself and others in any situation if you feel
this sense of impatience and need for control kicking in. Some people may start to feel
anxiety if things are not going they way they want or as they predicted. It is this
expectation of what needs to be that can bring about this anxiety. But if we respect the
unfolding with patience, we find a way to operate and still do what needs to be done
without these stressful feelings of impatience and anxiety and nervousness.

To exercise patience, simply become aware of your breathing and breath purposefully
and take nice slow breaths. Know that there is an inner wisdom and calm that you can
exercise.

This week, notice times and moments when you feel impatient. As you notice that you
are getting impatient, say to yourself, “I notice that the feeling of impatience has
arisen”. Then intentionally slow down and and exercise patience, kindness and
compassion for the moment; remembering that you have the choice to enjoy the
unfolding of each moment.

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3. BEGINNER’S MIND
Having a beginner’s mind is like being a child again and experiencing that joy of
experiencing everything for the first time. When we practice mindfulness, the logical
part of the mind begins to form opinions based on past experiences and starts to form
believes about what is going to happen, even before something has fully transpired.
This allows expectations and comparisons to creep in and inhibits the experience of
having a beginner’s mind. The filters in our mind begins to take over to predict what will
happen. This becomes the mental activity of living in the future and not being present.

Having a beginner’s mind is operating with open curiosity like a child in a playground
for the first time. Practicing this can be harder than it sounds because we are almost
tricking our minds to feel like we have never experienced this before. How is this
possible when we already have known and experienced something before. You may
say, how can I have a beginner’s mind when I have my morning coffee? I know exactly
how this coffee is going to taste like? It is this logical part of us that comes in and tries
to take over the experience by forming conclusions to an experience which is yet to be
experienced. Even something as routine as your coffee can be experienced with a
beginner’s mind because uou have never had this particular coffee, on this particular
morning in this specific way that you are about to today.

It is like having watched thousands of sunsets but never having watched this particular
one that you are about to witness. This moment of you having your coffee this
particular day will never happen again. So you are in fact experiencing it the first time.
It is the trained, logical mind that wants to draw conclusions that clouds this truth. You
are not even the same person you were yesterday. Your physical cells changed, you
had experiences yesterday that shaped neural pathways. Scientifically speaking, you
were physically different yesterday. So you are even a different person this morning
having this coffee. So meet this experience like it is the first time you are meeting it,
because it really is a NEW moment to experience! Each moment is indeed unique when
we are present with it.

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4. TRUST :

Trusting in your practice and the journey of your practice is important in mindfulness.
No one else knows all your past experiences or your current state of mind or your
beliefs and values and dreams and feelings and everything that has made you who you
are today. NO ONE.

So trust that your practice is for you to decipher what is best for you. Trust that you
can work it out and grow, based on your own intuition and inner guidance. In practicing
trust in your mindfulness exercises, you are guiding your own authority to be able to
trust yourself more and more. Developing this trust in yourself, your feelings, your
intuitive instincts and your own voice is part of taking responsibility for your personal
development and growth.

You begin to trust your own being and not feel the pressure to conform to expectations
nor have to do something for the sake of doing it. You trust yourself more and more to
take purposeful action in your life, even if that means learning from making mistakes
along the way. This gives you more clarity and not be clouded by opinions and the
expectations of others. Begin to trust that your mind and body has helped you this far
in life and that you can trust it to do you right.

And this starts with practicing trust in your formal mindfulness practices. The more we
practice trust in our formal practice, the more we practice trust in our daily lives. So
have trust in your practice. Trust in your abilities and wisdom. Trust that you are
supported. Trust that in times of challenges and stress, that you have the ability to get
everything done. That you don’t need to feel overwhelm. You can CHOOSE to focus on
one thing at a time and trust that your best is good enough.

Many times, it is usually a lack of trust in your own capabilities or lack of confidence
that you will be supported that tends to cause stress. With trust, we also become more
confident to say no when required, to create opportunities for ourselves and trust that
we are good enough. In fact, we begin to trust in our own perfection.

Some people ask if the experiences they had during their mindful practices are right. I
say, ALL your mindful experiences are PERFECT. Because it is exactly what YOU
needed to experience in order to grow into the next experience. Just like life! We just
need to be open to the lessons and trust that the lessons and experiences we have in
our practice is what we need to grow.

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5. NON-STRIVING: Non-striving seems counter intuitive for most people because
since young, we are taught to get results, set goals, study hard and do well. Having a
non-striving attitude does not mean that you now can be a ‘slacker’ and lay in bed all
day listening to Bruno Mars singing, “Today I don’t feel like doing anything”.

Instead, it means not trying to be anywhere else except in the moment that you already
are in. It is an internal practice for you to stop striving to be in some future place or
some past experience. Many times, when we are working or doing something, we are
striving to get something done. For example, you may be striving to finish a report or
striving to finish cooking dinner or striving to perfect something the way you did that
last time. Sometimes we do things striving to please someone else. With non-striving,
you are merely writing your report and enjoying the process of writing each word. You
are enjoying each moment of cooking. You are not striving to finish anything nor re-
create something from the past. You are in the moment with each part of the process
because doing each part well is what need to complete the task well anyway.

So why strive for the future or strive to recreate a past, when you can enjoy the present
which will give you the same (if not better) results anyway - and without the added
stress! The best way to describe this is when I see how athletes describe being, “in the
zone”, or when artists describe being “in the flow”. They are in a space of focused
attention where their mind is free to discover the possibilities present in the moment -
simply by being present in the moment.

Non-Striving is about trying less and being more. Being more by experiencing the
present more vividly and with more awareness. With non-striving, you are operating
from a more organic and authentic state rather than a forced way of being.

You know when you see someone not quite comfortable or trying really hard or being
stressed. And you can tell when someone is in a natural state of flow. It is a pleasure to
watch someone who is in that natural space. It makes us wonder how they are so calm
or confident. Many times, they are not striving to please or striving to complete, they
seem to be enjoying the moment.

So non-striving is understanding and remembering that the moment is perfect. You

don’t have to be better, you don’t have to be more nor do you have to be less. You can
just be. Practice this sense of knowing that you are ok in this moment. That everything
is just right and just the way it needs to be without forcing anything within yourself.

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6. ACCEPTANCE:

Jon Kabat Zinn said, “Acceptance is not passive resignation, it is active recognition”.
So being accepting does not mean you become a doormat to another person’s
rudeness or abuse. It does not mean you do not work to provide positive impact. It is
the active recognition of the present and the acceptance to things just the way they
are. It means that you are not caught up in judging what is happening.

When you drop the judging, the resistance to the present drops and acceptance can
come in. It is dropping the resistance that most people find challenging to do in
situations, especially in challenging ones. Have a listen to your internal self-talk for a
couple of hours and notice how much you are resisting the present moment.

Most of us say these to ourselves, like, “Oh goodness, this is taking too long”, or
“When will this person shut up”, or “This traffic is so bad”, or “This queue is not
moving!” or, “Gosh! I hate it when he/she is late” or “Parking is always so terrible here”.
Do any or a lot of these statements feel familiar? Well, these are all statements of
resisting the present.

To start in this practice of acceptance, start with noticing your internal dialogue. And
when you notice that your internal chatter is in resistance to the present, simply allow
yourself to come back to the moment by noticing what is going on now. Use your
senses to increase your sensory awareness off the moment and accept what is
happening.

It is this conflict and resistance to the present that is the major reason for the mental
suffering that people experience. When we resist something, we fight back, internally
or externally. We get into negative thinking about a situation or person or even about
ourselves. And when that happens, we can go into the mode of trying to force
something to be how we want it to be instead of taking the time to understand a
situation or person fully. This can give way for conflict and stress to arise. To have
better clarity of what is happening, acceptance is key.

This acceptance allows us to exercise more flexibility in our responses and gives us
more clarity in thinking about the many choices we can actually make in the present
moment.

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7. LETTING GO: Letting go in the context of mindfulness is the opposite of holding on
to something tightly. It is the letting go of set ideas, beliefs, concepts or perceptions.
We tend to hold on to pleasant feelings, thoughts and situations. We want them to
repeat and so we live in the past and try to relive these experiences. And when the
present does not match up, we get disappointed.

Sometimes, we hold on to unpleasant feelings and thoughts. This makes us harbor

negative feelings which we can’t let go off, which many people call emotional
baggage.When we are not letting go of what we don’t want, we resist harder when a
situation we do not like arises. This causes emotional and mental suffering.

We all experience thoughts, people, situations and emotions that we want to avoid
because it is too confronting, emotional or mentally frustrating. In mindfulness, we let
go and experience things as they are without wanting to hold on to anything nor
wanting to push anything away. We let go and let being happen. We allow the
experience of the present moment unfold .

In her blog, Michele Zakashansky writes, “On the intellectual level, we are able to
understand that there cannot be grasping without pain. You only have to squeeze your
hand in to a fist, to feel the contraction in your body. Despite this logical understanding,
we have a very difficult time actually applying this knowledge in our lives. When this
duality is understood on a deep intuitive level, we begin to unbind our hearts and live
more joyful lives.”

Try to experience a day when you are observing your mind and how it is often holding
on to beliefs and thoughts about everything. Remembering to let go means that we can
let things be as there are without judgement. We do not have to force things to be the
way we want them to be or avoid what we don’t want to happen.

By letting go, we practice a sense of detachment to our thinking which helps us not to
identify with our thoughts. This non-attachment to the mind identification process can
make way for mindfulness. That way, thoughts do not have to define us and we
understand thought are merely transitory thinking. They do not have to define us in any
way. The metaphor often used is that of our breath. We have to let go of our breath in
order to take in another breath. So if we come back to our breathing and remind
ourselves that holding on to our breath is counter productive, we can do the same with
our thoughts. By letting go we trust the present process.

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8. GRATITUDE:

The practice of gratitude has been talked about by almost all personal development
coaches. And this practice cannot be undermined because many of us do take so
many things for granted. Being in the present moment is about experiencing the depth
of each moment with a sense of gratitude. Gratitude for being alive, for being able to
experience this moment.

For too many people complaining is a favourite past time. Being seeped in gratitude
lets us break away from this complaining attitude which only fosters more negative
thoughts. Breaking away from complaining and choosing to be grateful instead helps
us be more present about what is happening right now. So slow down and remember
that in each moment, there are more things to be grateful for than to complain about.

Even when a challenging situation arises, there are other things in life we can be
grateful for. We can even be grateful for the challenge that is helping to push us out of
our comfort zone in order to grow. Life’s changes are constant and curve balls are part
of life. If we can practice gratitude, we can learn to embrace the good and bad with a
sense of equanimity.

9. GENEROSITY:

Generosity is the selfless act of giving joy to someone else because you can. The act of
being present with someone is a real gift to that person. Many times we are in our own
heads and wondering how we sound or how we look or how we come across to the
other person. This is not being generous.

To be generous is to be immersed in the experience with the person you are with and
to be caring and attentive to that person. To give that person the full care and attention
and presence they deserve. You do this, not because you can be complimented or be
validated for it later, but to simply make them feel joy. 


An authentic interconnectedness can surface with we communicate with people

generously and with presence. Your mind and heart is open to them for a deeper
connection to be made.

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