Learn Mindfullness
Three Pillars Of Mindful Awareness
Three building blocks of Mindfulness are:
1. Concentration
2. Equanimity
3. Sensory Acuity.
1. Concentration
Concentration is focus. Focus is an ability to hold your attention on a specific, chosen object.
Why concentration?
In general, if you ask successful people how they achieved any kind of success. They will probably tell you they had to be laser focused on certain activities and goals in their mind. There is a famous story floating around, where someone asked Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, to write on individual pieces of paper what was their key to success in life. Without talking to each other, they both wrote "focus".
Ability to focus can be applied to any endeavor in life. If you are focused, you can become a great basketball player like Kobe Bryant. If you are focused you can learn to play piano, if you are focused on your business plan you can build a successful company. If you are focused you can carry a full glass of water across the room without spilling a drop.
Now imagine playing a piano while distracted, because you're talking on a phone and at the same time eating a sandwich... I don't think it would come out right! lol
Focus is a very very fundamental human skill. Arguably its probably one of the most important ones.
Focus in Meditation
Concentration to our sensory awareness is like a microscope that you would use to look at some object really really closely.
On a surface you might see a drop of water. But if you use a microscope- you will see much more than just a drop of water. You might see some little organisms swimming around, you might see some little particles. And if you choose to zoom in even more, you might see the molecules, or even atoms that water molecule is built from.
Similarly, when one has an ability to focus. One can apply that skill to closer observe their sensory experience. Which is a very necessary tool to be used when meditating. When you can closely observe what goes on in your sensory experience. You can start separating the building blocks of what that experience is built from.
Which in turn allows for a clearer awareness and ability to separate our senses, instead of allowing them to take us over all at once. Which often happens when strong emotions are present. More on that later.
How can you get better at concentration?
Just like the ability to play a violin, painting art or ballroom dancing are learnable skills. So is concentration. The more you do it, the better you get at it. In fact it is often comparable to muscles. The more you train the muscles, the stronger and quicker they become. Same applies to concentration. It takes some guidance and some practice at first and anyone can learn it. Anyone can master it. It takes effort, but anyone can do it if they put their mind to it...
Prayer of Quiet ©
One of the more important milestones in meditation is achieving a high state of concentration. If you tried meditation at some point in your life. You probably know that sitting still in one place with your eyes closed is not the most easiest task in the world. All because you mind starts to go at 100 miles an hour in different directions and you starting thinking of a 1000s better things you could and NEED to do other than sit on a soft cushion doing nothing! That is whats called a monkey mind. It happens to everyone...
What is the antidote to monkey mind? Its concentration. The more you focus, the less monkey mind. The less monkey mind, the more concentration. The more concentration, the closer to the Prayer Of Quiet ©.
Prayer Of Quiet © is a state of high concentration which means no monkey mind. No wandering, no other thoughts, just pure concentration on whatever object you choose to focus. It is attainable and it is rather rewarding. This is what you should strive for and that is the goal of practice of concentration.
2. Equanimity
Equanimity - means letting things unfold as they come without resisting...
We often tend to want to control our reality. After all this is how the world is built and progress is made. Yet when it comes to our senses, they usually come uninvited, simply because of cause and effect. Something happens and we respond. The dog starts to bark at you as you walk by the fence, you jump and might feel scared for a moment. You did not invite the feeling of fear. It happened because it was triggered by an external event (dog barking. It came seemingly out of nowhere.
Now of course, after realizing what happened, you can try to resist feeling being scared, perhaps, because you were taught not to show fear. So you would repress it and pretend you are not fearful. However that would not be very equanimous. With equanimity you would just let the fear be... for as long as its there, until it fades and disappears into nothingness.
Another way to explain equanimity is a saying by Byron Katie(she has a book with that title too) that goes: "Loving what is"...
You might think of it as - accepting things for what they are. No matter the experience, painful or pleasant, you don't resist it, you don't wish for it to go away, you just feel it, experience it, enjoy it, embrace it, you let it unfold and you let it pass when its done running its course...
That is what being equanimous means.
In meditation opportunities to practice it are revealed during the longer sitting sessions, when your legs get numb, your legs start to ache or you get strong desire quit or during other intense feelings . Equanimity is what you apply during those moments where instead of enduring discomfort or pain and resisting it, you just accept that it is there and don't let it affect you. It is definitely easier said than done, especially in the beginning of your meditation journey. But equanimity is also a learnable skill and needs to be practiced in order to deepen its application and your ability to apply it to various sensory experiences - both pleasant and unpleasant.
When applied to pain- equanimity means reduction in suffering
When applied to pleasant sensation- equanimity means more enjoyment and satisfaction.
3. Sensory Acuity
We all posses 6 different senses(Seeing, Hearing, Feeling, Smell, Taste, Thought) that we use interchangeably, on moment by moment basis that our total human experience is comprised of. That is why we humans happen to be kind of the same, yet also very different. Two people can listen to the same song on the radio. One person will be falling asleep, while the other person will be singing the song when driving, while the people in the car next at the red light, thinking if they are maybe a little crazy. It is because we all have different preferences of which senses we tend to use the most and the way we use and express those senses happens to be the foundation of our personalities. That's why you have visual people who can notice many details, or you have feeling people who are more sensitive to emotions of others, or you have musicians who have a gift or trained themselves to learn the science of the sounds they hear.
Those are of course are pretty general examples. When it comes to our emotions, which are one of the more primordial elements of our beings. Things can get a bit-a lot more intricate.
You've probably heard an expression -sensory overload. It might occur when many different senses are stimulated simultaneously, usually with strong intensity. Maybe at the concert or during some movie, or maybe a roller coaster. Or maybe when get very very angry at someone and emotions flood your awareness maximally.
During those extreme types of moments few of our senses often operate at full capacity. They overwhelm us to the point where you might even lose track of what is happening. It is because those sensory experiences happen all at once. Hence our brain experiences a sort of overload. It loses track of what is happening. As result, you might get dizzy, you might need to sit down and unwind or you might need to splash your face with some cold water- so you can "come back to your senses". We have all been there. These were extreme examples.
More often though, the tangled sensations happen almost all the time, but on a more subtle level.
Sensory Clarity In Meditation
When practicing Sensory Acuity, we train our awareness to pay attention to the individual senses and what they sense in those specific moments, without the separate senses being tangled together.
So say a situation where you thought of your ex- who cheated on you, suddenly.... Obviously it might make you feel very angry (even though it happened few months ago), it makes you feel hurt, it makes you feel disappointed, your hands might start shaking, your voice might start choking, you might feel the pressure in your tentacles, or you might even start losing your mind at that precise moment while pacing down in your living room.
If you think about it. It is a type of a sensory overload of some sort when all of those feelings are taking place in the same moment. And sensory acuity (along with concentration) helps us break those different components into separate individual experiences.
See...
Thinking of someone (your ex) that might cause you to feel angry- is what goes on with one sense only (Thinking).
Feeling a feeling of anger is a separate sense also (Feeling).
Remembering the sound of your ex's voice when they blatantly denied the wrongdoing is a separate sense as well (Hearing -internal)
When they are all happening at once - it tends to overwhelm us.
What is the purpose of breaking down sensory components individually?
It is done for the purpose of not being carried away by strong feelings or uncontrollable emotions, which over time might have even turned into destructive habits. When you are able to break down your experience into separate components. They tend to lose their invisible power over you.
Just because you remember in your thoughts what your ex did- after all it is just a thought.
Just because you feel certain way when you remember what they've done, after all it is just a feeling sensation somewhere in your body.
Just because you remember the sound of their voice when they said it, after all it is just an audible sense within your memory. It is just an auditory sensation.
Hence when you shine the light of mindfulness to separate all these sensory experiences, they no longer have power to overload you. Because you see them for what they are - 3 distinct happenings, which DO NOT HAVE TO BE MIXED TOGETHER. It is rather freeing.