Mindfulness - The Royal Road to Fulfillment and Happiness

When I first encountered and started practicing mindfulness meditation 35 years ago, it was a very fragile seedling that had just been transplanted into America from Southeast Asia, where it had flourished for around 2500 years. As a spiritually-oriented psychologist and psychotherapist, I immediately recognized its tremendous potential not only for spiritual development, but also as an optimal solution for an extremely wide array of human mental and behavioral problems.

Since then, this initial vision has been strongly and repeatedly validated, and I have been delighted to watch mindfulness evolve rapidly from being obscure and off-beat into gaining a high degree of respect and popularity in mainstream medicine, psychology, sports, personal development, and education. I confidently predict that this evolution will continue to accelerate in the future for the very simple reason that mindfulness has such a wide range of major benefits for a majority of modern people, with no significant downside. I personally regard it as the single most valuable skill set that I have developed.

Quite apart from its 2500-year history in Asia as a means par excellence for facilitating spiritual development, it has now been shown to be equally robust in a wide range of purely secular applications in the west.

Here is a partial listing of these successful applications:

• Reducing/managing stress
• Coping with chronic physical pain
• Managing/resolving anxiety disorders, including panic attacks
• As an aid in cognitive therapy for depression and in relapse-prevention
• Helping to reverse eating disorders
• Increasing emotional stability in unstable personality disorders (e.g., in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy)
• As an aid in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders
• Improving athletic performance (e.g., Phil Jackson's coaching with the Chicago Bulls basketball team)
• Generally improving concentration and cognitive skills
• Increasing equanimity and the ability to cope with many kinds of adversity
• Enhancing one's capacity to be more present-centered, instead of being constantly caught up in reviewing the past and planning for the future--i.e., in implementing what Eckhart Tolle calls "the power of now"
• Providing a way of JUST BEING as an antidote to the frenetic drivenness of constant DOING
• Facilitating the development of emotional intelligence in children, including reduction in the symptoms of ADHD
• Significantly enhancing the functioning of brain centers that mediate love, compassion, and equanimity (as has now been well-documented in several major neuroscience research centers)
• Helping to reverse a wide range of behavioral and substance addictions/compulsions
• A powerful means of increasing ordinary happiness (enjoying the usual pleasures of life more fully), as well as extraordinary happiness (the capacity to live fully and meaningfully regardless of one's external life conditions)

In keeping with my passion for sharing mindfulness as fully as possible with interested others, I have created a blog that is dedicated to this end and which I invite you to visit.

George Shears is a retired psychologist, wellness consultant, and business coach. He has personally practiced mindfulness meditation for 35 years and pioneered the first Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program in Minnesota, starting in 1995. He can be contacted at:

651-204-0523
gshears@arrowheadtel.net
http://www.wisewaystohappiness.com/blog