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Hi, Nick Grabovac here, your personal guide to the art and science of mindfulness.
This video is all about how to use meditation to build your mindfulness skills.
If you haven’t yet watched my video about what mindfulness is, you may want to check
that one out first, since it will help you understand much better what I’m going to
show you in this video.
Let me start by saying that there are many ways to develop mindfulness skills. I’m
going to focus on meditation in this video, and I’ll cover the other ways in future
videos, so keep your eye out for those.
So, why meditation?
Well, I like to make an analogy with training for sports. I’m an avid rock climber, so
I’ll use rock climbing as my example.
If you want to get really good at climbing, you need to train a bunch of different things,
including movement technique, finger strength, power and so on. Obviously, just by climbing
a lot, you will train all of those different things, but if you want to get better as efficiently
as possible, you need to isolate those different parts and train them individually, in an ideal
environment like a climbing gym. Then, when you get back outside on the rock, you can
use your newly developed skills to climb more difficult things.
The same applies to mindfulness, which is very much a trainable skill.
You will definitely improve this skill just by being mindful as you go about your day.
But, if you want to fast-track your skill development, you need to be like an athlete
and simplify conditions so you can isolate and then practice your skills in an ideal
environment. That’s what meditation does.
Improving your mindfulness skills through meditating makes it easier to then use those
skills during your day when you’re not meditating.
Ok, now that you know why meditation is useful, let’s cover some of the basic setup for
your practice.
The absolutely, hands-down, most important thing about meditation, is that you need to
do it every day! You need to be consistent. No excuses! It doesn’t have to be a long
time, even a few minutes in your parked car is better than nothing. But you need to do
it every day. I can’t stress this enough!
Why is this so important?
Well, remember that mindfulness is a skill. Just like learning to play the piano. If you
practice everyday, assuming you’re practicing correctly, you’ll get better and better
and eventually be able to play beautiful music. If you only practice here and there, when
you happen to be in the mood, you won’t improve much and it will be a long time before
you have enough skill to play something like Rachmaninov’s Prélude in C sharp minor.
[PAUSE for MUSIC – play chopsticks] Meditation is similar.
The other super important thing is to practice correctly. You can practice 3 hours a day,
but if you’re not practicing the right way, all that time and effort will be wasted. Let’s
make sure that doesn’t happen to you!
I’ve been doing this meditation thing for a long time, over 20 years, And, I actually spent a lot of that time in wasted effort,
because I wasn’t practicing correctly. But, once I learned how to meditate properly, I
improved my skills dramatically. In only a few months, I made more progress than I had
made in the previous several years! That’s the difference that precise instructions can
make!
The type of mindfulness meditation that made all the difference for me and that I teach
is called noting practice and it’s very simple.
During noting practice, you begin by paying attention to the physical sensations associated
with breathing, in particular you focus on the sensations in the abdominal area as you
inhale and exhale. As you pay attention to these sensations, you mentally label them,
which is why it’s called noting practice.
Noting practice is so effective because it strengthens your skill in all the components
that make up mindfulness. If you watched my video about what mindfulness is, you’ll
know that the components of mindfulness include alert observation, receptiveness and equanimity.
To observe something, you need to be able to direct your attention to your object of
interest, and hold it there for as long as you need to in order to be able to see it
clearly. Noting practice trains this ability by requiring you to perceive the sensations
you’re observing in enough detail and with enough clarity and longevity that you can
correctly label them.
Noting practice also trains receptiveness and equanimity, the ability to allow anything
to come into your awareness, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, and take an equal
interest in it. The act of mentally labeling what you’re observing increases both your
interoceptive awareness and your tolerance for intense sensations and emotions, improving
your ability to simply allow these sensations to arise and pass on their own, without your
interference. In fact, there have been many scientific studies showing that mental labeling
helps to reduce the perceived intensity of emotions and helps us to handle them better.
If you’d like to give this a try, you can download a set of free guided meditations
that teach you to use the noting technique on my website. Just go to 30daysofmindfulness.com/getguided
and follow the instructions. I’ve included a short instructional video there and two
mp3 files: a guided meditation for beginners, as well as one for those of you who have moved
past the beginner stage and are ready for something a little more challenging.
That’s it for this video. If you liked it, please give me a thumbs up here on youtube
and leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you. And subscribe to my channel to make sure
you don’t miss any new videos as they go live. I’m Nick Grabovac, Thanks for watching.