Setting the mindfulness skill
Setting the skill of mindfulness is increasingly becoming a task of coaching and counseling on personal growth. In solving this problem, the method of keeping a diary or at least periodic fixation of experiences has proven itself perfectly. If you take this seriously and thoughtfully, with interest and desire, then in addition to describing events, there is also an analysis of the experience you receive. And already experience becomes the subject of attention, extraction, processing. It turns into the fuel of individual development.
If the events in the past made up some kind of experience, gave some valuable lesson, then it means that they were fully experienced, with meaning, with benefits and a foundation for the future. If the experienced event did not bring any experience then, then you need to try to extract his experience now, after reading the records of the past event, restoring details, feelings, cause-and-effect relationships as much as possible in memory. This is how the comprehension of life takes place. This is how awareness is gained in one of its meanings.
The fullness of the experience can be said not only in a purely rational sense, but also in an emotional one. If, for example, the purpose of our enterprise is to get aesthetic pleasure from visiting a museum, concert, excursion, meeting with a person you like, then the criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of such an enterprise is appropriate: how rich, bright, saturated emotions I received from it. Or it all turned out to be “faceless”. Often we hear, for example, “well, how do you like the movie? – yes, nothing!”. But from the point of view of full-blooded living of life as something wonderful, delicious, psychosomatic, the emotional value of experience is not inferior to its rational value.
Today’s understanding of success has become much deeper and more humanistic than it was quite recently – at the end of the last century. Now it is clear to everyone that success is not limited to material goods and money. Money is just empty signs in itself, which we exchange for emotions, as, in fact, time. There is hardly any doubt that a civilized person, no matter what he buys, ultimately buys the emotions that he forms as a result of consuming the acquired good. Why do we, for example, choose more expensive restaurants for ourselves, preferring them to economical meals at home or in canteens? Why do we wear branded items, in addition to their quality? Why do we go on vacation abroad, and not just sit in dachas? Why do we get high and drive? And what do old people lament, summing up the bleak results of their journey? These are all emotions, without which no life is unthinkable, especially an interesting, rich, full-fledged life. And such an option as mindfulness involves managing emotions.