Your experience with mindfulness

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Hello!

My ASD assessment came with a number of recommendations including relaxation and mindfulness as a way to deal with medical phobias and anxiety. For me there is a neat center in my city offering a mindfulness program and the service is covered by medicare (yay Canada!). I am looking into it and would be curious to know what your experience has been with mindfulness?

Many thanks!

I don't have an autism diagnosis. Since I have anxiety disorders and am very analytical, I started mindfulness to get out of my own head.

I definitely find it helpful. It changes my focus, either to my breath or my feelings, or to external things like sounds or objects around me. There are also some fun exercises you can do with food. The whole idea is to experience, rather than focusing on thoughts. You don't judge the thoughts or try to do anything with them, just change focus and let them go if you can.

Is that what you wanted to know?

I highly suggest reading [or listening to audio books of] Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now and A New Earth, as well as Depac Chopra's The Way of The Wizard, as all three books are tremendously helpful in regards to mindfulness and other important topics.

A wonderful therapist who I did weekly sessions with for a long time encouraged me to explore mindfulness in response to many things, I have done yoga for a number of years and I kind of tie my thought wandering and discipline I conduct via my yoga hours into the notion which I seem to carry like a cloud that can do many things and it all flows along in a neat system that has served me well whenever I am troubled and need to explore, sometimes I need it as a break, sometimes I need it to reinforce my progress, sometimes when I am having a panic attack nothing works better than picking up and smelling grass or my crystals and thinking ''This is where I am/This is where I have reached/This particular object represents x'' I dunno I'm kinda waffling.

Mindfulness meditation and swimming long distance, remedy most of my anxiety symptoms, these days...

Mindfulness is the new fad. In Zen meditation, mindfulness leads to the realization that there is no mind one can be "full" within. Mindlessness then prevails and leads to happiness, since it's the mind and it's thoughts that makes us unhappy.

I did Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (also known as "DBT") when I was 16, and they put a lot of emphasis on mindfulness. I would say DBT was pretty helpful, I made some good friends there too. The mindfulness was always tricky for me, but I think I got better at it over time.

I woudn't call the idea behind mindfullness to be a fad. The NAME is a fad. But the idea is crazy old. The mindfullness name is just applied to a modern form that is tailored to modern, western tastes.

My experience is really good. In fact, I would say this kind of stuff has really saved my life. You have to be careful about the crazies at the fringe of the movement, but that's pretty much true for everything.

There's nothing new about mindfulness. It's just the modern, secular name for what religions refer to as prayer or meditation. Practitioners and health services have simply repackaged it for use among those who don't belong to a religion, and charge handsomely for it.

But if it works for you, and you don't have to pay for it, then why not.

I'm writing an essay about Shintoism that I'm linking to mindfulness. I hope I can negotiate with the teacher so that I can write it how I want it and not just use the textbooks [which I don't even have yet, since I joined late!]

As long as you know the term is a bait and switch. Meditation on the mind is a trick. Using the mind to find the mind is a futile effort, and deliberately so. But maybe I shouldn't say anything. People have to realize this on their own.

^Well said! Well said.

All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.
You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.

[various quotations from Eckhart Tolle]

I've found it very helpful. It's a lot of work to make sure I practice it enough, but if I'm just starting to get stressed and I do mindfulness, the stress lowers a lot more effectively than if I just tried to distract myself instead.

Yes! Exactly. It is a trick. There is no mind to meditate on. But that's advanced stuff. Most people just want to practice chilling a little with the hopes they will have fewer panic attacks, or a better way to zone out when sensory overwhelm gets too harsh.

Medication has been a part of many religions for all of recorded history. (Including Christianity - look for the phrase "contemplative prayer.") There are some groups that use meditation as a hook that they use on new people until they draw you in. Then they start doing the crazy controlling stuff. That's really bad and it's good to be aware of this. But most meditation teachers are good hearted and not looking to get you to donate all of your worldly possessions to them and go work on their farm for free. The phrase mindfullness is particularly good right now for indicating that its a secular meditation scheme.

Started attending a meditation group around 20 years ago after going through some silly teenage moments (drugz, stealing, eating disorders) and have gone on and off since then depending on if I feel I need it. I should get back to it really, deffo helps to calm my somewhat wandering and frantic mind.

I prefer breathing techniques but I do like the part where they talk about looking around the room and naming things. It helps one not focus on what's bothering them.