MINDFULNESS

MINDFULNESS
According to the publication made on healthdirect website @ healthdirect.gov.au
Mindfulness is paying full attention to what is going on in you and outside you, moment by moment, without judgment. It means you observe your thoughts, feelings, and the sensations of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. You are also fully aware of your surroundings.
Mindfulness involves paying attention to what is going on inside and outside ourselves, moment by moment.
It’s easy to stop noticing the world around us. It’s also easy to lose touch with the way our bodies are feeling and to end up living “in our heads” – caught up in our thoughts without stopping to notice how those thoughts are driving our emotions and behavior.
Mindfulness does not try to quiet your mind or control your experience — you just observe what is happening in the moment.
However, anyone can practice mindfulness to improve their self-awareness
One of the Program for Ignatian Mindfulness, framed by the Ignatian charisms of care of the whole person and people for others and with others, the Program for Ignatian Mindfulness unites the concepts of mindfulness and discernment. Saint Ignatius calls us to surrender to more fully receive love and grace. The three pillars of the program are:
Pause: Creating a space without judgments or attachments to appreciate the whole person
Presence: Bringing attention to the moment by noticing one’s thoughts and surroundings
Peace: Imagining empathy, and compassion for self and others through contemplation and wellbeing.
Mindfulness promotes meditation, even though these two terms have their similarities, we should cover what separates them.

Mindfulness requires us to be aware of what’s around us and how our bodies feel. Meditation is a practice that reels in our thoughts to calm the mind
According to Sofia Carozza on one of his articles titled Catholic Schools and the Values of Mindfulness, mindfulness meditations typically involve sitting calmly and attending to the breath—not fighting one’s thoughts, but simply drawing one’s attention back to the present moment.
Catholic schools, whose highest task is to open the souls of their students to the life of God, have an urgent responsibility to offer a positive and coherent account of reality, as well as the means to learn it. When this is absent, the young person is vulnerable to implicit formation in the metaphysical worldviews that underlie the popular practices of the time. Such is the case with the mindfulness movement, whose uncritical embrace can produce three devastating losses in the life of a student.

The first loss incurred by the uncritical practice of mindfulness is the weakening of judgment.

The baseline cognitive state of most human beings is a mental chatter that includes not just observations but conclusions about the meaning and value of what one thinks and observes. To receive the information and act on it appropriately, one first needs to evaluate the truth and goodness of the thoughts, considering their content and rejecting what is false or worthless. Detached awareness may be a helpful first step toward that end, especially for those whose internal life is agitated or chaotic. But if this awareness remains non-judgmental, the mind and heart are abandoned to the anarchy of the instincts and hampered in their pursuit of the good.
As a student, staff, priest, religious, management, father, mother, aunty, sibling or any status, we really need to be mindful of our life, we shouldn’t wait till something happens just like during the covid 19 pandemic, institutions of all kinds endorsed the practice of “mindfulness” as the antidote to the uncertainty and insecurity it has engendered , it also expected we apply the practice of mindfulness in our environment and this practice will help us to guide our mental health and in guiding our mental health we will be able to think right, feel right.

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Okafor Johnsteve udochukwu