This is about people regulating their attention as in these modern times there is so much stimulation that our human brains are stressing out and losing the ability to focus our attention. This kind of stress leads to effects that include aggressive behaviors and sometimes violence. To regulate our attention is how we benefit from mindfulness while limiting the impact of stressful and harmful experiences. Our minds in this modern technological and social revolution is bombarded constantly by stimuli so creating the ability to remain in the moment using mindfulness will enable us to recognize where our attention has gone and why it is being drawn away from what is important.
Mindfulness, the term, comes from a language of early Buddhism, it refers to memory. Mindfulness is about recollected over forgetful, collected and gathered together rather than remain scattered and apart.
Being mindful is creating a narrow field of attention, such as threading through the eye of a needle but it is also seeing a broader view, such as observing the whole continuous stream of consciousness.
Nowhere else is it more critical to have a focused, in the moment, mindfulness where a practitioner must be mindful of both their inner self and the outer world of others. Such as the egoistic feelings one might have when encountered by someone rude and insensitive or when you have to deal with road rage of the inattentive truck driver who is moving closer to your lane on a rainy highway.
Mindfulness isn't about changing ones experiences or behaviors, which is another aspect of training and practice. It is a means of being more receptive and accepting to the stimuli not just happening in your environment but also in your mind. When the outside triggers certain self-soothing thoughts inside. It is not judging or directing but holding your reactions in an awareness that itself is never disturbed by what ever passes through it.
With mindfulness, you can detect when certain glitches and triggers hit, step back from your reactions, observe that with a more peaceful, focused and centered mind more in the logic rather the monkey brain. It is about learning to accept stimuli regardless of negativity so you don't identify with it and then achieve a more valid, appropriate and efficient way to act in accordance with said stimuli instead of falling into the monkey's emotionally driven egoistic reactions that cause our defenses to fail us.
Being mindful is being in the moment without the dominating effect of emotions, emotional maturity if you will, while moving about the cabin of your environment encountering others and while communication with others, while making choices, and while accomplishing one thing after another.
In defense-protection martial arts and karate people need to train, practice, exercise and apply skills all meant to deal appropriately, accurately and within legal and social requirements meaning, for mindfulness, exercising and practice mindful present moment brain work like your daily exercise of muscles, tendons, and the skeletal systems. You need to make it a part of your training and practice regimen but to truly achieve success and master you should, like all the other martial skills, apply them to all facets of your life outside the dojo.
It is about time, repetitive application and making it a regular part of that daily life that will spell out success. Like all things it takes time and over time one develops a continuity of mindfulness that provides us with a quality of sustained presences that is grounded and unwavering. It is about making mindfulness a conditioned response to all sorts of stimuli, or triggers, so it becomes, “Habit!”
How do we create mindfulness, first is to reduce distractions. Be creative and develop your own ways to reduce distractions. Lean how to mediate for instance then use your phones reminder app to trigger chimes throughout your day that will remind you to meditate for several minutes, like taking a very quick coffee break (also a way to be mindful by concentrating on the hot coffee taste, etc.) and using deep slow diaphragmatic breathing while focusing your mind on counting your breathes in and breathes out. Be creative! Be especially mindful on training to be mindful whenever more negative triggers set off emotional responses. Start with the little one’s and make them triggers and as you achieve more successes then let the bigger triggers also trigger mindfulness. The more exposure to the more emotional oriented triggers the better you can be mindful before the really big adrenal stress chemical dump type triggers hit that would need that mindful, present moment, mind to deal with aggression and violence through things like avoidance, escape and evasion, and de-escalation - before you find yourself going hands on.
Speaking again of meditation, there is a secret to that and it is simple. Keep your meditation as simple and easy as you can. It is when we make things complicated and often complex that they become burdensome and unwieldy thus ending up lost in the mire that is modern distracting stimulus overload. Meditation as is mindfulness as is being in the present moment only takes a few short minutes of practice a few times a day and every day to achieve success.
A good example is like having to give a talk so you take a few minutes just before going in front of strangers, take deep breathes slowly and deeply, relax the facial muscles then the shoulder and back and finally the arms and chest, eyes slightly closed and focus the mind on counting your breathes to ready the mind and thus the body to handle it with mindfulness and total focus on the objective in the moment.
Mindfulness can be further explained through other more esoteric terms and definitions you will find when we cover the fundamental principles of these martial arts and karate practices toward defense-protection.
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