Enjoy a Mini-Mindfulness Meditation The benefits of mindfulness Let me tell you something; when I first started to do this thing called mindfulness, I didn’t get it. I sat there, trying to focus on the breath, spending half the time wondering if I was going it right and, more importantly, why I was doing this in the first place? What was the point? It wasn’t until I did some study with Dr Russ Harris that it all began to make sense when he started to talk about ‘the distraction’. Go back thousands of years in time, it was ‘distractions’ that kept you alive. The sound of a bush rustling could mean a tiger or a neighbouring villager coming to attack you and so being able to focus on distractions was something that activated the flight, fight or freeze mechanism that we’re hard-wired with and potentially saved us. Now, we don’t have tigers and villagers in bushes, but that hard-wired mechanism still exists and still serves a purpose. When we anticipate that something is wrong, our natural fight, flight or freeze response kicks in. The problem is this; what if it goes off over everything? Even the things that it shouldn’t?…
