Tag Archive for: wisdom

Mindful lessons from Star Wars: A New Hope

Mindfulness teacher Shane Ledford shares mindful lessons that can be found in the movie Star Wars: A New Hope

Cultivating Five Inner Strengths: Wisdom

Wisdom is one of the Five Inner Strengths that can be cultivated to help us in our mindfulness journey.

Cultivating Five Inner Strengths

The five inner strengths are interconnected beneficial qualities that steady the mind and support our mindfulness practice so we might live in closer alignment with our deepest values.

Who Decides? Mindfulness of Multiplicity, Interdependence and Agency

We like to believe we are the authors of our own actions, but research is showing us behavior is complicated. Fortunately, mindfulness can help us make the subconscious processes that drive our impulses more conscious and intentional.

Wise Perspective: Seeing Things Clearly

Our perspective becomes the scaffolding for our practice, and at the same time, our practice helps us develop clearer understanding and wiser ways of relating with ourselves and the world around us.

Mindfully Embracing Our Role in the Web of Existence

Mindfulness can help us live more fulfilling lives through developing a more accurate understanding of and inviting an active interest in the intertwined causes and conditions that create suffering and make happiness possible.

Patience Now, My Friends

We can cultivate the attitudes of mindfulness, such as patience and trust, through the most humble of life's lessons when we're open to it - including in the blooming of the last lotus of the season.

Cultivating Contemplative Skills

Contemplative learning and practice integrate introspection and direct experience, cultivating wisdom through the development of fundamental skills supporting individual and collective wellbeing. Mindfulness is an essential component underlying all of these skills.

Love, Empowerment and Clarity: The Mindful Trinity

Compassion as love, benevolence as empowerment, and wisdom as clarity are beneficial qualities cultivated through mindfulness that can help us make the world a better place.

Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI), or the awareness of and ability to modulate emotions and interact with others empathetically, is positively correlated in the research with mindfulness and meditation practice. Cultivating EI helps us communicate, manage stress, and solve problems more effectively.

Are Good Intentions Enough?

Even when we are in touch with our intentions and they are good, our compassionate actions can be unskillful. Mindfulness, discernment, balance and equanimity in the face of suffering are also important factors in increasing the likelihood that our helping will be truly helpful.

Opening to Truth

Like a tailor makes a “bespoke suit” for a particular customer, our unexamined minds have a tendency tailor our own “bespoke truth” that satisfies our preferences. But, when we ignore or exclude aspects of reality that we don't prefer, we miss out on important information that could be helpful in making wise choices.

Embodying What We Teach

While there is great value in the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, no teacher is as potent an instructor as lived experience. In mindfulness training, knowledge arises out of the direct experience of the teacher's own mindfulness practice and is transmitted through one's embodiment of these attitudes and practices. The teacher isn't an expert per se, but a fellow traveler on a shared journey.

The Bottom Line is Mindfulness

Mass mindlessness causes great suffering for ourselves and other living beings. Maintaining a personal mindfulness practice may be one of the most important things we can do to liberate ourselves and the world from the tyranny of our own unexamined minds.

The Power of Intention

Intention is the driver behind action and our ethics inform our intentions. Together these concepts are important because they orient us and point us in a certain direction. Aligning our mindfulness practice with our highest values helps us step out of the cycle of suffering and live with greater purpose.

The Mindfulness Spiral

When we are operating on autopilot, we are vulnerable to being caught up in a self-perpetuating downward spiral of reactivity that, for some people, can lead to depression and anxiety. Training in mindfulness can help disrupt this painful pattern. A self-perpetuating upward spiral gains momentum, cultivating greater equanimity and wellbeing.

Evidence vs Intuition

"Listen to your gut" can be dubious advice. Mindfulness can increase awareness of our gut instincts and allow us to include other important information that may be available in a given situation. This helps us respond with greater wisdom and increases the likelihood that outcomes will be more satisfying for all involved.

Is Anyone Beyond Compassion?

The practice of mindfulness can help us pause before reacting impulsively to acts of aggression or hatred. This makes space for considering the many choices available to us for responding with skill and wisdom. Evidence throughout history and in the research demonstrates that a more reasoned and compassionate response leads to better long term outcomes for us all.