Mindfulness: What is it?
Acceptance - an attitude of openness and welcoming to present moment reality.
Patience – an understanding that things can only emerge in their own time
Beginner’s mind – a willingness to see everything as if for the first time, and the ability to bring freshness, clarity and vitality to experience rather than seeing things through a fog of preconceptions. In this way mindfulness practice enables us to develop a perspective that is not based on our history.
Trust – developinga faith in the validity of one’s own thoughts, feelings and intuition.
Non-striving – an attitude of willingness to allow the present to be the way it is, and ‘having no goal other than for you to be yourself’
Letting go – the development of an ability to acknowledge the arising and passing of experience without becoming entangled in the content of it.
Commitment, self-discipline and intentionality – the development of an intentionality and firmness about staying with the process of investigation of personal experience.
Kabat-Zinn J. Full ‘Full Catastrophe living’. New York: Delta; 1990 as cited in therapy today December ’06- Vol 17, No 10.