“Mindfulness therapy is gaining headway in many areas of psychology, and now there’s more evidence to back up its effectiveness. A new study published the Archives of General Psychiatry finds that depression patients in remission who underwent mindfulness therapy did as well as those who took an antidepressant, and better than those who took a placebo. That means that mindfulness therapy was as effective as antidepressants in protecting against a relapse of depression. Mindfulness generally refers to the concept of being present and in the moment, and comes from the Buddhist meditation tradition.”

When I first started meditating over 3 decades ago in Northern England, it was almost unheard of. So I found myself having to explain myself again and again… “What on earth is “meditation”?! And the question behind the question, “Are you weird or something?” My preferred option: I avoided bringing the subject up. But in the intervening years there has been a rapidly growing number of studies showing its benefits as attested to by science and medicine, and so the answers are easy; I can just point people in that direction. “Yeah, it is a bit different, but it works and you can do it too.”

One reason meditation works is because it helps us control our mind such that we don’t have to think the thoughts we don’t want to think.

Mindfulness overcomes distractions — which are all those thoughts we don’t want to think but can’t help thinking if we have a distracted mind. And having to think negative and depressed thoughts all day is clearly no fun.

Being able to meditate on an object is a bit like parking your car home in the driveway after you’ve been on a way too long car journey and it has been hell, full of traffic, wrong turnings, road rage, bad weather, stress, accidents, exhaustion, boredom… Once you find your meditation object — whether it is simply the breath or something that transforms your mind from negative to positive — you can stop everything and relax into it. Really relax. Smile inside. Chill. You’re home.

Dealing with distractions may seem to be hard, especially at first; but that is only if we are more interested in the distractions than in the meditation object. Thoughts are a natural function of the mind and, until we are a very good meditator, will continue to arise in the background even when we are concentrating on one object. However, we don’t need to follow those thoughts, and especially we don’t need to fight with them (they always win. Once we’ve engaged them, they’ve already won.)

We just let our thoughts go, one traditional analogy being focusing on the clear blue sky without dwelling on the clouds. If we are more interested in absorbing into the spacious blue sky than busily following the scudding clouds, the clouds will not disturb our concentration, even if they appear.

Another analogy for our thoughts is water bubbles. They naturally dissolve back into the water from which they arose without our having to do anything, and thoughts naturally dissolve back into the clarity of the mind without our having to make them do it.

That same article remarks:

“One drawback with mindfulness is that it can be a struggle to find time for it, Segal said. You have to carve out 30 to 40 minutes per day to do the meditations on your own, according to this particular regimen. But it can become part of a plan to take care of yourself, he said.”

In fact, even ten minutes can make an astonishingly big difference. And the interesting thing is how much time we waste at the moment thinking thoughts we don’t want to think, which makes our time at work and at home unnecessarily stressful and unproductive. If we can think the thoughts we want to think all day long, we will find an incredible amount of space and time opening up in our lives, well worth the investment of time in meditation.

To begin a meditation practice, see this article: Meditation: simple, easy instructions for getting started.

See also How to meditate for other meditation articles.

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