Some More on Mindfulness
Thinking a little more about what I posted yesterday made me ponder what John Kabat-Zinn wrote in his book, Full Catastrophe Living. Kabat-Zinn, the director of the stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, uses mindfulness as the center of his program. Based on principles he has learned and synthesized from many places, Kabat-Zinn has developed a wondrous insight and wisdom about what helps bring about human health.

The Five Remembrances from yesterday can be an essential foundation to that mindfulness. Kabat-Zinn has seven foundations to mindfulness that includes two which fit the remembrances. These two are:

Acceptance:
Acceptance is seeing things as they actually are in the present. It does not mean that you have to like everything or take a passive attitude or feel hopeless. It simply means that you have a willingness to see things as they are at this moment. To do anything else is to be in denial (my word) of what is truly happening.

Letting Go:
This is non-attachment, letting our experiences be what they are from moment to moment. This is the natural outgrowth of acceptance truly and deeply practiced. When one sees things as they are and starts from an understanding that this is the way it is at this moment, we stop fighting the moment or seeking to hide our head in the sand.

But yes, I am an activist so I affirm again we are not talking about passiveness. We don’t know what needs changing- and what we have the ability to work to change- until we have discovered what is. That includes discovering ourselves- being mindful of who we are, where we fit in the great scheme of things, and what our skills, gifts, or even calling might be.

A number of years ago in the AA big book, one of the stories had a passage about all of this that has become a central focus for many people in recovery. Here is part of what it says:

Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today... I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposes to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake.
(p. 417 in 4th Edition)

Such can be the beginning of our own mindfulness and serenity.