What is Mindfulness?

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5 Ways to Know Yourself
as a Spiritual Being

5 Ways to Know Yourself as a Spiritual Being

Basic Mindfulness Training is built around five core practices. You don’t necessarily have to learn all five, although most people like to at least sample them all. Because these practices are strongly contrasting, the chances are very good that even if you don’t take to all of them, at least one or two will really work for you. Furthermore, if a particular practice doesn’t work at a given time, then it’s very likely that one of the other four will.

A practice is said to "work" if, in a reasonable time frame, it delivers one or several of the following.

• Reduction of your physical or emotional suffering

• Elevation of your physical or emotional fulfillment

• Deeper knowledge of who you are

• Positive changes in your objective behavior

I refer to these core techniques as the "5 Ways of Basic Mindfulness."

Each of the 5 Ways plays four roles.

• Each is a skill-building exercise –A way to strengthen your concentration, clarity and equanimity muscles.

• Each is a basic response strategy –A way to deal with life’s challenges and utilize nature’s grace.

• Each is a way to know yourself –Revealing a facet of your spiritual essence.

• Each is a tradition –A modern and secular reworking of one of the basic approaches to enlightenment developed historically within Buddhism and other Eastern (as well as Western) traditions.

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