Introduction to Mindfulness
Research Paper By Jaahnavi Katti
(True Life Purpose Coaching, India)
The world is all abuzz nowadays about mindfulness. This is a wonderful thing because we are sorely lacking, if not starving for some elusive but necessary element in our lives. We might even have a strong intuition on occasion that what is really missing in some profound way is us:
- our willingness or ability to show up fully in our lives and live them as if they really mattered, in the only moment we ever get, which is this one
- and that we are worthy of inhabiting life in this way and capable of it. This is a very brave intuition or insight, and it matters enormously. It could be world transforming. It is certainly profoundly nurturing and life-transforming for those who undertake it .........Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness has been featured recently on the cover of Time Magazine, at The World Economic Forum Davos,in the New York Times in just about every yoga studio around the globe. Google is holding mindfulness conferences, and so are General Mills and Twitter. Celebrities like Goldie Hawn, Lena Dunham and Kobe Bryant are singing its praises. Mindfulness experts like Jon Kabat-Zinn are more popular than ever.
We’re all reading about its extraordinary health benefits — physical, psychological and emotional – but the real question remains… Are we actually doing it?
My Journey as a Coach
The more I coached the more I realized the importance of being Mindful in Coaching. I am becoming aware coaching is all about the client’s journey, agenda, perspectives, goals and vision in the client‘s life. I realized how my mind was playing its tricks and coming in my way of being there for the client and allow the client to express in a safe space of non-judgemental listening. My own little voice in my mind was as usual playing tricks and not letting me be there. So I wondered what I could do to snub this little voice. The opportunity to learn to handle this little voice and show up for my client came by surprise when one fine day I had to create my power tool ’Being vs. Doing’ which I use for coaching my clients. I wanted to give the best coaching to my clients and so developed my coaching model ’FOCUS’ which shows my clients my coaching approach and my philosophy in life. While creating my power tool and model I evolved as a Coach and started realizing I need to be in a continuous state of awareness if I want to grow as a coach. I realized Mindfulness was what I was looking for and since I needed to be in the moment to be aware of my client’s needs and agenda, I started to take great interest in the subject of Mindfulness and joined a group of like minded coaches from around the world and we meet every week online to share and coach each other on ’Mindfulness’. We are following and implementing a book written by Mark Williams and Danny Penman.
An eight week plan for finding peace in a frantic world
There are Mindfulness meditations to be practised every week and we are as a group committed to be accountability partners. It is not easy to practise Mindfulness as we all realized how much we operate on Auto Pilot and our habits came in our way .We all noticed small things like keeping too may tabs open on the computer, not resting when we were tired but mindlessly working or indulging in some activity and keeping ourselves busy were practices which were not serving us and we became aware how our minds can slip into the old patterns and so we need to make deliberate attempts to be Mindful and do the meditation and practise it throughout the day consciously like during walking, during our daily rituals, our work and our daily conversations. Simple actions I practised like changing the place I normally sit for the majority of time changed my perspective and made me mindful.
Mindfulness started becoming a way of life for me as a Coach.
Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging. It is the focusing of attention and awareness. As a group we started sharing our thoughts and discussed how we can apply it in the coaching .But we realized we need to take baby steps first and started applying in our personal life as well. I observed I was becoming very harsh on myself by feeling bad when I observed myself not being mindful. So I realized I need to be gentle and not push myself too hard and when I was gentle with myself I realized I was being gentle with others who were not mindful or with Myself when I was not mindful. Actually I started becoming mindful about Mindfulness itself. Mindfulness started becoming a practice. It is about me being awake, aware and living my life intentionally. I am now intentionally practising being mindful and everyday my awareness of my moments is increasing which is creating a great transformation in me and the way I perceive everything’s my perceptions are changing as a Coach I am better able to listen, to reflect, ask powerful questions and create a powerful space for my client to express. As a coach I now know when my client feels safe, comfortable and trusts the whole process.
