I recently read an article on Medium by Chloé Milne, where she shared how on a flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong, she lost faith in the practice of formal meditation to manage her anxiety. After trying to practice meditation and mindfulness for a couple of hours with simply no effect on how much anxiety she was experiencing during the flight, she replaced her meditation practice with a form of laughter therapy by watching a funny movie instead. In her article she shares the consequent insights she gained since that experience on the value of laughter as a way to quiet the incessant fear and anxiety she was experiencing, and to return to mindfulness.
Milne’s story got me thinking about the practice of mindfulness. It has been a buzzword for the last two decades, and although many people are actively seeking to be more mindful, or trying out different mindfulness practices, it’s almost as if we don’t really have a clear understanding of what mindfulness actually is. We tend to cling to very narrow definitions of the concept that lead us to believe that mindfulness can only be achieved through meditation, deep breathing exercises, practicing yoga, or journaling.
The problem with this narrow way of defining the practice of mindfulness, is that we can limit our range of experience or sometimes completely exclude ourselves from experiencing what mindfulness is. […]