Mindfulness Misunderstood

Once during a Buddhism meditation practice, we did this raisin eating exercise. If you haven't done    the experiment, it is simply taking a very long time to touch, feel, taste and finally eat a raisin in five may be even ten minutes. Some may call it mindfulness but I think this works well only if you make your other senses come to life and engaged. It works well if you cajole your mind into stopping its normal function of thinking and get our other organs which are normally hijacked by the mind, to do what they do best. Feel!

So to me, mindfulness really means paying attention; eyefulness, nosefulness, tastiness, touchyfeelyness and simply loveliness.

The confusion arises due to the common understanding of mindlessness, when one goes about living like a mindless zombie. So naturally we assume that being mindful is the opposite of that. It is the process of thinking that confuses the issue. Being mindless means living without paying attention not necessarily without thought.

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