Freeing Yourself From Your Mind

6 Key Practices From Eckhart Tolle

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Freeing yourself from your mind is the primary objective of all mindfulness meditation practice.

"One of the most effective things we can do when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap.

We stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We allow space into our state of mind. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps.
Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap.
If you don’t fill up your practice time with worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings.
You can just sit there quietly.

Then silence will dawn on you and the sacredness of the space will penetrate."

Pema Chodrun

Freeing yourself from your mind - here's how with 6 key mindfulness practices outlined by Eckhart Tolle in "The Power of Now"

(1) "Watching the thinker" - start listening to the voice in your head

As often as you can, pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old audiotapes that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years.

(2 Focus your attention into the now

Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: And that is the degree of peace that you feel within.

(3) Look at your emotions: the body's reaction to your mind

The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not.

(4) Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself

What are you defending? Is it an illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity? By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you un-identify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve.

(5) End the delusion of time + letting go of psychological time

End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops - unless you choose to use it. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time.

(6) Connecting with the inner body

Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it.