“You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it.”

Oh yeah? I get stuck in a moment all the time, and it has to be one of the pleasures of life. Drifting away mindlessly. Ignoring life around me.

This is different from mindfulness. Mindfulness, in a very big nutshell, is learning to live in the very moment of the present and enjoy life as it passes now.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it:

paying attention
in a particular way
on purpose
in the present moment
and non-judgmentally.

Mindfulness means engaging all thoughts and feelings that consciously enter the mind. By “non-judgmentally” Kabat-Zinn means that the thoughts are objective about what is being observed, not negative. A person does not judge the thought, or himself or herself for thinking it. The result is that perspective on one’s own thoughts is gained, allowing an escape from the usual mental ruminating and negative patterns of thought.

Mindfulness is used in a growing form of therapy called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which is particularly helpful in preventing relapses in depression. When a person has depression, they typically lose themselves in negativity. The brain makes a link between the mood and the negative thinking. When a low repeats, the link is easily reactivated and the person falls back into the same thinking patterns.

MBCT aims to break this spiral of negative thoughts. It is a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which aims to identify and alter “thinking” distortions, and mindfulness, which aims to identify thoughts moment by moment but without passing judgments. The aim is to learn how to switch out of automatic, habitual, negative patterns of thinking, into more constructive, objective patterns.

People who learn this technique can stay in touch with the present, without stewing over the past or worrying about the future. For many years I lived my life in the future. By that I mean that I was constantly escaping the present, trying to ignore it, by focusing on my future life. I made plans and dreamt of a better life. Nowadays I’m firmly in the present, but certainly not without worries. Mindfulness is a difficult thing to achieve. I’ve been giving it a go, on and off, for the last few months. I think it’s a slow process, but ultimately it should be very beneficial.

Further reading:

http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/
http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/mbct.html

Concise, well written (5/07) Wikipaedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_Cognitive_Therapy