What is meditation?

Deliberately paying attention to your experience as it unfolds, without judging it.
When we practice mindfulness, we use our attention like a flashlight, shining it onto our experience.
Our experience refers to changing internal states, such as thoughts, physical sensations, and emotion and includes how we relate to them as well as to our external experience, such as sounds, smells, other people, and our immediate environment. These internal and external factors are all interconnected.
We are interested in how we relate to our experience: wanting more of it, resisting it and trying to make it go away, or tuning out from it. Much of our suffering arises as a result of not liking what is arising and trying to make it different.
Intention is crucial—we deliberately choose to pay attention to our experience and, most importantly, we pay attention WITHOUT JUDGiNGand with a dollop of KINDNESS.
It teaches us to be with whatever arises. We don’t chase a particular experience. We don’t pick and choose and only pay attention to those parts we like.
Paradoxically, it is only when we accept things as they are—that is, we stop resisting our experience—that our relationship to that experience changes.
We learn to do this by accessing The Power of the Breath and The Power of the Body and by cultivating specific attitudes.
In MBSR &MBCT(adaptive form to prevent relapse of depression), the focus is on how we relate to our problems rather than the problems themselves.

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