Mindfulness meditation has been described ‘as the awareness that comes from paying attention to the present moment experience in a purposeful and non-judgmental manner’ (Bishop et al., 2004 cited in Brown, Bravo, Roos, & Pearson, 2014 p. 1020). Pearson, Brown, Bravo and Witkiewitz (2015) suggest there are five important features of mindfulness when practising such as focussing one’s attention to the present and avoiding distractions, non-judgmentally experiencing thoughts, non-reactivity to thoughts, labelling experiences and simply observing thoughts/feelings. Integrated with the literature, this portfolio will contain description of my experience with mindfulness meditation technique resulted from guided exercises from Rob Nairn’s book ‘Diamond …show more content…
9/10 ref) An individual must try in meditation practise to ‘subdue subtle distractions’ to try to achieve exclusive attention to achieve metacognitive awareness. Rather than ‘letting go’ of these thoughts that came to conscious awareness, I was instead making to-do lists, planning and ruminating about the past. I felt numerous times during the tasks quite difficult to fully ‘zone out,’ fully relax and ‘be in the moment.’ This led to further feelings of anxiousness as I became aware about my own thought-patterns both positive and negative – factors which essentially drive stressors. During meditation practise, I found that frequent thoughts kept reoccurring such thoughts about upcoming deadlines or other commitments, which sometimes led me to stop meditating altogether. This was especially made difficult by the number of individuals in the session and how discomforting I felt sitting still for long periods of time. Bamber and Schneider (2016) suggests that a core feature of mindfulness is non-judgemental awareness. In mindfulness, this involves paying direct attention to the present moment and allowing thoughts to pass, without reacting to them (Shipherd & Fordiani, 2015). However, I was emotionally getting involved with these thoughts, allowing them to deviate me from practise. Culadasa, Immergut and Graves (2017) suggests one way