"Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it.
How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness."
How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness."
-- Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks
There are plenty of well-documented benefits to be had from what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls mindfulness — the practice of bringing your full awareness into the present moment. For more than 30 years Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has been used to help everyone, including over-worked managers and senior executives, reduce stress, increase focus, and reap physical benefits such as lowering of blood pressure, etc.
Mindfulness is, in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, “paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment, without judgment.” (For more, see my podcast, Practice Mindfulness or check out this article at The Greater Good, Why Mindfulness Matters, featuring Kabat-Zinn in a video overview of mindfulness.)
As Eckhart Tolle has said throughout his work, almost any of nature's creations (trees, flowers, plants, birds, etc.) can provide an excellent doorway into the clarity and simplicity of increased mindfulness. You merely need to seek them out, spend a few minutes with them, and let your jabbering, worry-filled thoughts fall away.
Can't leave your desk, you say? No worries... I've put together a brief, 6-minute video of scenes from Northwestern Pennsylvania's June countryside, along with a beautiful soundtrack featuring Robert Ronnes' "Meditation no 19 – Sunlight Through Cathedral Window." So now you have no excuse... Take a break, disappear into nature's landscape in this video, and become more mindful!
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| Watch the 6-Minute Video: Take a Break: A Mindfulness Meditation in the PA Countryside |
