Mindfulness at Avon

A Message from Mr. Custer

What is mindfulness? One teacher calls it “non judging awareness of the present moment,” and most of what I am going to talk about comes down to paying an inordinate amount of attention to something routine or even mundane: breathing, walking, or eating, for example. We do this in order to train our minds to focus on what we want to focus on. Most of the time, most of our minds are preoccupied with reviewing things that happened in the past or speculating about things that may happen in the future. Mark Twain put it this way: “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” 

If we can train our minds not to wander so widely, we can be better at paying attention and less likely to say or do something we will regret later. Beyond that, we will be able to deal with the stresses of our lives more effectively.