What is Your Mindfulness "Ah-Ha" Moment?

The Mindfulness Summit has been fabulous and full of so much helpful information - so much that it is a little hard to find time to get to it all! Our Beloved Grand Eagle, Walt, mentioned that he wished people would share their mindfulness "ah-ha" moments - what a great idea !!! So, Walt and I are hoping that lots of people will share an "ah-ha" moment - a moment that impacted your perspective, understanding, symptoms, etc., via mindfulness. So, what's your "ah-ha" moment ?????

 

I had a mindfulness moment this morning. I had a bad dream about my abusive stepfather and woke up from it.
I immediately reminded myself it was just a dream and began deep breathing, feeling how my body parts felt, and
counted to 10. I fell asleep right away. I had been dreaming in the past and woke up in the present. Feels good.

 

Great idea, you guys.

Each presentation has at least one ah-hah! moment for me, so while I can't remember a particular one, what I am getting is a much better sense of how mindfulness integrates with the deep emotional work that we are all doing here. For me, this is one giant Ah-Hah!

The other day, responding to a post, I suddenly found myself writing about how TMS is all about our thoughts, but at two different levels.

The first level is the deeply repressed negative emotions, often from childhood, which our brains cover up by giving us distracting symptoms. We are always talking about this level, and that's what the writing exercises are designed to expose.

The second level of thoughts is the constant negative self-talk that is running around in our heads all day long, much of it related to the fact that our primitive brains are constantly scanning the horizon for danger, and then reacting to all kinds of everyday situations as if we were facing a sabre-tooth tiger. We are only now really starting to talk about this, especially thanks to the Summit! Because Mindfulness is the exercise that will help us expose these thoughts, and help us to recognize what's really going on (not a tiger) and to respond more appropriately.

The two are totally related, because the reason our brains have to suppress the deep emotions in the first place is that we might not notice the tiger in the shadows if we're obsessed by emotional stuff. Supposedly we're more alert if we've got a physical symptom to worry about. I guess. It's not a very good mechanism, and it's certainly extremely flawed in today's modern world.