Landmark Forum Leaders Speak Out: Part Three: Mindfulness

Landmark Forum Leader Cathy Elliott was interviewed by Vive, an Australian magazine for businesswomen, for an article titled “Five Steps to Mindfulness” in an issue earlier this summer. The article gave five steps towards being mindful in life, including:

• Thanking your mind – Then replace uncomfortable thoughts with positive onesn • Add the phrase “I’m noting I’m having the the thought…” to give yourself some distance form your thoughtsn • Observe your breathing for three minutesn • Five/five/five – Notice five things you can see, five things you can hear, and five things you can feeln • Push your feet into the floor and feel lighter

The article looks at how to maintain mindfulness, and to live in the present moment. It asks the question: How does living in the present work in practical terms? What follows is an excerpt from the article:

Landmark Education addresses this issue in the courses and forums they run geared towards professionals. According to Landmark, much of the way we live our lives is based on the meaning we attach to the things that happen to us. The theme of breaking a habit and working to create a new or more constructive behaviour recurs.

“It’s very human that when something happens, we interpret it in some way,” says Cathy Eliott, a program leader for Landmark Education. “The moment we make it mean something in relation to something else, we collapse what actually happened.”

What follows is a natural tendency to gather evidence to support the truth’, or form an interpretation of an event. This can result in ignoring things that don’t match that thought pattern. According to Elliott, this means we often don’t see life the way it is, but as a personal version filtered through how we see the decisions we’ve made.

A good example of this is how past partners (or even parents) often haunt current relationships. “We think we are relating to the person in front of us, but most of the time we are reacting to a situation from the past that happened with someone we are not over,” says Eliott.

Being aware of this situation goes a long way to help ensure we don’t relive the past in the future.