Taken from About.com this is the seven key elements needed to achieve a state of Mindfulness. This list may help to explain the process of achieving complete Mindfulness.
The Seven Key Elements to Mindfulness by William Meek.
Non-Judging: taking the role of an impartial observer to whatever your current experience is.
Patience: cultivating the understanding that things must develop in their own time.
Beginner’s Mind: having the willingness to observe the world as if it was your first time doing so. This creates an openness that is essential to being mindful.
Trust: having trust in yourself, your intuition, and your abilities.
Non-Striving: the state of not doing anything, just simply accepting that things are happening in the moment just as they are supposed to. For people from the Western countries like the Unites States, this seems to be one of the more difficult components.
Acceptance: completely accepting the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and beliefs that you have, and understanding that they are simply those things only.
Non-Attachment: avoidance of attaching meaning to thoughts and feelings, or connecting a given thought to a feeling. Instead, let a thought or feeling come in and pass without connecting it to anything, observing them exactly as they are.
Mindfulness can be very useful in dealing with both acute pain and chronic pain. Practicing mindfulness cannot remove the sensation of pain but rather control the thoughts that come with it. Often when we are in pain our mind conjours up all soughts of unhelpful thoughts that can increase our perception of the level of pain that we are experiencing.
Pain is a warning sign that what we are doing or have done is likely to put us in danger. Placing your hand on a hot stove is a good example of this. The pain sensation is there to warn us and tell us that if we leave our hand on the stove we will suffer and now is the time to remove it! Therefore pain sensations play a very important part in keeping us safe.
The same cannot be said for chronic pain however. Studies have shown that chronic pain lingers around long after any damage has been suffered and the danger to the body has passed. This is where Mindfulness is especially useful.
When suffering pain of any type all sorts of things can be conjoured up in the mind, increasing tension and stress levels in the body and increasing pain levels. Such thoughts can be;
Worry that the injury is serious.
Fear that it may get worse.
Frustration that your activities may be put on hold.
Anger if this is a recurring problem.
Depression from potential changes to lifestyle and general feeling of being in pain.
All of these thoughts can add up to one ordinary experience. Once we learn to effectively practice mindfulness we can however seperate the thoughts we are having from the actual pain sensations and reduce our level of self-imposed stress.
The practice does not promote supression of these thoughts, rather the acceptance that we have those thoughts and without focusing on them we simply let them go from our mind and bring our focus back to our physical self, back to the here and now.
Take it from me, I have suffered chronic back pain for just over two years and I have not found any other technique (or drug for that matter) that is as effective in improving and maintaining mental health through what is a very trying time.
Here we have a video of a Mindfulness session led by Jon Kabat-Zinn for employees of Google. This video is seriously long, around 70 minutes however I urge you to take the time to watch it as I am sure you will find his teaching useful in your life.