Mindfulness classes to ease stress and distractions

Put down the phone, close your eyes and be totally still — and quiet — for an hour, maybe two.

Sound like torture?

That’s how it was for Jim Goldfuss of Glen Cove when he first tried a form of meditation called mindfulness a few years ago to deal with stress and anxiety.

“You would close your eyes and you would sit there and within 10 seconds, there was the urge to move, the need to twitch, the pain. The discomfort was so intense for me, that I couldn’t relax,” says Goldfuss, 52.

During the fourth session, something clicked.

“For the first time in 48 years, I was able to still my mind. And it was the most amazing experience. Up until that point, I didn’t realize just how bad my mind was running away with my thoughts, what I worried about, the obsession with things that are going to go wrong in the future. My mind never stopped.”

THE ART OF SLOWING DOWN

Mindfulness, says Gabrielle Chiaramonte, a clinical psychologist who runs an eight-week mindfulness program at The Stress Reduction Center in Islandia, “is intentionally paying attention to our experience, without judgment.”

It’s about minimizing distraction, intentionally directing your attention to where you want it to be — right here, right now — says Karyn O’Beirne, who teaches mindfulness meditation classes at Welcome Mat Yoga in Islip.

“We can often direct our attention to the past, when we’re trying to remember something, or on the future, when we’re trying to plan something,” she says. “But mindfulness is specifically putting our attention on purpose in the present moment.”

The practice helps us respond — not react — to the challenges of daily life. Chiaramonte says such focused mental discipline is an innate ability that everyone can grow and strengthen.

But it can be hard.

FINDING THE FOCUS

Although she was skeptical, Kathleen Treccagnoli tried The Stress Reduction Center’s mindfulness program in 2016, still grieving from her husband’s death four years earlier.

Before long, Treccagnoli said she found benefits of the discipline’s meditation, gentle movement and discussion.

“It helped me so much,” says Treccagnoli, 60, of St. James, who’s now working toward certification to teach classes herself.

Goldfuss, meanwhile, uses the mindfulness skills he’s learned several times a day, usually when he gets to work, at random times during the day and before bed, trigger points when you tend to feel your thoughts running away with you.

“You can still get caught up in your thoughts, but my ability to be able to stop them now and just catch myself before they start winding themselves up into bigger and bigger thoughts has been amazing,” he says.