Git your Mindfulness on

I am trying to get back into mindfulness meditation after getting out of practice the last year or so. Background and thoughts:

There is now good scientific evidence that mindfulness meditation is an effective therapy for stress, depression, addiction ADD, chronic pain, and a whole host of other conditions. Comparable or better in many cases than drugs, therapy, and almost everything else (other than exercise, still the best cure-all around). If you think it's all about sitting with a blank mind, or mantras, or new age fluff, or Buddhism, you're wrong. It IS, in a way, about awareness. And it's benefits are measurable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_Cognitive_Therapy

I'm no expert in it, but I have dabbled in it just enough to glimpse some fairly interesting benefits. Here are my recommendations based on the dabbling:

DO NOT:
* think that you know what meditation is or that "it's just not for me" based on just reading about it or trying it a time or two. It's fairly unintutive how to do it (it's NOT just sitting doing nothing), and it's benefits do not kick in until you've doing it regularly for several weeks or more.
* try it for more than 10 minutes or so at a time in the beginning. It is like exercise: it gets easier than you think with practice, but it's very easy to get discouraged with how difficult it is in the beginning.
* sign up for a big day-long or week long "retreat", a la Spirit Rock or the like, without having had some practice first. It's like doing a marathon before you know how to run. More is not better - at least not without practice.
* get discouraged by the fact that some of Jon Kabat-Zinn's writing is so-so. Don't get me wrong, Full Catastrophe Living and the like are a good introduction, I just found them a bit repetitive and flat, and just owning it and reading unlikely to push one into an effective and regular practice. (again, like reading about running)

DO:
* if possible, take one of the standard 8-week MBSR classes held around the world: http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/mbsr/
* find friends to do it with you - schedule it. support eachother, compare experiences, etc.
* as a poor-man's version of the class, or to reinforce your practice, read (or listen on CD) to some introductory material on what meditaiton is, then use a guided-meditaiton CD to actually do it. This is much more likely to result in success then just "sitting in a room" by yourself with little experience trying to meditate
* bring the principles from MBSR into your every day life, and in particular reinforce them with other activities that nurture breathing awareness anyway, like yoga, swimming, scuba, exercise, walking, etc.

I took the class a year ago, loved it, and fell out of practice a few months later. Am about to try some of the aforementioned poor-man's techniques - wish me luck.