What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is nonjudgmental, moment-to-moment awareness of our experience, with acceptance and curiosity. When we are mindful, we feel more grounded and connected with our bodies and thus with ourselves. We experience the world more directly and vividly, through what we hear, see, taste, touch, smell, and through our feelings, rather than being absorbed in thinking about past events or making future plans. Practicing mindfulness helps us to experience other people, the external world, conversations, with more immediacy and aliveness. We can be more fully present for and compassionate with friends and loved ones, more focused during meetings and for work tasks. We can be more aware of our emotional and physical needs and take better care of ourselves.
Because people often have misconceptions about mindfulness, it is helpful to understand what mindfulness is and is not.
1. Mindfulness is not the same as meditation
Mindfulness is both a set of practices for developing skills for being mindful, as well as the quality of mindfulness itself. Mindfulness is usually practiced both formally and informally. Formal mindfulness practices include sitting and walking meditation and mindful movement. In addition to practicing mindfulness formally, we can practice being mindful at any time, such as during a conversation with a friend, your partner or child, while cleaning dishes, working on a job task, or walking in the woods. Mindfulness includes a range of techniques that develop awareness of body, mind and heart, some particularly helpful for specific situations or experiences.
2. Mindfulness does not involve stopping thinking or “emptying the mind of thoughts”
A misconception about mindfulness is that in order to be mindful, we need to stop thinking or “empty the mind of thoughts.” If this were true, no one would be able to practice mindfulness. The nature of our minds is to think, and the mind produces thoughts as naturally as clouds produce rain. When during meditation we experience a lot of thoughts, we are invited to simply note this experience with curiosity, patience and acceptance. We do not need to be in a peaceful or calm state when we begin to practice mindfulness.
3. Mindfulness includes training our minds to pay attention, but the nature of the practice is broader than mere attention training
A common mindfulness practice is breath awareness meditation, in which we pay attention to the sensations of breathing in the body and return our attention to those sensations when the mind wanders—which it will do, and often! One result of this practice, along with other mindfulness practices that cultivate the ability to maintain a broad, open awareness, is seeing our thoughts and emotions with greater clarity and gaining a sense of inner spaciousness and ease that is separate from the proliferation of thoughts. Over time, mindfulness practice strengthens both our ability to focus and be present, while also cultivating qualities of acceptance, kindness, compassion and connection that give our lives meaning.
4. Mindfulness is not a religion and does not require any specific beliefs
While the roots of mindfulness are in the teachings of Buddhism, mindfulness practice is separate from any belief systems. Mindfulness practice gives us a set of tools and instructions that help us explore, understand and educate our minds and hearts for increased present-moment awareness, clarity, kindness, happiness and compassion. We are invited to try these practices and see for ourselves the results in our lived experience.
5. Mindfulness reduces stress by changing how we relate to sources of stress, including our thoughts and other people
Mindfulness practice helps us to respond in healthier ways to stressful situations through increased present-moment awareness and a changed relationship to our thinking and emotions. Stress seems to melt away, because we develop a sense of inner spaciousness that gives us space between ourselves and a stressful event or stressful thought patterns. With greater awareness of our own and others’ emotions and increased skill in emotion regulation, we respond promptly to signals to take care of ourselves and others so that stress is less likely to build up. We become more resilient. Present-moment awareness also calms the amygdala, the part of the brain that perceives threats and activates the flight-flight response, so we tend to be less reactive and able to respond in a way that is beneficial and appropriate. As Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
