What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the simple practice of being fully in the moment, noticing what we are experiencing and what is around us. It is not about what we are feeling emotionally or what we are thinking, but the practice of leaving those spaces for a few minutes to pay attention to the physical sensations – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch – that we so often do not notice because we are busy doing other things or being lost in our thoughts and emotions.  It is a simple practice but one that is greatly under-utilized in our hectic and over-stimulated society.  But it also has the power to transform our ability to engage in the world with greater balance, mental health and critical thinking, while helping us to more greatly influence the story of our lives, by simply taking a few minutes to notice and slow our breath, and noticing with appreciative lenses what is around us.

As simple as this sounds, it takes a disciplined commitment to practicing this to fully integrate it into our way of being. Neurons learn to fire, and neurons that fire together, wire together. Over the course of our lives, these patterns have taken on a life of their own. Mindfulness calls on different neural pathways that may have gone idle, and it takes intentionality and practice for them to start firing for a sustained period until they, too, become part of the neural wiring.  In my practice, introducing and practicing mindfulness is an important aspect of what we do together. It helps to move from thinking we are problem solving to recognizing that life is about stories and, as we are the authors of our own lives, we can influence how that story gets written and told.