What’s Mindfulness Anyway?
Mindfulness can be understood through many lenses – religious, spiritual, scientific, and secular. At its simplest, mindfulness is a way to get to know your own mind – and the quieter wisdom of the body and heart that lives alongside it.
The way we learn anything is the way we can learn our own minds. How do you do it? You study it. You set up a coffee date. You observe it, like watching someone who has a skill that you want to develop. You engage in study and observation to gain information, clues, and tips. This is the exact strategy of mindfulness. If you want to get to know your own mind these are the steps: sit down with it, watch it as though you were a research scientist with complete interest, curiosity and fascination.
When coming to know your own mind the first thing you may notice is that it is a slippery pig, hard to catch, moving and darting all over the place. Mind wandering isn’t a failure, it’s our biology.
The human nervous system is designed to scan, predict, and move quickly. This is good to know for mindfulness is a practice of observing, not performing. It is the art of noticing rather than judging, allowing rather than fixing, and returning to yourself right here in the present moment – perfectly imperfect as you are.
If you’d like to explore this, consider carving out time each day, 2-3 minutes to start, practice sitting quietly and observing. Like learning scales on an instrument, it takes time and repetition to see improvements. To get better you must keep practicing.
And this is where mindfulness begins – not by changing yourself, but by learning how to notice everything, especially your mind.
In-joy practicing mindfulness,
Debbie