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If you have any connection at all with anyone who practices yoga or meditation, you’ve probably heard the term “mindfulness” and you probably wonder what exactly it is. This article will inform you on the basic principle of the life-changing state of mind known as mindfulness.
It is difficult to define mindfulness, for it is a very subtle process. You have likely experienced it at some point in your life, and you might even being experiencing it right now. When you first become aware of something, such as a feeling, you have a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before your mind conceptualizes whatever it is you are aware of, before you identify it and your mind comes up with the word that names it. This fleeting awareness is called mindfulness. It is usually very short. The experience of mindfulness takes place just before you start thinking about something; it happens in your body, not in your mind.
When you experience mindfulness, you are in a moment of pure experience; you are completely in tune with reality. But it is not the reality of your mind, which isn’t reality at all, but how you perceive reality. You are in tune with the being of whatever it is that you are aware of. It’s kind of like seeing out of the corner of your eye—you get a glimpse of something; you can’t see it exactly, but you get an awareness that it is there. When you focus your eyes, you lose your awareness, your perception of the object and you see it the way you have been trained to see it—straight on as it is. Your mind perceives it as it has been trained to perceive it—as a “car,” or a “dog” and what those symbols stand for.
Mindfulness is so fleeting that it is almost unobservable, especially to someone who has not been trained to be mindful. You generally become mindful of an object or feeling and before you even realize it, you have moved to your mind; you focus on perceiving the object or feeling, recognizing that perception, naming it (such as “car” or “love”) and then getting involved in thinking about it. Your mind takes control. The original mindfulness gets lost, and you forget it, especially if you didn’t even know it occurred in the first place. That is the reason many people meditate: it allows them to prolong that moment of awareness, of mindfulness.
Mindfulness can help you reduce stress and enjoy life more. When you are mindful, you are very cognizant about what is going on around you and how you feel about what is going on around you. And when you are very aware of people, things, and situations, you are able to make a skillful choice about how to respond. For example, if the kids are all yelling at once and you are beong mindful, the yelling doesn't cause you to get angry and blow up at them. Instead you tend to feel calmer and are able to focus on what is going on, in this case the yelling. When you are calm, you tend to respond to the stress of the yelling by calming down the children and getting to the bottom of the problem rather than yelling back at them.
When mindfulness is prolonged through meditation, you will find that your experience is profoundly changed. However, you have to learn how to meditate and it takes consistent practice to become mindful. Few people are constantly mindful; only people like His Holiness the Dahli Lama have learned through extensive training to be constantly mindful. But once you learn how to meditate and become mindful, you will find that mindfulness can rally change your life.
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