What Is Mindfulness?

Since “mindfulness” has become a buzzword in many circles, I thought it would be helpful to explore what mindfulness is. It is usually described as “an alert, open attention to the present moment.” This is to say, it is all about being able to relate to your thoughts rather than from them so that your attention is grounded in the present moment.

To get a sense of what it is, I invite you to take one minute to stop reading and put your attention on all the sounds around you. It can be helpful to count or name the different sounds.

Three different things may have happened in response to that invitation. The first is you didn’t do this. Please know that is okay. Our minds are so used to thinking about life that they can be resistant to being fully present for life. The second is you became fascinated by the sounds of Life around you and all thoughts faded to the background as you were present for the living moment of your life. Be not dismayed if this didn’t happen.  Most of us have been caught in our minds for most of our lives, so we have not developed our attention enough to experience the sounds rather than drifting back into thoughts about life. The third possibility is you had moments where you actually heard Life, only to have your mind take over again.

To get a deeper sense of what it is to be mindful, I invite you to do a little exploration with me. In a moment, you’re going to lift your pointing finger up and move it all around in front of you, doing big and small loops, following your finger where ever it goes with your attention. (If you are driving or you are in a public place and are not inclined to have people question your sanity, you can do this in your imagination!) This movement of your finger represents the 65,000 thoughts that go through your head every day and how you follow your thoughts wherever they go. If your thoughts say you are angry, you think you are angry. If your thoughts say you are sad, you think you are sad.

Now lift your finger and watch wherever it goes.  Really get into this.  Follow it with your body – up and down, high and low.  One could get a little dizzy doing this!   Now keep your finger moving but see beyond your finger and focus on an object in front of you – a lamp, a cat, a tree, a picture on the wall. Even though thought is still moving inside of you, you are lifting your attention out of the stream of thought and paying attention to Life. This really helps you to see that you have a story about life and then there is the living experience of it. Now bring your attention back to following your finger, representing how easy it is to slip back into your stories about life.

Keeping your finger moving and focusing on something beyond your finger, take the next step in mindfulness.  Bring your attention back to your finger and watch it with just your eyes so that you are becoming interested in your finger, which represents becoming interested in what the stories in your head are doing rather than falling into them. This is where the magic of mindfulness makes a difference. Slowly you learn how to see what your thoughts are saying rather than being lost in them. It is the difference between saying, “I am afraid” and saying, “fear is here.” Now bring your hand down.

The more you can relate to your thoughts rather than from them, the more you come back to Life. You don’t need to try to be in “the now” because you are already there. As you learn to see the veil of thought, it will lift under the light of your curiosity, under the light of your focused attention.

In my experience, mindfulness only takes you so far. The true and lasting healing happens with heartfulness. We will explore this next time. In the meantime, be willing to cultivate moments where you are curious about the sound of a bird, the taste of your food, the rising and the falling of your breath. And then, when you can, be curious about what the storyteller inside of you is talking about. And I assure you, a moment here and a moment there relating to your thoughts rather than from is where the doorway to freedom is.