Mindfulness helps us see with greater clarity how we may approach our moment by moment experience skilfully, taking more pleasure in the good things that often go unnoticed or unappreciated, and dealing more effectively with the difficulties we encounter, both real and imagined.
It is more easy to define mindfulness if we think about the usual state of mind that every so often most people experience…
Stressed and not able to enjoy the good moments in your life?
Brood and worry about everything?
Lying awake at night and brooding about what happened during the day?
Mindfulness gives you back the control of your attention so that moment by moment you can engage in your life and be in contact with yourself, with a wholehearted awareness without the self-critical voice that every so often is following you around.
Mindfulness as it is currently practiced and taught in secular Western culture is closely related to traditional Buddhist mind training methods. In Buddhist practice, mindfulness is the act of seeing things as they truly are in the present moment (Gunaratana,2011). Although we may think that we naturally experience our surroundings as they are, this is rarely the case. Most of the time our perception is limited by our attention span; fragmented by continuous distractions; distorted by our biases, assumptions, and expectations; and regularly hijacked by our emotional reactivity. Mindfulness is the capacity to perceive our world clearly, without adulteration or manipulation.
Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of your experience without falling into reactions to physical sensations, thoughts, emotions or other people. Mindfulness gives you the CHOICE of choosing a more skillful response instead of reacting automatically to what is pulling for your attention.
