Understanding Mindfulness Have you ever noticed that when you're doing quite familiar and repetitive tasks,
Like driving your car or doing the housework,
That your mind is often miles away thinking about something else?
You may be fantasizing about going on a holiday,
Or worrying about an upcoming event,
Or thinking about any number of other things.
In all of these cases,
You're not focusing on your current experience,
And you're not really in touch with the here and now.
This way of operating is often referred to as living in the automatic pilot mode,
Simply from thought habits that have been formed in the brain through repetition.
Some of these thought habits are harmless,
Such as daydreaming about that upcoming holiday.
But other thought habits are much more harmful,
For example,
Constantly ruminating over certain worries.
So mindfulness essentially is the opposite of automatic pilot mode.
It offers a way of freeing yourself from those automatic and unhelpful ways of thinking and responding.
It's about experiencing the world that is firmly in the here and now.
This mode is referred to as the being mode.
After all,
We are human beings,
Not human doings.
Yet we rarely take a moment to just pause and be.
We spend so much time just lost in our own thoughts,
Thoughts about the past,
Or worries or daydreams about the future,
That we never fully experience the moment that we have right now.
Mindfulness invites you to press pause on allowing those unwanted negative thoughts to just keep playing out on loop and running the show in your mind.
As you increase your self-awareness,
You can begin to observe your thoughts,
As opposed to always allowing them to dictate the way you feel and the way you behave.
By learning to be and to experience life in a more mindful way,
We can actually experience life more rather than doing things mindlessly.
You know,
There's this tendency to try to get through things quickly in life,
To get to the next thing,
To get to the exciting stuff.
We might see this,
For example,
When we're eating.
We rush our starter to get to the main course or to get to the dessert.
We want to rush through the traffic so we can get to the gym.
Then we get to the gym,
But our mind is on where we have to be next.
When we start to look at what is happening in our minds,
We're trying to do away with the present moment in the pursuit of some future moment,
Which we think holds greater gratification or pleasure.
So while missing out on enjoying our starter or our main meal or not paying attention in the gym might not seem terribly important in itself,
It represents the fact that you might be missing something much more important.
That is your actual life.
Life is only ever happening right here in this present moment.
Mindfulness helps you to recognize that,
To wake up to your life,
To notice what is happening in your mind and your body and the world around you.
Life is precious.
Life is a gift.
But if we're constantly wrapped up living in the past or the future,
We're going to miss out on experiencing the true beauty of life and everything that it has waiting for us if we dare to slow down and live in the present moment.
