Are You Being Mindful, or Is Your Mind Full?

“Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.” Eckhart Tolle

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness and meditation are often expressed together and seem to be synonymous but the simplest way to define mindfulness according to the American Psychological Association, “is an awareness of one’s internal states and surroundings.”

While meditation is focusing on one particular thought, object, or practice and clearing the mind of all else, most often this involves concentrating on our breathing.

The point of meditation is not to clear our minds of all thoughts or outside influences because we can’t, our brains think thoughts. While we are still alive there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

However, we can redirect and control our responses to any wondering thoughts by cultivating mindfulness.

The more mindful we are the more effective our meditation practice will become due to an increased awareness of the tendency to drift from our breathing to other thoughts or stimuli around us.

In life it’s not the events in our lives that make us feel the way we do inside, rather it is our interpretations of those events that elicit an emotional response.

The more awareness we have in any given moment the more likely it is that we can disrupt the normal cause-and-effect relationship of our experiences that leave an imprint on us.

This is especially important when they’re negative, that car that cut you off on your morning commute wasn’t personal so any irritation that arises should come and go just as quickly as the flow of traffic.

The more mindful we become the easier it is to let go of the natural reactions we have to life’s day-to-day occurrences.

Even more importantly we can become present and grateful for all the positive events that bring us joy and happiness.

Counterintuitively these are just as important to acknowledge and let go of. Life should pass through us naturally without our need to hold on to individual moments.

By having an appreciation and gratitude for life as it is happening each moment maintains its purity without overshadowing it with desire.

As Alan Watts describes so accurately in his concept of the backwards law where he describes

“the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive.”

With mindfulness we can become much more equipped to realize these truths as they happen, allowing us to turn negatives into a positive. While allowing the very best of our lives to remain high points without our fears of lack diluting the present moment.

Learning to meditate and having a physical practice are the best ways to increase our mindfulness and live more fully in the present moment.

Use exercise as a practice

One of the many reasons I love exercise is that it has just as many mental benefits as it does physical. An intense workout has a way of clearing your mind both during and for hours after.

In reality, it doesn’t even have to be that intense of a session for you to get these benefits, sometimes all you need is a nice walk outside.

Or better yet find a park or big grassy area and kick your shoes, shirt, and socks off to let the grass touch your skin.

Whether it’s an intense pump or a relaxing stroll outside the intentional movement of our body has a way of grounding us in the moment.

As physical effort increases the brain will naturally narrow its focus to the most important tasks like breathing, holding onto the weights, staying tight, and finishing the remaining reps. All the stressors of daily life fall away as the steady increase in intensity steals all your attention.

The best part is that the feeling of relief and relaxation you get after a tough workout has a lasting effect for the rest of the day.

Another benefit of working out is that it will naturally increase your self-awareness and help you become more in tune with your body.

Whether it is cardio activities, lifting weights, or a combination of the two, exercise will create different sensations that become more heightened as we move from low to high intensities.

Lean into those feelings and sit with them, even the pain and burn that is unavoidable if you are truly pushing yourself. They will provide the most opportunities to get in touch with your body on a much deeper level.

The more disconnected we are with our bodies the more we will suffer from physical and psychological dis-ease.

Leading to things like depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, illness, and other degenerative health conditions. Fostering that connection inward will not only help the body become stronger but we are simultaneously blessing it with positive intentions.

It’s as if we are sending ourselves a prayer for health, happiness, and good fortune every time we exercise. Sometimes the most satisfying things in life are those that are hard.

Benefits of cultivating mindfulness

We are all aware of the impact that stress plays on both our minds and bodies. Being overwhelmed by stressors will slowly break us down over time and lead to poor health and an overall lack of well-being.

Diseases that affect the body are heavily influenced by the mind, whether they occur from negative emotional states or poor lifestyle choices.

As more time passes without disrupting and changing the stressful thinking-feeling loops we experience the harder it becomes to heal and restore our health. Having tools and activities to help form new patterns are necessary for longevity and peace of mind.

Practicing mindfulness creates an awareness of ourselves, the environment, and our reactions to it. This becomes especially important when those reactions are negative and create internal tension.

Having a deeper connection with our bodies means we can more quickly realize these changes and bring ourselves back to neutral, rather than living in emotions of fear, anxiety, or anger for extended periods of time.

The sensations we feel from such responses are necessary for our survival but they are not intended to remain present long after the initial incident.

We do this to ourselves by not redirecting our attention toward the positive. By replaying these past experiences in our heads and living in the same physical states we are perpetuating the same event in the present moment.

Mindfulness can disrupt this repetitive cycle and provide opportunities to create new internal states. Breaking the pattern of negative feedback loops that feel just as real to us the tenth time we replay them as they did the first time it happened.

This is because our brain and nervous system cannot tell the difference between something that is actually happening from something you are just imagining.

Meaning, your body is responding the same way to your rehearsal of past hurts as it did from the initial painful experience. Putting the body in the same physical state and therefore reliving that stressor over and over again.

As our moment-to-moment awareness increases so does the ability to recognize and reframe the negatives into a positive.

By having this understanding we can remain unattached to the ideas that do not serve us and replace them with empowering ones.

As Michael A. Singer, the author of The Untethered Soul writes;

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”

• Summary of main points

  1. Mindfulness is having an awareness of both our internal and external states as one will affect the other.
  2. Let life come and go as it is without holding on, our inability to do so causes unnecessary friction.
  3. Exercise is a great way to cultivate mindfulness by becoming more aware of our bodies through movement.
  4. More awareness means we can more easily recognize negative thinking patterns and reframe them into positives.
  5. You are not your thoughts, you are the observer of thoughts.

• Call to action

  In small episodes throughout the day become very present during any task you’re doing. If you’re washing dishes be very aware of the temperature on your skin, the feeling of the water running down your hands, and how slippery the soap is. While you’re driving to work take 5 deep breaths making the exhale longer than the inhale. Focus on the rise and fall of your chest and notice how much your heartbeat will slow by the time you’ve completed your 5th breath. When you’re at the gym don’t shy away from the burn or the pain that’s accumulating during your set, instead, embrace those feelings and welcome the warmth spreading across your body. In that moment there’s nothing else going on in your life except for the feeling of effort, training both the body and mind.