It All Starts With Being Mindful

What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is all about being aware of what’s going on around us and within us. This is being aware of our thoughts, our emotions and our feelings and our decisions and our actions.

A common misconception about mindfulness is that it is all about meditation. Mindfulness which is awareness, is what you want to accomplish, whereas meditation is how you will accomplish that. You can become more aware by paying attention to what’s going on around you as you’re going around your daily routine, or you can journal about an aspect of your experiences. You can meditate to become more mindful, and you can also meditate to build compassion for yourself and others or to gain greater insight into your active beliefs.

Another misconception is that mindfulness is all about being present. One aspect of mindfulness is attentional awareness, which is knowing where your attention is being placed at any given moment. It can be placed in the past by ruminating about a past experience, or it can be placed in the future where you are worrying about something that may happen. Another aspect of mindfulness is simply the awareness of your body, emotions, decisions, and actions to become aware of those things. Perhaps you may not meditate but do another type of exercise to help you become more aware of what’s happening.

Mindfulness is important because it allows us to make more informed decisions. By being more aware of what’s happening around us and within us and how we interpret what is going on, we can examine our inner dialogue and gently shift it to something more reasonable and balanced.

Science has proven that when we conduct these mental exercises repeatedly, our brains develop new neural pathways making this way of thinking more accessible and automatic.

Remember that whatever you want to accomplish starts with being more mindful and is the first step in our 4 steps approach.