What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is everywhere right now, and it's almost become synonymous with self-care. I'm going to use the classic definition, from Jon Kabat-Zinn: mindfulness is an awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment. There's a lot packed into that. It's an attention practice. It uses attention on purpose. It uses that on purpose in this moment. And it does all of that without judgment.

Why it's everywhere right now

Mindfulness requires you to become the boss of your attention. Your attention is that flashlight that focuses on one thing rather than another, and mindfulness trains you to use it with intention, with choicefulness. That matters enormously right now, in a time when all of us carry little devices perfectly designed to grab our attention. Social media gets paid simply by holding your attention long enough to show you an ad. In the age of information, our attention is the most valuable, most recruited thing we have — so it matters that we're the ones in charge of it.

The capacity to choose

Mindfulness makes you the boss of your attention by using it intentionally, in the present moment — and that gives you the ability to choose, again and again, how you respond to life. Without that choicefulness, it's easy to get swept up in your triggers, your automatic reactions, your pain stories. Mindfulness works by choosing a position of neutrality, looking non-judgmentally at what's happening, which gives you the space to keep choosing. That capacity to override the automaticity of your unconscious and subconscious mind is what allows you to heal, to grow your intuition, to manifest what you want to manifest and haven't been able to before. It really is a prerequisite.

Healing only happens in the present moment

Healing does not exist outside of the present moment. Right here, right now, is where the capacity to heal lifetimes of wounds happens — not by thinking about the future, or regretting the past. Mindfulness brings you right here, right now, and it's right here, right now that you're endlessly powerful to heal and to choose differently.

Formal practice and informal practice

Mindfulness has a formal version — setting a timer, deciding for a set amount of time that you're practicing coming back to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment, using the breath as an anchor, or the sensations in the body, or the sensations of walking. All of it works beautifully because the breath and the sensations only exist in the present moment. That's where you're training the muscle of your attention, practicing noticing how your mind pulls you away from right here, right now — which is a beautiful feature of the mind, and also something worth training. Then there's an informal version: being fully present with a friend while you talk. Having someone's full attention is a magical experience, and my guess is most of us have felt that at some point. Or waiting in line at the grocery store and taking a breath. Noticing, after scrolling Instagram too long, that you're in a thought spiral about not being good enough, and coming back to the present — because that spiral doesn't exist in the present moment. There's nothing happening there. Refocusing breaks the pattern that keeps pulling you into a life you don't actually want to create.

Boy number one, boy number two

I started my whole spiritual journey at a ten-day meditation retreat. I didn't know what meditation was — I just knew it was going to be ten days of silence, and figured that was probably going to be good for me. About seven or eight days in, ten hours a day of meditation, I realized I'd gotten relatively good at bringing my attention back to the present moment. But where my mind went, when it wandered, was predictable, and silly — boy number one, boy number two, and what am I doing with my life. Ninety-five percent of my thoughts could be summarized into those three themes. It was a profound moment of clarity, and honestly, a bit of a woe-is-me moment — is this all that I am? A silly twenty-three-year-old girl thinking about boys and what she's going to do with her life? In that moment I decided to be more than those three thoughts. It set off everything that's followed since.

If we go unchecked, our patterns run away with us, and we become a very simple expression of those patterns.