When I first started hearing the word mindfulness, I, like many others, assumed it meant just sitting quietly and not thinking. I was a skeptic. I thought, “How is sitting in silence going to help anything? It’s just a waste of time!” After years of learning and even taking the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course at Duke University, mindfulness is now a huge part of my work as well as my own mental health care! Mindfulness is not just sitting in silence.
In fact, mindfulness is not just one specific activity at all. To me, mindfulness is best described as simply the ability to adjust your attention and awareness in any given moment. Mindfulness is all about opening up to all of our awareness and being able to shift your attention to those aspects of the present that are often filtered out. For example, when you set an intention to make progress on a project, mindfulness means being able to focus on that work, but also being able to expand your awareness and take breaks to shift your attention to other aspects of your present moment experience. This might be recognizing the physical comfort of your cozy blanket and the smell the candle you have burning nearby, or it might be noticing your body signaling that you need water or a snack.
Mindfulness is having the ability to make space for those elements of your awareness that you may be skipping over when you single out the things that seem more necessary or practical. By slowing down and opening up to these forgotten aspects of the present moment, we allow ourselves more intentional choice as well as a more full and balanced perception of our human experience.
In today’s world, there are a million things fighting for our attention and awareness at any given time. It is no wonder that mindfulness feels so foreign to many of us despite it being such a natural human function. Our attention defaults to whatever feels productive, pressing, flashy, or allows us to “check out” altogether when we are overwhelmed by it all. We are going, going, going with little space given for our attention to naturally wander or to consider what we might
be overlooking.
Practicing mindfulness can be done in many ways, and some do involve sitting in silence, but there are also many little ways to integrate it into your life to start growing the mindfulness muscle. Mindfulness can grow through simply noticing when the warm sunlight hits your face on your way to work, bringing your full attention to your child or pet when they are interacting with you, or feeling the warm water on your hands while you do the dishes. It might be stopping for a big deep breath when you’ve been hectically moving through the workday. Mindfulness can look like checking in with your body when you’ve been spending the day on the couch. Once you have grown your mindfulness skill, you might start to detect when your thoughts are obsessively dissecting your recent argument with your partner or running “what if” scenarios about your upcoming social plans. Without judgment, you will start to find you are able to bring your
attention back to the safety and security of the present to balance your awareness in that moment.
The more we can intentionally practice stepping on and off our mind’s usual hamster wheel of productivity and consumption using mindfulness, the more likely we are to create in ourselves the foundation for acceptance, gratitude, and tolerance of discomfort – essential mental health skills. If you, like me, have struggled with the idea of mindfulness supporting your mental health work, I encourage you to give it a chance! Take an extra moment to give your attention to the
clouds, the birds, the breeze, and other present moment sensations that fall just outside of your usual day-to-day awareness, or maybe take a mindful moment to check in with your body here and there, and see if other shifts in awareness and attention start to come a little more easily over time!
Kelsey Terrell is an Intern with The Mindly Group studying Counseling at East Carolina University.
