What is Mindfulness?

The concept of mindfulness is very popular these days. And that’s wonderful! It is truly at the core of how we start to escape our old cycles and pain. It is the starting point. But what does ‘mindfulness’ really refer to?

There is a big difference between seeing yourself as the experiencer of something versus seeing yourself as the observer of the thing that’s happening.

Our consciousness is very interesting. There are various layers of our thoughts and inner experience. There’s the surface layer of us that is simply responsive. And then there’s the version of us that can notice that we are being responsive.

Doing this inner healing starts by shifting our focus to that second layer. We need to recognize the things that are happening inside of us.

So, when someone triggers you or is rude to you or anything like that, you can turn your attention to one of two places.

You can either focus on the thing that triggered you. This keeps you as the experiencer of the event, and the more that you focus on the trigger, the more that you will perpetuate an inner cycle where you keep blaming, judging, getting angry, etc…

Or you can focus on what’s happening inside of you at that moment. You can recognize ‘oh, look! I’m getting triggered right now. Look at how my thoughts are moving to judgment and anger! Look at how I’m holding my breath and tensing up my shoulders’.

Which option do you think is going to get you back to feeling good more quickly and help you compose yourself to act in such a way that will lead to better outcomes for you and everyone involved?

Even if your automatic response might be ‘justified’ in the context of morals and etiquette regarding what someone did to you, the question I often ask my clients is this:

Do you want to keep justifying your emotions?

Or do you want to overcome them?

If you keep on focusing on the external trigger, then you will continue to be triggered, in which case your mind will go out of its way to keep justifying to you why you’re right in being triggered. And sure… logically speaking there is a reason to be triggered. But it’s not pleasant or helpful to feel that way.

So, why are you going to go out of your way to rationalize to yourself why you’re right to suffer?

If you want to stop being angry, bitter, afraid, etc… you’re going to have to stop telling yourself how right you are to be angry, bitter, and afraid.

Even if someone else has genuinely done something wrong or cruel, you have the option of whether or not to absorb that and let it steer you into inner suffering, or to focus on the inner suffering itself so that you can escape it as quickly as possible.

That is mindfulness. And it’s a skill we want to get really good at.

We want to be able to move from ‘being’ to ‘observing’ as quickly as possible, so that we can escape the subconscious cycles that perpetuate our suffering.