How to Develop Mindful Awareness

Mindfulness is an awareness that encompasses the mental, emotional, physical, environmental, and spiritual sensations of every moment. To be mindful grants us breathing room so that we can pause before resorting to our habitual, addictive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Mindfulness replaces judgement with open-minded curiosity.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. ATTENTION:
   Pay attention, using all your senses to be in the moment. Notice what you see, smell, taste, feel, and hear. Notice also what you are thinking and what your thoughts are about those thoughts. Notice what you feel emotionally, especially those feelings you don’t want to acknowledge.
2. AWARENESS:
   Realize that you are not your thoughts. By the very act of observing what is happening, you have created some distance between you and your thoughts. They are not you.
   Recognize, too, that what you are experiencing is only part of what is happening. For example, if you are talking with someone, your partner is having an experience of the conversation and his or her experience is different from your own. Expanding our awareness entails recognizing that what we tell ourselves is not the whole story and we can develop an open-minded curiosity about what else may be happening in the moment.
   Recognize that a lot of your thoughts are about the past or the future. If you can stop attending to these thoughts and attend only to this moment, you will see things in the present more clearly.
3. ACCEPTANCE
   Accept whatever is happening in this moment. You may not like it, you may have some strong feelings about it, but it is happening and accepting that fact is the beginning of being able to change.
   One of the best ways to develop mindful presence is through breathing meditation practices.