What is mindfulness?

One definition is to be aware, another definition is, a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.  There are multiple other explanations and definitions, I’ll use these, because it is most important to begin somewhere.  Mindfulness is a practice, and to practice is better than not practicing.  We’ll start with being aware and in later blogs we will explore the second definition.

Being aware, one definition of aware is having a perception of a situation or a fact. We perceive our external world through our senses and we also have an internal world we perceive that is separate from our senses.  Today’s focus will be on the senses and the external world.

Sometimes we get stuck in our internal world of thoughts, beliefs, ideas, stories, and feelings.  A mindfulness skill that helps us get out of our head or internal experience is to focus on our senses.  We can focus on one sense such as sight, focusing in on one object or noticing multiple objects and identifying them.  We can focus on two senses for example closing our eyes noticing the smell of a candle while listening to the noise of a fan.  If focusing on one sense or two senses is difficult, a third, a 4thor a 5thsense can be added to the equation.

I have noticed that when teaching some people with ADHD and/or racing thoughts that it was beneficial to focus on multiple things.  It could be because their mind needed multiple things to keep up with it, to keep their attention, and/or to keep from being bored.  Focusing the senses for 3 to 5 minutes a day, helps to build concentration, it metaphorically strengthens our attention muscle.  It also can keep one’s mind away from worry or out of one’s head.

I’ve seen it help someone who kept getting in trouble at school, because he would always talk with his friends in class.  After doing an exercise where he focused his sight on a pencil tip for 2 to 3 minutes a day, he no longer got in trouble for talking because he learned that he could ignore his friends or choose what he paid attention to, which also helped increase his grades.  One of the main strengths of focusing our senses is that it teaches us to be able to separate from distractions, thoughts, feelings, anxiety, worry, or anger and it increases our ability to be able to concentrate, focus, or choose what we give our attention to.

In the next blog we will explore more into mindfulness, by looking at how breathing and mantras, can be added to focusing on the senses and three ways to use breath in mindfulness.