Mindfulness Decoded: Understanding Awareness in Practice

In the realm of the well-being industry, meditation and mindfulness sessions are now offered through online apps, gyms, studios, and workplaces. If you've participated in these sessions, you've likely engaged in guided meditation, focusing on your breath, specific body parts, or cultivating feelings of gratitude, love, and compassion.

But do you truly grasp what mindfulness and meditation entail? Why are there so many meditation styles? And what exactly is mindfulness?

So let’s break it down into simple, digestible terms:

What is mindfulness?

According to Bhante Gunaratana [1], mindfulness is a special mode of perception in which the observer (you) sees reality exactly as it is. You might be thinking that you already do that, but in reality, our minds have crafted a set of lenses through which you observe and infer reality.

These lenses are a collection of all your experiences, good and bad, accumulated over the years. They make up your perception, how you see life, and your behavioral patterns (habitual thoughts and actions). Our brains are so efficient that they are constantly racing against our senses (what we feel, smell, hear, etc.) to predict what is about to happen, all in an effort to keep you safe and either avoid pain or rush into a pleasurable experience.

The brain does this by conceptualizing, something that as humans, we are really good at. It takes a sensation, experience, thought, or even our sense of “I,” and crystallizes it into a concept, grasping onto it as a fixed thing. We mistake those mental objects for reality.

When we are mindful, we are experiencing pure awareness. We create a gap between the external stimulus and our reaction/response to it. It’s a split-second gap that is non-conceptual; it’s only awareness.

When this happens, we begin to notice the things that we do with our bodies (like fidgeting, our posture, our food choices), our minds (our mental patterns, our biases, our reactions, and our triggers), and sensations and emotions with more clarity, without adding or suppressing anything.

With this new clarity, we can think more clearly about how we want to act or respond in the present moment, regardless of how challenging the situation may be, and avoid falling into the trap of our mental conditioning (we have all been there!).

And we also begin to notice the impermanence of things. How everyone and everything, including our emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and even our bodies, are constantly changing, constantly in flux. We can relax into life a little more, accepting that everything has a beginning and an end.

Lastly, it becomes evident that everyone and everything is interconnected. We affect others with our choices as much as others affect us at every level: personal, social, environmental, and global.

If we all became a little bit more mindful and made more conscious ethical decisions, can you imagine what the world could look like?

Stay tuned for the next entries where we will explain what you are supposed to be doing while meditating, how it relates to developing mindfulness, and how you can develop an in-home practice.

[1] Mindfulness in plan English, 1996, Bhante Gunaratana