Day 138 of #LiveWell2017

Mindfulness is the light of awareness…

How many times have you been doing something and suddenly realized you were done, but had not been aware of the act of doing it? It’s easy to do things on auto-pilot – washing dishes, brushing teeth, driving home from work. We are doing the task, but our minds are somewhere else, remembering, planning, day-dreaming.

In our fast-paced world of get-things-done, we forget, sometimes, to just be. To be fully present, mindful of where we are, who we are with, and aware of what is happening inside of us. By constantly going from task to task – from home to work, from meeting to happy hour, from gym to pick up the kids – we think we are being productive and successful and valuable, but we are missing out on just being.

Being truly present in the moment, being mindful, allows us to choose which thoughts, feelings, or sensations to act upon and which to ignore. Being present gives us the space to be, instead of to do, but it is hard. We are conditioned to have goals, purpose. I’ve lived most of my life in that head space, plotting, planning, working toward something. My name translate to mean “the bee,” and I’ve always been busy as a bee. But, what about now? This moment? Isn’t it worth my attention, too?

In her book, The Power of Off, Nancy Colier writes:

“In truth, life actually happens when you stop doing something with it and to it. But to trust this fact, you have to discover it for yourself. When you live with here as your destination, life gets…much easier.”

Being mindful is living with here, now.

“Did you ever stop to notice that everything going on in your mind… is in fact only happening in your private internal world? Your thoughts appear only to you.”

Think about that a minute. Each of us is thinking, sensing, perceiving the world in our own individual minds, in our own ways, completely differently from everyone else in the world. What is in our minds is ours alone. That’s a bit frightening to think that what we are experiencing “doesn’t exist except for an instant inside our minds.”

Being aware of those thoughts, feelings, and sensations and allowing them to come and go opens the door to just being here now. It is a powerful practice, to be mindful. Mindfulness is the light of awareness.