What Is Mindfulness?

What Does Mindfulness Mean?

Mindfulness means clear comprehension in the Pali language. Pali is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist PāliIts definition aligns with its purpose. The meaning of mindfulness is to develop clear comprehension. It will help us see more clearly, respond more effectively to what life puts in front of us, and ultimately make more aligned choices to what our purpose in life is all about.

To use mindfulness as a noun refers to a state of mind. A state of calmness, gratitude, and compassion that can have a positive effect on us psychologically and modes of physical sensations

When used as a verb, mindfulness points to entering that state, to practicing a way of being, a moment-by-moment awareness and gentle nurturing of our thoughts, emotions, and sensations flowing through our body. It involves knowing who you really are.

Learning mindfulness is the most important thing you can do in your life.

Martin Hamilton

You will have better relationships and for many is the first step to a new and better life. Mindfulness is backed by lots of research with anecdotal evidence that obtaining a mindful brain can lead to a much happier and more productive life.

To get a broader perspective, mindfulness originated in ancient Chinese medicine, but has been widely integrated into modern western therapies for treating an extensively wide range of psychological and physiological conditions.

After studying some of the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton, a neuroscientist who studies cells, it’s clear mindfulness training can improve mental activity and change brain connectivity along with bodily processes. As even another teacher in the field of mindfulness puts it, brain neurons that fire together, wire together. 

The proven effects of the application of mindfulness in our daily routine begin to work so quickly that even as few as five sessions of practice can lead to improvements in both the central and autonomic nervous systems, which are essential for regulating involuntary bodily functions, processing feelings of stress and danger, and the connection between our internal organs and our brain. This entirely leads to better physical health as well as happier mental states, lower levels of stress, and an overall better everyday experience

One of the most exciting findings of mindfulness is the recognition that we are far from being fixed in who we are. As Dr. Lipton has said for decades, and proven through his lab experiments with human cells, we are neuroplastic in nature and are an ongoing development of our inner emotional feelings and responses.

This is how neuroscientists explain our ability to learn and grow, and even unlearn. We literally are creating our future second by second. This again solidifies the approach of the importance of programming our subconscious mind with the correct information to develop habits, before trying to program the conscious.

The work of organizational psychologists help people gain happiness, which mainly comes from the feelings of usefulness and/or simply making a decision to be happy regardless of life situations.

One organizational psychologist in particular, Benjamin Hardy, PhD, has written several books about personality and how to be your future self. He defines a person’s identity as that which you are most committed to.

The idea that our brain and our future is constantly changing throughout our lives means that our sense of happiness, contentment, and meaningful living, can be transformed through how we control the experience of the present. To make our present better we need to make our future bigger.

The Psychology of Mindfulness

Mindfulness isn’t just about paying attention but more about how we pay attention.

Our attention is more important than our time or our focus. Attention is the IQ of the 21st century.

Once mindfulness-based interventions become part of our physiology as well as psychology, the benefits of mindfulness practices allow us to use our heart as our compass, directing and reflecting our most delightful hopes and values.

It will enable us to increase our emotional intelligence and eliminate mind wanders in our everyday life by training our brain, using mindfulness exercises enabling the grounding our mind into the present moment.

By learning and implementing simple practices of mindfulness we elevate our quality of life and develop a stronger and more uplifting attitude. This in turn creates an environment within ourselves of paying attention to what’s happening around us—no matter the situation—with an attitude of compassion and curiosity. Once you learn how to reach this state of mindfulness it’s an automatic device to rid yourself of negative emotions.

Psychology shows that mindfulness can help us escape the vicious cycle mental process like that of negative thinking, allowing us to go outside the chattering negative self-talk—our reactive impulses and emotions and be an observer instead of a participant.

While unhappy or upsetting memories, judgmental ways of thinking, and the chatter of negative self-talk, are all going to involuntarily enter our minds, we can choose what happens next after they enter and how they trigger our reactions and actions. 

Learning mindfulness methods we can learn to apply a pause, quickly create a reset, and employ an alternate way of seeing ourselves and our environment by stepping out of physical motion and into feeling becoming the best version of ourselves. 

Our brain and conscious mind can do more than think. It can be aware of the thinking that’s going on.

Many People Ask Themselves Who They Are

The answer to the question “who am I” is simple, yet very hard to grasp. Who you really are, according to our implementation of the disciplines of mindfulness methods would be our identity. The one observing what you are thinking, and not the thoughts themselves.

Our identity as that which you are most committed to while realizing the gap and the gain.

Some thoughts just pop-up like an email form on a web page—totally unexpected and unwanted. We can’t completely control that. That’s why we should understand that’s not who we are. Those thought are not you.

When your consciousness is not centered within, it becomes totally focused on the objects of the consciousness. When you are a centered being, however, your consciousness is always aware of being conscious. That’s who you really are. The observer.

This new awareness of who we are allows us to experience the world more directly and with less judgement. We can view our world with positive emotions and gratitude which will automatically encourage our subconscious to guide us into an upward spiral of positive emotions and body sensations.

Research from the American Psychological Association (APA) suggests that the benefits of mindfulness come from its ability to help us better control our body’s response to stress. It is a practice of mindfulness-based stress reduction.

The true “you” is the part of the mind that is noticing the pop-up thought, self-talk, and mind chatter and deciding how to react and act to those thoughts. 

By applying mindfulness techniques which will correlate in changing activity within regions of the brain, those specifically associated with attention and emotional regulation, mindfulness will significantly lower our response to stress. By achieving this position we are automatically creating a positive flow of effects throughout our body. We more effectively control things like our weight using mindful eating in our daily life. Many have found benefits of mindful practices to control anxiety disorders along with much better handling of stressful situations.

Is There More Than One Meaning To Mindfulness

You will find slight variations of the meaning of mindfulness in books, websites, audio, and videos. We’ve put together a compilation of resources to get you started on your mindfulness journey on the site. As we alluded to earlier, the universal definition of mindfulness is the practice of purposely bringing one’s attention to the present-moment experience without evaluation, a skill almost anyone can develop through mindfulness meditation techniques or other more expensive training methods such as cognitive behavioral therapy.

The true work of mindfulness is learning to let these bad psychological imprints release. To let it go. It’s a skill that’s hard to adopt.

Martin Hamilton

Mindfulness in its simplest terms means paying full attention to something. It means slowing down to really notice what you’re doing. Being mindful is the opposite of rushing or multitasking while your mind moves extra fast. When you’re mindful your brain frequency is more relaxed toward the theta state, you’re taking your time. You’re focusing with greater ease, in a relaxed easy way at every given moment.

I think the best and most helpful meaning of mindfulness is awareness of what my inner self-talk is doing to me and how to immediately recognize when it’s not serving me properly. How do I know when it’s not serving me properly? It’s when it is creating bad psychological imprints on my self mind and me being able to send it down the road quickly. It’s cultivating the practice of visually, in my mind, the leaning away from bad stuff type thinking while at the same time being mindful and aware of not piling more stuff on that will clutter and hurt me mentally in the future.

Challenges With Implementing Mindfulness

Trying to change behavior and habits is not an easy thing to do. It was once said the basic steps to develop a new habit it took about 21 days. Modern research has now shown it a much longer time frame —possibly because of the amount of interruptions we now see daily through social media and TV—that it takes more like 72 days to form a new habit. This can make programming our subconscious and allowing the positive benefits of mindfulness seemingly beyond our conscious control to develop. 

Conclusion:

Mindfulness offers a solution by unconsciously transforming our thoughts feelings and actions. Mindfulness has certainly been shown to help anyone wishing to reduce or stop poor habits like smoking and drinking through an improved process of self-awareness of thought patterns which control physiological aspects leading to wiser actions. There are situations where continued practice of mindfulness methods help with chronic pain. Did you know you can use mindful movement activities to remove harmful levels of stress from your body and life?