Mindfulness Defined

If you’ve ever taken the London metro, you’re familiar with a polite warning announced at every tube stop: Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. MIND the gap. Watch your step. Be MINDFUL of the danger you might get into if you stop paying attention.

Preoccupied with daily challenges, to-do lists, and various troubles, our minds have a lot to juggle. Meandering between ideas, observations, opinions, reactions, and emotions is a full-time job. What our full minds need is mindfulness.

The concept is pretty instinctive in nature, hence, naturally, mindfulness will have a unique meaning tailored to your particular way of experiencing reality. However, let us attempt to define it so we can get a better understanding of its numerous benefits.

Mindfulness is intuition

The best way to experience mindfulness is to feel your way to and through it. There’s no point trying to analyze it or calculate it into your schedule — mindfulness borders on the edge of the spiritual realm. Dive into it with feeling, trust your gut, follow the bliss. Let mindfulness engage all your senses and open you up to something more than logic and reason.

Mindfulness is awareness

Realizing what’s happening around and inside us (or, that we have no clue what’s happening) can be truly enlightening because awareness is the foundation for all change, progress, and improvement. We need to properly register what we’re going through in order to handle the situation well (like minding the gap at the metro station). Mindfulness is the selective attention that we pay to what matters most in a given moment.

Mindfulness is meditation

Mindfulness stops time when it merges the past, present, and future into now. One breath after another, we make peace with what once was and is no more, and we welcome what is to come. We get anchored in the present moment and simultaneously exist slightly outside of time. Mindfulness makes it easier to distance ourselves from the contents of our minds to observe our thoughts without judgment.

Mindfulness is depth

There’s more to life than meets the eye. And mindfulness is that more. It uncovers hidden layers of our existence. It pushes the boundaries of our individual realities and therefore expands our perception of what we call life. Mindfulness adds meaning to our journey by focusing our attention on the why behind who we are and what we do.

Mindfulness is connection

We connect the dots of our life’s purpose much more efficiently in the state of mindfulness. We also build stronger bonds with ourselves and others when we do it mindfully. The smallest elements of everything that we think, feel, and do are interconnected. If we strengthen these channels with attention and focus, we’ll be able to fully embrace our space in the universe. Mindfulness is our wiser relationship with life itself.

Mindfulness is minimalism

Whatever feels inessential, mindfulness will unburden you from it. In the state of mindfulness, we close unnecessary tabs in our minds, clear all our cache and cookies, and delete obsolete files from the hard drives in our heads. You’re more likely to find mindfulness on a blank paper page rather than in a Google doc embedded in the overwhelming abundance of the online world.

Mindfulness is potential

Once you start going through life mindfully, the possibilities for small miracles become endless. Your mindful eyes will see more, your mindful ears will hear more, and your mindful heart will feel more. All of a sudden, there’s more potential for life to surprise and inspire us with new opportunities for wonder. Mindfulness is enchanting.

Mindfulness is harmony

You’d think mindfulness is quiet. But it sings with a gentle melody of tranquility, intention, and introspection. Her soothing voice almost whispers sweet notes of inner peace in our hearts. This song is one of relief from whatever doesn’t serve us well. It’s about the balance of the energies inside us that now all sing in unison. Mindfulness tunes us into our true selves.

Mindfulness is self-love

The relationship we have with ourselves is the most important one we’ll ever have. It’s the starting point and the prediction of all other relationships we will build over the course of our lives. Needless to say, it is worth investing time and energy into building it with solid bricks of self-awareness, self-respect, and self-love. How does one do that? You guessed it—one mindful heartbeat at a time.

Mind the Gap

Mindfulness is a gift that keeps on giving. It strengthens our intuition, expands our awareness, and eases us into meditative states of quiet reflection. It has the power to uncover the depth of our existence, it can forge and improve our connection with ourselves, others, and life itself. In the spirit of minimalism, it focuses our attention on what matters most. Mindfulness is full of potential, it brings about harmony, and it holds us in a (self)loving embrace. Mindfulness unloads a full mind.