Without direct experience, the impact of habitual mindfulness practice seems too simple to be beneficial.

A year of streaming my weekday morning meditation practice during the pandemic.

When you begin a walking or running program, there are several details you can track as evidence of improvement. Your step count. The length of your stride. Your pace. The amount of time it takes your heart to return to its recover its baseline resting rate. But how will you know when you’re getting better at noticing perceptions? 

What keeps us holding out for these perfect, comfortable lives that we imagine? And how can training your attention help address these habits?

There’s something liberating about feeling at home in both the story of your life and the direct experience of living it. 

When it comes to developing any new skill, it is more important to be clever than to be disciplined.

What makes it so difficult to establish a habit even when we’re convinced of its benefits?

Focusing on our in-breath, we release the past, we release the future, we release our projects. We ride on that breath with all our being. Our mind comes back to our body, and we are truly there, alive, in the present moment. We are home.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

Mindfulness practice involves tracking aspects of ordinary experience as precisely as possible while allowing these observations to come and go with less interference. The noting technique creates a structure for maintaining both of these qualities of attention. Using mental labels is a technique that supports noting.

Mindfulness meditation uses ordinary sensory experience to develop skills of attention which can increase our baseline level of contentment. We take the world in through our eyes, our ears, and our bodies. We make sense of the world and our relationship to it through our mental images, internal conversations, and sensations in the body which seem to have emotional flavors.

Consider keeping your new mindfulness practice to yourself until the habit is established.

Just as physical exercise increases strength, flexibility, and endurance to support the regular activities of your life, mindfulness exercises develop skills of attention that nurture a deep and mature level of personal contentment.

“There is a middle way here between the extremes of rigidity and passivity, one that offers a more legitimate form of meditation.”

Jason Siff

“To be present, it helps to purposefully bring awareness to your moments – otherwise you may miss many of them.”

John Kabat-Zinn