IMAX enhances awareness of the objective world by increasing the intensity. Strengthening your attentional skills elevates awareness of the subjective world — your thoughts and feelings — as well as the interplay between both worlds.

Intensity isn’t required.

Everyone is already mindful, but we could all use a little more practice.

Get curious about what you feel instead of forcing a prescribed emotional response.

Try focusing on what’s noticeably changing from moment to moment.

Being more curious about body sensations might pleasantly surprise you sometimes.

Mindfulness doesn’t provide some kind of magical exemption from discomfort. Not at all. It's actually the opposite. It means when practiced consistently—with or without meditation—we can sometimes change the degree to which we fight against some present discomfort.

It wasn’t until I stumbled clumsily toward a daily mindfulness practice in my mid-thirties that I discovered that there were ways I could get better at feeling my feelings.

Before intentionally working on my attentional skills, I had no idea how often I escalated my unpleasant feelings and zipped past the pleasant and subtler ones.

The kind of self-awareness that mindfulness exercise develops has helped me become more objective about my subjective experiences.

"You don't have to analyze it. You just have to feel it." 

Dan Harris

Mindfulness involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

First, you must let your heart
be broken open
in a way you have never
felt before,
cannot imagine.

Dorothy Walters

Thinking your way through unpleasant emotions takes time while a single repetition of any mindfulness exercise only takes a few seconds. The skills of attention strengthened by mindfulness practice enhance both the resolving of unpleasant emotions and the acceptance of them.  

One of the things I’ve found so remarkable about the approach to mindfulness I practice and teach, is the way it has gradually, yet significantly changed the way I relate to the physicality of my emotions—including the unpleasant ones.

“If we sit still, like a mountain in a hurricane, if we don't protect ourselves from the trueness and the vividness and the immediacy and the lack of confirmation of simply being part of life, then we are not this separate being who has to have things turn out our way.”

Pema Chödrön

"It’s ironic that the biggest potential problem associated with focusing on emotional discomfort is closely linked to one of its most powerful payoffs: our cage may get rattled a bit before it collapses."

Shinzen Young

Here's a great strategy from Phillip Moffitt for working with unpleasant emotions .

“When a difficult situation or memory arises, it is essential that you be able to self-soothe in order to respond skillfully.”

Phillip Moffitt