What is mindfulness?

Hint: it's more than a hot bath with scented candles

In my book Radical Wellness, I begin to address the question “What is mindfulness?” with the following:

“Mindfulness is the practice of staying present and observing your experience in a compassionate, accepting, and nonjudgmental way. Your experience includes what is happening inside of you — your thoughts and emotions — as well as what is happening outside of you, such as life events and relationships. One of the main goals of mindfulness is to create space between you and your experience. That space reminds you that there is a you separate from all of this, and that these internal and external experiences are temporary, while you remain.

As you practice and become a more compassionate observer of your own mind, you may grow more aware of your biases and reactive patterns. You begin to navigate negative thoughts, hard emotions, and difficult situations with more awareness, intention, and grace. That awareness often leads to wiser choices, choices that reflect your values and your authentic self.”

But let’s go deeper, because I think modern usage has taken mindfulness a bit off course.

Mindfulness techniques and theories stem from the ancient Zen Buddhist tradition of living with present moment awareness. In Zen monasteries, monks have practiced this for centuries through zazen, or seated meditation, as well as through the most ordinary acts of daily life. Washing a bowl, raking gravel, drinking tea. The point was never to feel relaxed or to escape the difficulties of being alive. It was to be so completely present in each moment that there was no room for the mind to wander into worry, judgment, or distraction. Every single act, no matter how humble, was an opportunity to practice waking up.

The Western version of this tradition was championed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, a Professor of Medicine who created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the 1970s. Kabat-Zinn worked with patients struggling with chronic pain and anxiety associated with chronic illness or injury, using breathing and visualization techniques to help them learn to be with their pain instead of fighting against it or trying to get through it. He helped people live better lives, not by eliminating their suffering, but by changing their relationship to it.

Over the decades since this groundbreaking work, mindfulness has become a widespread term. And when that happens, it also gets co-opted.

Since the dawn of the modern marketing industry in the early 1900s, businesses have used our aversion to discomfort, our shame and insecurity, to highlight the gaps between how we feel about ourselves and our lives and the products and services they can sell us to fix those gaps. Marketing works because we don’t like to feel bad, period. We want to feel however someone is telling us we can feel: clean, younger, strong, efficient, chic, healthy, smart, independent, popular, accepted. “You want to be manly? Buy this truck and use Old Spice! You want to be beautiful? You need fewer wrinkles and a Rolex!” And many companies and coaches, unfortunately, have used these same tactics to sell us on mindfulness. “You want to feel calm and in control of your life? Drink some mindfulness tea, light a mindfulness candle, do a mindfulness meditation on a mindfulness app. Just let your discomfort melt away.”

This is missing the point entirely. Self-care is an important part of wellness, and bubble baths and deep breathing have their place. But they are not the practice of mindfulness in and of themselves. They are rest and relaxation, very important parts of taking time for yourself to de-stress. The difference matters. Thinking of mindfulness as a way to avoid discomfort actually makes us more fragile in a world full of uncomfortable experiences and relationships, a world specifically designed to offer us challenges and opportunities to grow and mature in the way we navigate the river of life.

Buddhists do not practice meditation to rid themselves of suffering. Life is, in fact, suffering and joy and boredom mixed together like water in a river, sometimes calm and clear, sometimes full of jagged rocks heading toward a raging waterfall. Without the rocks and the waterfall, a life that was only a peaceful stream would lose its context. Joy is joy in the context of suffering.

Mindfulness meditation is about learning to stand on the bank of that river and watch the water move. You are not the river. You are the one watching. The thoughts, the feelings, the discomfort, they flow past. You remain.

This is the practice: you sit in silence and stillness, and thoughts arise, because they always will. Instead of getting swept away in the current by them and any emotions or meanings you attach to them, you notice them. Ah. I am thinking thoughts. And you come back to your breath. Then more thoughts arise, and you get swept away again for a while, and then you notice again. Ah. There I go. And you come back to your breath. Over and over. This is not failure. This is the practice. You are not trying to control your thoughts or get rid of them. You are simply learning to watch them with curiosity rather than conviction, because in the distance between you and your thoughts lives something extraordinary: choice.

Photo by Christian Lunde on Unsplash

Think about what happens when someone cuts you off in traffic. An angry thought flares up instantly. Maybe it used to hijack your mood for a few hours, bleeding into your interactions and your energy. With mindfulness practice, something shifts. You see the thought arise. You notice that what you actually felt was fear, or a sense of unfairness. And then you don’t have to go anywhere with it. You come back to your breath. It passes through you. It is no longer part of your present moment, the only moment in which we actually live. Or consider a harder example: someone you love says something that stings. The old pattern might be to react immediately, to defend, to shut down, to wound back. But with practice, there is a beat. A breath. A moment of watching before responding. Between what happens to us and what we make it mean, there is always a gap, and that gap is where our freedom lives. It is the difference between reacting and responding.

You are faced with life experiences and human interactions, both seemingly simple and surprisingly complex, all day long. The only constant through all of it is you. Grounding yourself in the present moment is not about getting control of your thoughts. The way is always through breath and awareness of your body, right now, in this moment.

Many people say they are “not good” at meditation. I’ve said it myself. But the more I learned, the more I realized it completely misses the point. Mindfulness meditation is not something to get good at. It is a willingness to sit with discomfort and come back to your breath, over and over, without judgment. The mind wanders; that is what minds do. Noticing that it has wandered and returning to the breath is the practice. Every single time. You cannot do it wrong. Think of it like lifting weights. You don’t go to the gym once and walk out strong. You show up, repeatedly, and over time, something builds, not just in your muscles but in your relationship to effort itself. Mindfulness works the same way. The spaciousness you practice in stillness becomes the spaciousness you carry into your life. Mindfulness is showing up for yourself.

While we all experience pain and suffering, the meaning we attach to it and the choices we make in response are ours. Mindfulness doesn’t promise to make your life easier or your river calmer. It teaches you to stand on the bank, steady, curious, and present. And then come back to your breath.

If you’d like to try this for yourself, here is a simple exercise to begin.

Sit quietly and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and let yourself sink into your seat, feeling the weight of your body, the ground beneath you, the air moving in and out. When you feel settled, notice the first thought that arrives, or choose one that has been nagging at you lately.

Now imagine that thought written on a piece of paper, sitting on a table in front of you. Look at it. You don’t have to do anything with it. Just see it there, outside of you, separate from you.

And then, slowly, take a step back. And another. Keep breathing. Keep creating a little more distance between yourself and that piece of paper. Notice what happens in your body as you do. Does your jaw loosen? Does your chest open? Can you feel yourself releasing your grip on the thought, even just a little?

This is what mindfulness practice builds over time, that ability to step back, to breathe, to remember that you are not your thoughts. You are the one watching them. The paper stays on the table. You keep breathing.

And that is enough to begin.

Happy Mother's Day to all the amazing mothers out there, and to every woman who has ever loved someone fiercely and unconditionally. Mothering is not only something you do for your children. It is something women do for each other, for their communities, for the world, every single day. The ones who notice, who remember, who show up, nurture, protect, and make people feel less alone just by being in the room. That is its own kind of mothering, and it matters more than words can say. Today we celebrate all of it.

Neighborhood peony update!