Mindfulness is a really key word these day, everybody is talking about it. The way I explain mindfulness is that it is when you get into a moment when you are not stuck in your thoughts. If you start to notice that your mind chatters to you from when you wake up to when you go to bed, you will realize you don’t really have the ability to “turn it off.” This proves that we don’t have control over our mind, it really does what it wants.
The point of therapy is to help understand how the mind is programmed from our past situations and what has shaped this mind chatter. It is about what you mind is talking about and how those ideas got in there. Mindfulness is the awareness that this chatter is neither your essence or your truth.
In a way, we are like a computer that was with a fresh slate when we were born. Then, after your life happens and you are influenced, all these programs start to run in this computer, just like all the programming that runs our lives.
If you can get a really quiet moment then you might have a realization that you can differentiate between the parts of yourself that exist. You can just witness your inner dialogue instead of being overtaken by it. With mindfulness, you can connect with that calm, loving, wise, sincere part of yourself that is knowing. You can observe the chatter without identifying with it. This aligns with the concept of consciousness, where you are like the sky rather than being stuck in the clouds that are then allowed to simply pass by.