author: Daniel Clary Webb, producer

"To live mindfully is to live in the moment and reawaken oneself to the present rather than dwelling on the past or anticipating the future.  To be mindful is to observe and label thoughts, feelings, sensations in the body in an objective manner.  Mindfulness can therefore be a tool to avoid self-criticism and judgment while identifying and managing difficult emotions.

"Mindfulness has become an increasingly popular part of our repertoire for enhancing brain health.  There are mindful meditation programs at schools to help children reduce the stress of exams [or their families].  Many health providers offer adjunctive mindful-based therapies for those suffering with pain associated with chronic diseases, such as autoimmune disorders and cancer.  But the benefits of mindfulness-based therapies have been felt the most by those who live with [various forms of] mental illness.

"To have control over the focus of your mind's eye such that you are healing yourself by changing the activity patterns of your brain circuits is about as empowering as it gets!  But what is mindfulness?  or mindful meditation?  or mindfulness-based intervention? 

"Mindfulness is based on the Tibetan Zen Buddhist practice of meditation.  It was adapted for modern psychology and integrated into therapy by Thich Nhat Hanh, Herbert Benson, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson. 

"Mindfulness is focusing your attention on experiencing the present without judgment from the past or worries about the future.  It is training the brain to focus on sensory perception and motor behaviors as you experience them.  You learn to attend to sensations from the world around you and from within you. 

"Focusing on breathing and body sensations like muscle tension and posture facilitates entering a mental state removed from internally generated, emotionally charged, repetitive thoughts.  In this state, stream of consciousness thoughts can pass without emotional attachment and burden.  Inner thoughts can be observed at a distance with self-awareness and detached perspective."

[ This is interesting: The MPFI article referenced here starts with EXACTLY THE SAME content as the 5 paragraphs above from Psychology Today.  MPFI adds this: ]

"So, what do we think is happening in the brain during mindful meditation? 

"Mindful meditation changes the balance of brain activity between the higher-order cortical regions responsible for attention and strengthens executive control over the activation of these attentional networks.  There are four attentional networks:

• the default-mode network (DMN)
• the attention network (AN)
• the salience network (SN)
• the frontoparietal control network (FPCN).

"The frontoparietal control network (FPCN) guides how brain activity is balanced between these networks and other brain tasks."

From my perspective, the most powerful experience in mindful presence isn't necessarily related to a specific meditation technique. It's intentionally turning one's attention from the busyness of thoughts and subvocal monologue or dialogue to a restful awareness of sensations on the felt-sense dimension -- simply feeling whatever you're sensing without judgment or comment or nudging things to be different.  It's simply noticing sensation without any ambition to change anything.  This is something you can do anywhere, anytime, in any situation ... theoretically.  (It's called "a practice".)  It's a way of being that can be experienced in the midst of any activity. 

Awareness of sensation in no way diminishes the ability to think or write or plan.  Consciously feeling adds a dimension of reality grounded in the inherent wisdom and ecology of one's indivisible bodymind.  Thinking happens more freely, with fewer distractions.  Felt-sense awareness is the "fair witness" referenced when speaking about wordless wisdom. 

Sensations are always happening in the here of now.  In the human psyche, our primitive brain sends us (continuous?) impulses to avoid discomfort and seek comfort.  Our primitive, fear-based impulses distract us from the perfection of what-is, right now, which is a felt-sense experience.  As it turns out, our fearful imagination is a maladaptive legacy from our evolutionary predecessors.  This repulsion-attraction mechanism is a survival strategy that may have served our far-distant ancestors well in the wild. 

Today, those impulses are the very source of our anxiety and tension.  From this perspective, mindfulness is taking an opportunity to discover an inherent feeling of appreciation for everything, exactly as it is, not as we intepret it to be relative to our comforts and discomforts.

I have more specific things to say about two primary modes of perception in my article, "Feel ... and Listen".