How Do Mindfulness and Awareness Go Hand-In-Hand?

awarenessmindfulnesslife lessonsrealitythe present

Jan 28

Reexamining mindfulness

Mindfulness is conscious awareness of not just what’s happening in the world around us – but what’s going on within us. It’s being conscious and aware – here and now – of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.

I’ve previously explored using mindfulness to make choices – like choosing to be positive or negative. But that’s not entirely practical, is it? The whole concept fails to acknowledge how much space exists between the extremes like good and bad, positive and negative, etc.

Rather than employ mindfulness to recognize where we are in the present and redirect ourselves towards an extreme – just the act of being consciously aware via mindfulness is useful. Why? Because it makes us more aware of ourselves and where we are in the world outside of ourselves, too.

Be here, now

Mindfulness is how we can be in the present. Not to alter where, how, what, and why we are so much as being aware of where, how, what, and why we are.

While we can use mindfulness to be more consciously aware of all that we are to control change – it might be more useful just for knowledge and understanding. I think maybe just knowing where we are on the cylinder between given extremes opens us to possibilities.

It’s not about taking control to make a change. Instead, it’s really more about being in the present and the know. It’s using mindfulness to just exist in the now.