FAQs

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a mind-body approach that increases our ability to manage difficult situations and stressful lives. Mindfulness can be practiced  on a day-to-day basis. It can enable people to change the way they think and feel about their experiences and gives you a choice which ultimately leads to freedom.

I’m not a spiritual person will it matter?

While it is true that historically meditation has been closely associated with various spiritual traditions, there’s no reason you can’t be a complete atheist and still experience the benefits of calm, clarity, focus and productivity that meditation and Mindfulness convey. The very fact that nearly all spiritual traditions include meditation in their repertoire speaks to its universality. There are many different types of meditation. Mindfulness meditation is deceptively simple, and completely secular. It simply involves paying attention to your breath, noticing when you get distracted by a thought or emotion, and then returning to focusing on your breath. That’s it. No mantras, invocations, chakras, or third-eyes are necessary if you are not so inclined.

Why should I care about paying attention?

Mindfulness meditation has been scientifically shown to decrease depression, distraction, anxiety, rumination, and emotional reactivity, while at the same time improving information processing abilities, resilience, cognitive flexibility, immune function, intuition, emotion regulation, and relationship satisfaction. For these reasons and more, companies like Google, LinkedIn, Monsanto, Aetna, and many others offer mindfulness programs to their employees. Mindfulness is also key to becoming emotionally intelligent, a set of skills that has been shown to be important to becoming an exceptionally effective leader or manager.

So, Mindfulness is about stopping thoughts?

Not exactly. It’s more about learning how to recognize when you are thinking or feeling, and then making a conscious decision around whether it makes sense to continue that line of thought or to express that emotion, or whether you’d be better served by letting  go.

How does Mindfulness change the human brain?

The human brain is well adapted to reviewing the past, building models of the world, and predicting the future. Unfortunately, it is so well adapted to these tasks that it often goes overboard, letting these things take over, and then negatively feeding back, ruminating. There are at least two problems with this. First, when you are thinking, you are not doing, or worse, you are doing things on auto-pilot. Second, this feedback loop can amplify the wrong things.  For example, strengthening unwarranted negative emotions or unjustifiably reinforcing how you view yourself based on your past actions. Being mindful simply means that you observe this process in a detached way. Mindfulness lets you decide whether this is the kind of thought or emotion that makes sense for you in this momet.

Are Mindfulness and meditation the same thing?

No. Meditation is simply a technique used to train you to learn how to be mindful. It is like a targeted workout for your brain, one that trains you to learn a particular skill: being aware of where you are spending your attentional energy. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is a way of life. It can be practiced in every thing you do. You can walk mindfully, eat mindfully, listen mindfully, speak mindfully - drive, read, play, and love mindfully. Mindfulness is all about being present and aware of what’s currently happening in and around you, encapsulated in these three words: Be Here Now.