MINDFULNESS
“Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. Mindfulness activates parts of our brains that aren’t normally activated when we’re mindlessly running on autopilot.
Researches in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine provide a wealth of evidence that mindfulness affects attention, cognition, emotions, behavior, and physiology in positive ways. A small but growing amount of people in the management area also suggests that mindfulness is linked to better workplace functioning. And there’s growing research showing that when you train your brain to be mindful, you’re actually remodeling the physical structure of your brain.
Mindfulness is available to us in every moment, whether through meditations and body scans, or mindful moment practices like taking time to pause and breathe when the phone rings instead of rushing to answer it.