What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is self-awareness. It is knowing what you are thinking, how you are feeling, and who you are intent on being.

It’s continuously amazing to me how easily we lose sight of mindfulness. We get caught up in all the things around us, the attitudes and feelings of the people we surround ourselves with, and that in turn can overtake our own mindfulness.

Why is this important? When someone is telling you about their bad day, or you are reading about the awful news from around the world, bombarded with stories of oppression, greed and people doing bad things to people – your mood, your attitude and your feelings are directly affected.

The idea of Positivity is to try and view life from a positive perspective. Negative begets negative, and positive begets positive. If you are looking at life through a dark and unpleasant lens, you will see an abundance of the dark and unpleasant things. However, if you see life through a light and clear lens, you are now able to see it all.

Mindfulness is not about blindly seeing nothing but positive and happy and such. It is about being aware of your thoughts and feelings. It is about taking into account your surroundings, your mindset, your situation, your present self. Being mindful is the first step towards being aware, and being aware is how you can choose to live more positively or more negatively.

How do I express mindfulness?

The simplest and easiest way to recognize mindfulness is to ask yourself direct questions. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? How am I feeling? Where is my mind? What am I thinking about? What am I focused on? We are constantly asking our friends, families, coworkers, even random strangers questions like these. Yet it is infrequent of us to direct these questions inwards. Thus we lose mindfulness.

Positivity 197 - Mindfulness This is not an act of selfishness. Quite the contrary; you can do more for others around you when you know who and what YOU are about. Being mindful begins with the self…but mindfulness of the self allows for greater mindfulness of those around you. When you are more mindful of those around you, you will have a better idea of how you can help others in whatever ways you can.

Positivity is finding a positive place, a positive attitude. Being mindful of what you are thinking, feeling, saying and thus projecting will allow you to break from negativity more easily. This in turn will allow you to free yourself to be in a better, more positive headspace more frequently. I believe that more Positivity in the world can only make the world a better, healthier, more balanced place for everyone.

Finding positivity is not hard, but it does require action.

Knowing that greater mindfulness is greater self-awareness, we can choose to focus on more positive things. When we make the choice to focus on the positive we empower ourselves. When we feel empowered, we frequently spread that feeling to others around us; as such, we can build more positive feelings in the collective consciousness. We can use the positive feelings this generates to dissolve negative feelings. When we take away negative feelings, we open up space to let in positive feelings, and that is something we can be grateful for. Gratitude leads to happiness. Happiness is the ultimate positive attitude. Positive attitude begets positive energy, and that is always a good thing.

This is the one hundred ninety-seventh entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog and spread the positivity.