Mindfulness begins when we start to notice that we are living on ‘automatic pilot’ for a lot of our lives. Our minds are busy doing one thing whilst we are moving through our lives. Whilst being able to multi-task, or drive a car whilst not really thinking about what we are doing, is useful to us in certain situations, if being on ‘auto-pilot’ becomes a habit for our internal experience, we can run into difficulties. We can find ourselves in unpleasant emotional landscapes without really knowing how we got there!

Mindfulness invites us to be awake to our experience as it is unfolding, moment by moment, with an attitude of curiosity and kindness.

Through meditation practices we begin to train the mind to ‘unhook’ from distractions such as a wandering mind, a tired or an aching body, a persistent thought or unsettling feeling. Unhooking from what pulls the mind away and returning over and over again to re-focus on our breath in the body with a gentle, kindly awareness, is the ‘work’ in meditation. Becoming familiar with ‘unhooking’ in the meditation practices builds a foundation for being able to ‘unhook’ and take a step back from difficulties such as stress, anxiety or low mood when they show up in our day to day lives.

Unhooking from what pulls our attention does not mean getting rid of a difficulty, or fixing what we don’t want to be here, instead the movement of ‘unhooking’ simply gives us an opportunity to experience the difficulty as only part of our experience, not all of it, not all of us. We gradually begin to see our experience from a different perspective and so begin to relate to it differently. We begin to live alongside difficulties when they arise, rather than from inside them. It is the shift in the relationship to what arises in our experience that causes our experience to ‘feel’ different-perhaps less overwhelming. We may feel we have choices about how we respond to what life brings to our door.