Mindfulness: Disconnect to Connect

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L et’s take a quick journey into the past. Imagine a world without computers. Without cell phones and social media. Imagine waking up on your farm in the early morning hours to feed the chickens in the shadow of the sunrise’s rays. Does that sound deliciously wonderful or woefully awful?

Whether you would or wouldn’t choose to live in the past I’m sure you’ll admit there are disadvantages and advantages of living in any time period. And there definitely are some disadvantages of living in today’s modern world of cyberspace. Like constant noise. Dizzying speed. Never stopping for a minute. Always racing against the clock. Checking to see if we got any new messages on our handy dandy phones every few seconds — not very conducive to careful contemplation or quiet meditation.

But the winter months when we spend more time indoors with family and friends is the perfect season for careful self-introspection. This calls for us to stop think and examine our present realities. It is a time to tune in to our inner beings and discover our truer selves. In our society it is so easy to keep on racing without ever stopping to think about ourselves and our lives. So how can we learn to tune in to our inner reality?

This is where the concept of mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is about learning the art of self-directed focus. It’s about opting out of the race that makes up our busy lives to tune into ourselves. It’s about disconnecting from the hurried outer world of action to connect to our inner selves. Learning to become mindful is about learning to center our attention on ourselves at the present moment on fully contemplating and appreciating our unique human experience as it is right now. Practicing mindfulness is about being in tune with the flow of our thoughts and feelings and becoming more self-aware individuals.