Mindfulness: What is it? How can it help our happiness?

The practice of mindfulness in meditation goes back many years but its importance is still very relevant today. Too often people are tortured and affected by their own emotions and don’t know how to cope or even handle them so it's important to cultivate techniques to help cope and improve our wellbeing. This meditation technique of mindfulness focuses on addressing our inner thoughts even the suppressed ones which will help people focus on not reacting so quickly to our desires and attachments and thus helping the individual overcome suffering and lead a life that can get us closer to happiness.

In Buddhism mindfulness is a part of the eightfold path, the goal of this path is to help the individual overcome suffering and reach nirvana. Focusing however just on mindfulness from the eightfold path we can see how it may eliminate a sense of suffering and bring a form of happiness. People more often than not are utterly consumed by their desires especially in a capitalist society and this leads to people caring too much about materialistic things to bring them happiness and disregard their inner peace. When a person's inner peace gets disregarded for too long it can be quite the challenge to regain control of one's inner peace. Thus, people get into ruts that they can't get out of however from practicing this technique of mindfulness I have seen improvements in my inner peace and my ability to fight negative thoughts.

Mindfulness is all about detachment and taking a step back to properly analyze what's going on instead of letting our emotions get the best of us. For example, if I am sad and am over bombarded with sadness instead of dwelling on my sadness I would put my focus on being mindful of my sadness which would require me to take a step back and analyze what brought on the sadness and just be aware that there is sadness occurring and in doing so I am no longer dwelling and thus my sadness has decreased since I gave up my ability to dwell and instead became mindful of my sadness. This mindfulness can help with all emotions however not just sadness. Mindfulness thus helps our ability to not be completely embodied in emotion.

Now that I have set up what mindfulness is and how it can be helpful you may be asking how do I practice this mindful meditation? And how often must I do it? To start with I recommend learning how to meditate via focusing on the breath and learning how to refocus your attention and then once you’ve learned the initial technique of meditation then you can incorporate this mindfulness into your meditation. Which, practicing mindfulness in meditation is to simply listen to the mind's thoughts whether they're positive or negative and realize that these thoughts you're experiencing don’t define you and they will always constantly come and go so never let yourself become too attached to any specific thoughts. However, I would like to warn people before they go down this path of mindfulness it is a subjective challenge to overcome your issues and learn to overcome whatever issues are currently possessing you and the thoughts you're currently attached too. But once you start the battle against your attachment and desires, you'll learn how to always be mindful and if you can overcome the first battle and continue the battle then you'll slowly see an improvement in happiness due to being a mindful person. Practice, however, is extremely important in mindfulness and the first few meditations practicing this will be quite a challenge but as you refine your technique you'll get better at detaching from your attachment and thus be more mindful so if you start this journey don’t give up in the beginning and you will see improvement!

Best of luck on your mindful journey!