Mindfulness, as the word suggests, is the state of mind that is full of awareness. The mind that is fully attending to what’s happening to oneself, to what you’re doing, to the space you’re moving through and everything you as an individual are experiencing. That might sound very basic, except for the bothersome fact that we often swing away from this. Our mind takes flight, we lose touch with our body, and pretty soon we’re engrossed in a viscous cycle of obsessive thoughts about something that just happened or fretting about the future. And that makes us anxious.

Yet no matter how far we drift away from reality, mindfulness can snap us back to where we are and what we’re doing and feeling, making us realise the potential of self-healing. If you want to know the actual essence of mindfulness and want to experience its healing power, it’s best to try it for a while. Since it’s hard to pen down in words, you may find slight variations in the meaning in books and websites.

Definition of Mindfulness

There are many ways of explaining mindfulness. Wikipedia defines mindfulness as the practice of purposely bringing one's attention in the present moment without evaluation, a skill one develops through meditation or other training. Cambridge dictionary defines mindfulness as the practice of being aware of your body, mind, and feelings in the present moment, thought to create a feeling of calm. So, we can say Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us, that has healing property which can be attained by self through training.

Mindfulness is a quality that we as humans already possess and doesn’t have to gather it up instead we just have to learn to access it. Also, we don’t need anyone to guide us to the state of mindfulness, rather we are enough to motivate and guide ourself to this process of recovery.

Benefits of Mindfulness

Mindfulness can heal us in a variety of ways. It can significantly help us manage stress and anxiety that we face on a regular basis, help us enhance our performance, teach us self-control, improve concentration and mental clarity and a lot more.

Practicing yoga, tai chi and qigong can cultivate mindfulness, but mostly literature focuses on mindfulness that is attained through meditation, a self-regulation practice that focus on training our attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under voluntary control and thereby fostering mental well-being and development of capacities like calmness, clarity and concentration (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006).

Some of the healing properties of mindfulness are as follow:

• Reduced Stress: Almost every research focusing on mindfulness talks about its effectiveness for reducing stress, anxiety and depression. When we are stressed, we often fall into the trap of overthinking and drain our energy by feeling frazzled and over whelmed. Practising mindfulness helps in keeping calm and increasing our awareness to manage stress in a better way.

• Boost our working Memory: Mindfulness brings our attention to present moment and thereby it helps us in becoming more aware of our surroundings, this in turn boosting our working memory.

• Less Emotional Reactivity: Researches support the notion that mindfulness meditation decreases emotional reactivity. (Ortner et al., 2007).

• Improves Well-Being: Increasing the capacity for mindfulness supports many attitudes that contribute to a satisfied life. Mindfulness can help create a greater capacity to deal with adverse events and help you become fully engaged in activities.

• Improves Physical Health: Other than the overall well-being improvement because of mindfulness, scientists believe that mindfulness techniques can significantly help improve physical health in a number of ways. Mindfulness can significantly improve heart related problems, lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain, improve sleep, and alleviate gastrointestinal difficulties.

Mindfulness is a self-healing property of unleashing our natural curiosity about the working of our mind, approaching our life experiences with warmth and kindness and suspending judgements. There are so many amazing research-based benefits of mindfulness that our procrastinating behaviour of not taking advantage of this self-healing tool should evaporate. Although practising mindfulness is like having your favourite meal, the more the better. But you can initiate this process by just investing 10 minutes daily towards your better wellbeing. And once you are ready for a serious commitment, you can slowly increase it 45 minutes a day to enjoy it’s self-healing nature.