Reading Time: 6 minutes

Mindfulness is slowly gaining more popularity as the world embraces mindfulness exercises such as yoga and calming meditation. Mindfulness is also one of the aspects heavily emphasised in Buddhist practices and teachings. However, the majority of us are still not practising mindfulness consciously, which causes us to suffer from our own unmindful actions.

Some of our unmindful behaviour may still be excusable since at most we probably land ourselves into some awkward situations, but if not careful, our lack of mindfulness could actually cause great harm to our lives.

Let’s go through this mindfulness topic on the mindfulness definition, the benefits and how you can practise mindfulness in life.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a state of alertness with our constant consciousness of our surroundings as well as on our physical movements or earthly activities. Mindfulness meaning also covers our cautious outlook on every movement we act and especially conversing with people. This mental state of awareness will guide us to a safer ground of self-protection and impartiality in our judgement.

Mindfulness is our compass of guiding us with a good and clearer direction of our movement. The moment we step into the outside world, everything is relatively dangerous, especially walking along the road or hiking or marketing, and easily cause mishaps due to missteps on the pavement or ravine or accidentally knocked down by careless motorists. So we need to be mindful of our steps and walk along with careful sight of our movement.

Why Mindfulness Is Important? 4 Mindfulness Benefits

Mindfulness may seem like an advanced subject, to the point that many people disregard its importance. Many people think that mindfulness has more to do with spiritual cultivation but in fact, mindfulness is part and parcel of our daily living, and that you can apply mindfulness at workplace and even when managing relationships with others.

Mindfulness is a lifelong process of constantly controlling our mind to be alert and conscious of our actions wherever we go. Here are some of the benefits we can gain from mindfulness practice:

• Mindfulness helps us to avoid unnecessary accidents or mishaps. Without our mindfulness, we will easily knock ourselves into the lamp post without seeing it is in front of us, or fall into a big manhole without cover. This is because our state of mind is too preoccupied with our worries or predicaments that left our mind unconscious of our physical movement.

• Mindfulness lets us avoid embarrassing situations. For example, without mindfulness, we could also be enticed into entering the wrong toilet despite the sign saying it is the male toilet or female toilet.

• Mindfulness can serve as a guard against potential deceit. We could also fall into deceit by some unscrupulous people who take advantage of our compassionate heart and loving kindness if we are not mindful of our outlook.

• Mindfulness can become an important shield to help us prevent any unintended cause of libel suit or court case due to our negligence in overstating our erroneous statement. With mindfulness of mental alertness, we will constantly remind ourselves to bite our tongue whenever we want to criticize others and move to shout from the rooftop whenever we want to praise someone of their outstanding actions.

Mindfulness How-To: Simple Mindfulness Training And Mindfulness Exercise That You Can Apply

In order for our mind to attain mindfulness, we need to ensure we do not lose our concentration in our thought. This concentration of thought is only able to be materialized when our mind is steady and clear.

In order for our mind to become stable and calm, we must ensure to have enough sleep, good rest and plenty of physical exercises or recreational activities, such as going for daily morning walks, jogging, tai chi exercises, cycling, swimming, or playing board games like chess or Scrabble or carrom.

As we grow older, we tend to be preoccupied with our work and constantly glue to our laptops or mobile devices, that we end up having very little time for our physical exercises and recreational activities to relax and train our minds to be alert.

Sadly today, many working-class people and elderly ones neglect their time fortifying their bodies healthily with good exercise and recreational activities. Many of them are now in bad shape, with some suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia or Parkinson’s disease, while others are obese and contract diabetes and heart problems.

It is a vicious cycle. The moment we are slack in our physical exercises as well as our recreational activities, we tend to get insomnia, restlessness, and lack of good sleep and rest. In return, we are short of being physically and mentally fit.

This will pave the grave consequences of being sleepy and unsteady in our mind apart from the impending high blood pressure, mental depression, and loss of consciousness. Many people overlook the importance of finding enough time to go for their physical exercises as well as recreational activities to upkeep their physical and mental fitness. Little do they realise that without a healthy body and a mentally fit mind, we will never be able to acquire our state of mindfulness in life.

Mindfulness And Meditation

Mindfulness can only be aroused by constant contemplation and meditation. By our daily focusing of our mind on one-pointedness of an object or practising mindfulness breathing using the breathe-in-breathe-out mindfulness technique, one will eventually emerge to gain serenity and tranquility of our mind, and reap the mindfulness benefits.

With this state of mind, one will feel calmer and steady in thought and this give rise to our sense of mindfulness. The reason is simple. The moment we are in the working world, we will be easily distracted by all the external activities and gadgets, and our mind is so easily absorbed by these earthly phenomena that our mind is always juggling thoughts and tasks, and full of stress, worries and predicaments.

This awful state of mind will hinder us from achieving mindfulness and will only lead us to all kinds of mishaps and accidents. Hence, it is important to constantly practice contemplations and meditations in order to diffuse our tensed and worrisome mind to enter a calm and peaceful mental state. A state of steady and calm mind is the way to achieve our constant state of mindfulness.

You may be interested in: Understanding The State of Nothingness

Conclusion

Mindfulness is definitely important in our life wherever we go or whatever we do. In order to achieve a state of mindfulness, we need to always keep our healthy life with plenty of physical exercises as well as recreational activities to maintain our state of alertness.

In those early fifties or sixties, people walked to school, cycled to work and used hand tools to make furniture and walked up and down the stairs with pails of cement. Likewise, cooking is all-around with physical hand exercises using all sorts of kitchen tools to complete the kitchen tasks manually, including manual washing of clothes as well.

Everything was done from scratch to use hands and legs to complete their physical duties, thus physical and mental exercises were natural and pertinent in their daily usage. And it was these physical activities that helped to spur all these ancient people to become alert and mindful in their outlook.

There was no such thing as libel suit or court cases in those days as people are always mindful of their speeches and actions. On the contrary, today everywhere we will come across all sorts of libel suits and civil cases for modern people are full of indiscipline and discourtesy in manner.

If only mindfulness activity is given more thought and practised with more priority, we will be able to avoid unnecessary social tensions, awkward moments and even danger that could lead to our death if not careful.

We hope you gained some insight from this mindfulness article. Let’s end this piece with a meaningful mindfulness quote: