If you have spent some time looking at the Awareness in Action website and delved into its Resource Materials, you’ll have seen that we are very excited about the current scientific research that is helping to provide data that confirms the beneficial effects of methods of mind training such as mindfulness, meditation, and compassion—the very methods we use in our work.

For example, as part of the current research into happiness, Daniel Kahneman has explored how people evaluate their experiences. He describes an individual’s life as a ‘string of moments’—each of these present moments may last up to 3 seconds, which means that people experience 20,000 of these moments in a waking day.

Unfortunately, the experiencing self that lives these moments has barely time to exist before it is overtaken by the evaluating self—the self that weaves a story of our lives and forms it into a continuous whole. Whereas the experiencing self is present, and awake to each moment as it is, the evaluating self works through memory and is often affected by mood, habits and invested interest. To some extent we recruit our memory to support the narrative of our life that we wish to believe in and present to the world.

The practice of mindfulness is all about allowing the experiencing self room to breathe. By being present to each moment as it arises we give ourselves the chance to engage with our body, our mind and the world around us with freshness and accountability. Generally we are so caught up in everything that is going on around us that we do no take the time to notice what is going in our own minds—the continuous ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings. Because we are not used to looking at them, these very thoughts and emotions can sweep us away into moods, reactions, and stories. With mindfulness we learn to notice what is going on with us, and so learn to work with it, rather than be subjected to it.

When we’re at work we are usually busy and may thank that there is not time for the luxury of self-awareness. Nothing could be further from the truth. By taking time to notice our breathing, to experience our feet contacting the floor as we stand, to be aware of the rhythm of our limbs as we walk to a meeting are all simple, non-time consuming ways of becoming mindful. As we learn to practice each simple method, we can build a whole strategy of mindfulness to support us through the day.

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