Mindfulness Is Falling Awake

“Mindfulness is falling awake”.

-Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

Jon Kabat-Zinn is the author of a great book titled “Wherever You Go, There You Are”.  At this stage of my life I am very good at falling asleep except when it is time to actually go to bed for the night.  In the early evening, especially on work nights, I take some world class naps.  My wife doesn’t always know it because she is in another room doing the same thing in her recliner.  I am usually in full couch mode, sometimes with a blanket.  If it is dark and raining I am totally orbiting the planet.  Mindfulness is not actually waking up from physical sleep.  It is waking up from the kind of wakeful “sleep” that most of us are in throughout our day, regardless of what we actually doing.  When we are mindful, we are aware.  Unlike those days when we resemble the walking dead, when we are mindfully awake, we notice things.  Sometimes I am on auto-pilot and things zoom right past me and I never notice.  There have actually been times when I left home for work, and when I am finally walking into the office I realize that I have no memory of the actual commute.  Try sometime to remember all that you noticed in a day.  If your list is long, you had a very mindful day.  If your list is short, you were probably “asleep” most of the day even if you still got all your chores done.