Be Here Now
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Mindfulness is not a performance — It is a capacity, a natural quality of awareness that we can cultivate.
The “hard” of mindfulness is often information — When presence feel effortful, it is frequently because what waits inside the present moment is asking to be met, and meeting it honestly is a part of the practice.
The examined life does not require perfection — It requires willingness. Mindfulness that has room to be imperfect, is the mindfulness that lasts.
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From writing emails to analyzing medical images, AI is becoming a routine part of many people’s work. These tools can boost productivity and free us from tedious tasks — but what happens when we start relying on them for skills that once required years of practice to develop?
Click here to listen to an episode from the Speaking of Psychology podcast from the American Psycholoigcal Association.
Honesty about the effort
In our contemporary society I observe that mindfulness, though a valuable trait, has become yet another thing to perform, effectively and serendipitously enough diminishing its value. If we aren’t being mindful enough, we are told we should be doing more of it and if our attention drifts we should return to it — if the practice is difficult, we should be sitting with it longer.
As both a therapist and someone who has spent years walking this path personally, I want to name something here — mindfulness is not always effortless. Sometimes the awareness simply arrives, and we find ourselves fully in the moment without having done anything to “earn it”. Other times the invitation to be present feels heavy, tender, or even genuinely difficult because what is here to be met is not always easy to sit with.
The pressure to make mindfulness look like a consistently peaceful, always available state, has in some ways separated us from what mindfulness actually is. Today, I invite you to bring a more honest, generous, and contextual understanding to your relationship with presence. This will not be about how to do mindfulness better, but rather more truthfully.
Mindfulness as a westernized performance metric
Understanding the strange tension many of us carry around mindfulness, it helps to briefly examine what happened as the practice traveled from its contemplative origins into the mainstream of Western culture.
Mindfulness, in its traditional Buddhist framing, is rooted in the concept of bare awareness or clear attention. It is part of a broader framework of four foundations of mindfulness that invites practitioners to bring gentle and sustained attention to the body, feelings, mind, and occurring phenomena. In Taoist philosophy, a complementary principle is wu wei, often translated as effortless action — a movement through life that is neither passive nor contrived. It describes action from alignment rather than from strain.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, is largely attributed with integrating mindfulness into clinical and secular contexts with his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) — a program that translates centuries of contemplative wisdom into a form that can be practiced by just about anyone. This bridge created has offered up extraordinary value to the fields of psychology, medicine, and education. At the same time, the Western tendency to optimize, measure, and productize has effectively turned mindfulness into another item of the self improvement checklist.
You may recognize this in your own life as:
a vague guilt about not meditating enough or, not doing it correctly
a sense that your mind is too busy, distracted, or anxious to really practice
a growing frustration that the practice does not consistently feel the way you were told it would
a tendency to abandon the practice entirely when it stops feeling effective, as if effectiveness was the point
The performance framing pulls us away from the essence of what mindfulness has always been. This was never about achieving an ideal state, but rather developing a specific type of relationship with what is already here.
Two hands of presence
On one hand mindfulness is something we can intentionally cultivate by continually returning our attention to the moment as it unfolds and as our mind wanders naturally. We can build routines and habits to make presence more available to us.
One the other hand mindfulness is something that can arise spontaneously. In the middle of a walk or in a conversation with a loved one, (or even in the midst of a stressful moment) we can feel ourselves drop into a moment of full presence without even having tried — mindfulness that is recognized rather than created.
Both are real forms of practice and a mature relationship with mindfulness requires the humility to hold both at once. To sit in intentional practice when it serves us, and to release the grip on the practice when what is being asked is to simply notice what is already here. This can be where much of the honest difficulty with mindfulness lives, as the present moment does not always contain what we want it to contain. A reason mindfulness can feel hard is because what waits in the present moment is asking to be met, but at times we resist or avoid what is showing up due to our own subjective preferences of what a moment or moments should be or should feel like.
We do not need to force ourselves through this, but to allow the noticeable difficulty to be information, something to be recognized with gentle awareness (even curiosity) — just as much as we would bring awareness to just about anything else that arises in the practice.
Off The Page: Actioning The Insights
Cultivating honest awareness and confrontation
Your practice this week
This week, your practice is to bring a more honest and less performative relationship with mindfulness into your daily life. Not to do it more, but to do it more truthfully (and courageously). Take a look at the reflection questions and strategies below and notate any insights that arise for you this week.
Reflection Questions:
What does mindfulness feel like for you when it is easy? What about when it is hard?
Where has your relationship with mindfulness become performative?
What might be waiting inside the present moment that you have been keeping at arm’s length?
Strategies:
Notice where mindfulness is already showing up
Instead of scheduling formal practice time this week, see if you can notice the moments of natural presence that already occur (i.e. the moment you wake up and before your first cup of coffee, in between meetings when you are recognizing the weight of your body against your chair, the moment you step outside and sunlight shifts your attention, the conversations that you notice you are fully present and engaged)
Bring attention to what the present moment holds
When you find yourself in a moment of awareness, whether cultivated or spontaneous, resist the urge to evaluate if you are doing it correctly. Simply notice what is here — if it is peace, meet it. If its discomfort, meet that too. Presence is not about the quality of experience, but the willingness to be with whatever is showing up and discover insights with it through presence.
When mindfulness feels hard, ask a different question
Instead of asking, “Why can’t I be more mindful?”, try out “What is here that is asking to be met?”. Here, you are shifting from a performance to genuine inquiry. The noted “hardness” of mindfulness is often the hidden doorway to something the psyche has been waiting to bring to the surface — meeting it is in fact the practice.
The examined life does not require flawless presence, but rather willingness. There is only ever this one moment that we are living and you have the choice to meet it honestly — over and over again. It’s so deceptively simple, it can often to feel hard.
Thank You
Thank you for joining me this week! I’m excited to keep sharing insights from my work, research, and personal journey with you.
Did something resonate with you? Curious about applying these strategies in your life? Or know someone who might benefit?
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● New Reads in The Library
Currently me and my book club are reading, “The Dream Hotel” by Laila Lalami — click the link below to add this to your library and read along with us!
A Listen for the Week
As I continue to consume relevant content, I will share it here to deepen knowledge, perspective, and inquiry on a variety of topics related to wellness. This week I am sharing a recent episode from the Hidden Brain podcast.
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