No matter how you answered this question, please don’t get discouraged. For many people this answer is never or almost never. Even people who consider themselves relatively mindful aren’t usually intentionally mindful for more than a few minutes at a time.
It’s common to be partially mindful: aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it and paying attention to your experience of doing it, with your attention also split on something else—some unrelated thoughts or daydreams, or even multitasking.
For example, while cooking you might chop some vegetables absentmindedly and on automatic pilot, and then become more mindful while tasting and seasoning the food, and then go back to cooking absentmindedly. Then while eating, you might savour the first few bites and then finish the rest of the meal without giving it another thought.
As you go through this program, you’ll notice yourself becoming more mindful because mindfulness will be on your radar. You’ll be more aware of times that you are being mindful without even trying (that you might not have even noticed before), and you’ll find yourself intentionally doing things more mindfully because it’s on your mind.
We tend to find it easier to be mindful while doing something pleasant because it’s nice to pay attention to things we enjoy. It’s also easier to be mindful towards interesting experiences, as they tend to capture our attention more easily. With unpleasant activities, there is tendency to want to avoid paying attention to them. This makes sense, as why would anyone want to pay attention to something unpleasant. However, remember that we still tend to be happier when we're paying attention to our present-moment experience even while doing something unpleasant than we are if we allow our mind to wander.
What our minds wander to tends to correlate to our mood and how we’re feeling. If we’re happy, we tend to think or daydream about pleasant things that make us happy. If we’re in a bad mood, our mind is more likely to wander to unpleasant or negative things. If we’re bored, our mind might wander aimlessly from one thing to another.
As part of the home practice this week you'll be choosing one routine activity to do mindfully every day, paying attention to your moment-by-moment experience, rather than doing it on automatic pilot and thinking about something else or letting your mind wander to other topics. To help you prepare for this and give you a sense of what it's like to do an everyday activity mindfully, on the next page we're going to do a mindful eating practice.
Take a break, then continue to the next section.