Mindfulness Meditation Lesson 1

Everyday Mindfulness: Mindful Eating

Mindfulness isn't just something we can practice when we meditate. No matter what we're doing, we can do it mindfully. Throughout this course, in addition to the mindfulness meditations that we'll be learning, we'll also emphasize how to incorporate more mindfulness into our everyday lives—since we spend almost all of our lives not meditating, it's important to also be mindful during everyday activities, otherwise we only end up practicing mindfulness a very small percentage of the time, and some days not at all.

And if we are in the habit of rushing around mindlessly with our thoughts racing all day long, it's extremely difficult to slow our minds down enough to be able to focus during the course of a ten- or twenty-minute period of meditation. The mindfulness skills we develop when we meditate carry over into our daily lives, and being mindful throughout the day helps with our meditation practice.

With that in mind we're going to do a simple mindfulness practice using something from our daily lives, to give a taste of what it's like to bring mindfulness to a routine activity.