Mindfulness and a cup of coffee.

What is mindfulness really?

It is very common nowadays to use the term mindfulness in all sorts of circumstances. Yet are we really mindful and using it rightly?

Being mindful is actually being mindless. We can`t be mindful if we are caught in our thinking. Our thinking is always linked towards the past or towards the future. Mindfulness on the contrary is only in the present. One cannot be mindful if he`s thinking of something which isn`t there. So mindfulness is being completely present with what is happening right now. It is being right here, right now with whatever is happening, with whatever we are doing in this very moment.

If I`m drinking a cup of coffee, I am only drinking this coffee. I am aware of its smell, its colour, it`s taste. I don`t drink it while thinking of the day I have ahead of me, the job I need to go to, the problems I need to deal with, the people I will meet.

I just drink the coffee.

While I drink it, I don`t think of the argument I had with my wife over breakfast, or the bills I should have paid yesterday or the fun I had with my kids last night.

I just drink the coffee.

While I drink the coffee, I don`t think that this coffee is better than the one I had yesterday at the other cafe, neither it is less good than the coffee I usually get.

This coffee is as it is, and that is all.

I just drink THIS coffee, I don`t need to drink yesterday`s coffee all over again. While I drink this coffee, I don`t think, I just drink. I am completely into the experience of drinking. I am experiencing what it feels like to drink a cup of coffee. Four of my senses are activated: sight, smell, touch, taste. This is the full experience of drinking a cuppa. Nothing else should be in the way . Nothing else should be standing between me and my experience of drinking my coffee, not even a thought. Not even the thought ‘this is a good coffee’, as as soon as this thought come I`m already removing myself from the experience itself. I`m giving it a name, a description, it becomes a concept. It becomes part of the mental world, the illusion of ideas, it isn`t a physical experience anymore.

I AM drinking a coffee, and THAT IS ALL THERE IS.

This is real. This is the ONLY reality: me and the coffee.

Nothing else exists, nothing else is real.

Any thoughts trying to infiltrate this experience are NOT REAL, and do not need to be there. Any thoughts trying to separate me from the experience of drinking my coffee are usurpers trying to catch my attention and removing me from Reality. These thoughts would appear real as they are talking about MY life, MY problems. So I would listen to what they say , maybe believe them and even thinking them true. Yet they can`t be. Yet they are not.

What is true is me, now, and my coffee.

I am one with my cuppa.

That is mindfulness.

K.Wilson