Mindfulness means attention. It means that when you are washing your face in the morning, you actually feel the slippery soap and the warm water splashing in your hands. All too often, direct experience of the real-time present is replaced, forgotten, hastily bypassed. In our rush to get to the next moment, we substitute a fantasy life, an imagined life in the future for the actual life we are living. I’ve washed my face thousands of times, and I’m bored with it, so instead I am already caught up in planning and rehearsing what I need to say later in the morning at the 9.30 meeting. Which is more real – my presence at the sink or my ideas about this mornings agenda? Mindfulness lets us reclaim the lives we are actually living.
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about mindfulness meditation as a process of “touch and go.” “Touch” means really acknowledging, really appreciating, the texture of a particular mental content, not just bouncing off of it. It is the difference between a gentle squeeze and a superficial tap. This touching, acknowledging, appreciating, is the seed for developing insight — a way of being present to phenomena that invites fresh meanings to emerge. Because Westerners tend to be more split off from the experiential body than people in more traditional cultures, the practice of Focusing can facilitate our ability to touch genuinely what arises in the mind-heart in a non-discursive way. As Pema Chodron recently advised a questioner with doubts about her meditation practice, “There is a secret ingredient — direct, nonverbal experience.”
Cheerfulness comes naturally with meditation. It is a quality of space created within the mind. When there’s space in the mind, the mind relaxes, and we feel a simple sense of delight. We experience the possibility of living a life in which we are not continuously aggravated by emotions, discursiveness, and concepts about the nature of things…. Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful. 
Everyone wants to use happiness as a fix for problems, yet happiness is its own, very big thing, and it is selling happiness short to make it a fix for problems. To be happy is to experience life not as a series of struggles but as a gift, one that has no known limit. When you get the hang of being more interested in life than in agreeing with your thoughts, then you will get the life you get. And you will be able to have as much happiness as you want with almost no effort whatsoever. When you stop believing your thoughts, you look around just for you, just because it is interesting to look around. Some people call that enlightenment. But you won’t call it that. You’ll be too interested in the new view.
The principle of breathing dictates that we are to be aware of every step of our breathing. Simply: be mindful and understand happiness. A person is able to sense more than one perception at the same time. Hence, being aware of our breathing – the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling – should be incorporated with our daily routines – sweeping, cleaning, walking. The person will then enjoy better health and a brighter soul – that is true happiness. Guided by this perception, the mind will simultaneously move in harmony with the actions.
