Mindfulness 101: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How To Get Started

You’re listening to She Grabs The Mic, and I’m your host, Cole Baker-Bagwell. Every week, we’ll explore what it means to be happy, present, and whole.

You’ll hear from courageous women who are kicking ass in their lives, and leave with actionable tips that you can apply to reset from toxicity, tune into your gold, and live powerfully from the bedroom to the boardroom.

Right now, it’s time to grab your headphones, kick back and relax, and get ready to be inspired.

Welcome, Amazing Ones!

Thank you for joining me today. Welcome, welcome, welcome from wherever you are on this big, beautiful planet.

I am so glad that you are here!

This week, we’re diving into Mindfulness 101.

I’ve talked about mindfulness and mindset in every single episode I’ve recorded, but today, mindfulness is the star of the show.

So many of us are becoming busier, more stressed, more addicted, more unwell. We feel disconnected and far away from ourselves.

And we’re looking for ways to release the pressure valve, to find a sense of center- a sense of calm.

And mindfulness is a tool, a practice, and a way of life that can get us there.

The coolest part is this. Mindfulness is available to every single person. All we have to do is make a choice.

Mindfulness helps us get in touch with our thoughts, our emotions, and our moods.

It improves our mental health, physical health, and the relationship that we have with ourselves and with every single person in our lives.

Mindfulness helps us make choices that help us be our best selves and squeeze every single ounce of delicious goodness and joy out of our lives.

And that’s what living is all about.

Today’s show is going to flow something like this.

I’m going to start off by debunking the false myths about mindfulness because good lord knows there are so many out there.

We’re going to level set on what mindfulness is so you understand.

And I will help you understand why practicing mindfulness is a fundamental game changer that enhances your brain body health, your mindset, and most importantly, your life.

I’ll wrap up by teaching you how to bring everyday mindfulness into your life with three starter practices that you can use anywhere, anytime to start developing your big, beautiful mindfulness muscle.

And, by the way, if you have little kids, aging parents, students, or colleagues, you can teach them these three starter practices too.

When we are mindful together, oh my god, the world becomes even more beautiful.

Okay. Llet’s start by debunking the myths and getting on the same page.

Western culture has done a damn good job of bastardizing mindfulness. I’m just going to call it out.

I’ve been practicing mindfulness for 30 years, and I cannot imagine my life without it.

But I was super fortunate when I got started.

My very first teacher kept it real, and she made mindfulness accessible, and that’s what makes it powerful.

My goal through my coaching practice and here today is to share mindfulness in the way it was shared with me so that more and more people just like you have the information and the tools they need to start transforming their mindset and their life.

I’ve talked with so many people over the years who have the wrong idea about mindfulness. Oh my gosh!

They’ve been told mindfulness is something that only yogis practice.

Some people think mindfulness is woo-woo hippie fluff and that it doesn’t matter.

Others have been taught that practicing mindfulness means erasing their minds, and I will tell you that that is not possible, because if you erased every single thought in your mind, you would be dead.

Some people think they have to sit still, meditate, or go somewhere special to practice mindfulness, and others have been led to believe that mindfulness is a religion.

Please, please, please hear me when I say that none of these things are true.

We’ve turned mindfulness into something that is confusing, non-secular, and mystical, and that has been a massive disservice to mindfulness.

I cringe every single time I see a mindfulness influencer chanting, ringing a gong, or burning incense.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good chant just as much as everybody else.

I think the sound of a gong is absolutely gorgeous.

I love the smell of incense burning, but here’s the thing.

Practicing mindfulness isn’t about any of that.

You can practice mindfulness anytime, anywhere.

All you have to do is make a choice and know how to get started.

Now that you know what mindfulness isn’t, let’s talk about what mindfulness is.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of the greatest mindfulness thought leaders of our time.

When I started practicing, my amazing teacher suggested one of his books to me called Wherever You Go, There You Are  It had just come out. I went and bought it, and I will tell you right now that this book changed my life.

It continues to change my life every single day because practicing mindfulness is not a one and done.

Practicing mindfulness is a journey. It is a way of life.

My book is dog-eared, underlined, highlighted. It has notes in the margin, and I have told so many people about this book.

It is practical. It is just absolutely amazing!

And the way that Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, helps you understand how you can take mindfulness into your life every single day by telling the story through his own life.

It’s awesome. If you have a chance, I would highly recommend that you go and pick that one up.

In the book, Jon offers an elegant and accessible definition, and here’s what he says:

“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”

Understanding the core pieces of this definition, to me, make practicing mindfulness so much easier, so I’m going to break them down for you.

Okay, we’ll start here with awareness.

Awareness means knowing what you’re thinking and feeling, and understanding why.

That’s the magic- understanding what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling.

This can feel really challenging at first, because we’re so used to living on autopilot.

Our thoughts are reactive, and they seem to hit our minds at warp speed.

Some of them come together and crash into each other and, we skate right past what we’re feeling, emotionally and physically.

If we miss the thoughts and feelings that we’re having, because we’re moving too fast on autopilot, our tendency is to often stuff the ones down that are painful, that we don’t want to feel, that we don’t want to think.

Somehow we think that if we have a bad thought or we have a bad feeling that we’re negative or we’re bad people, none of those things are true.

They all have a purpose. Understanding why with awareness is magical.

The other part about awareness is that a lot of us tend to think of the body, mind, and soul as separate things.

They’re not.

When we think of them as separate, we miss the opportunity to understand their interplay and we miss the opportunity to understand ourselves on this deeper level.

But mindfulness can help us get there.

Okay, the second part, paying attention on purpose.

Well, very simply, this means actively choosing to pay attention to what you are thinking and feeling and why.

This sounds so simple, but again, we live in a busy world full of lots of distractions.

We spend more time face down looking at our phones than we do eyes up, actively paying attention to what’s happening around us or what’s happening inside of ourselves.

So, paying attention on purpose means making an active choice in the present moment.

This means being right here, right now and this can feel tough because, Amazing Ones, we have a tendency to time travel.

We can physically be in a space and mentally be somewhere totally different.

Sometimes we’re in the past, kicking ourselves in the backside about things we did wrong and ruminating.

We’re focusing on all of the regretful moments that we can’t do a dang thing about.

Or we’re skipping ahead to the future where we worry, obsess, and stress out about something that hasn’t even happened yet.

So, being in the present moment is the magic.

When you practice mindfulness and you have these little glimmers of being in the present, it is a magical feeling and you will want more and more and more of that.

I know first hand.

Okay, non-judgmentally, well, this means observing with an open mind and accepting whatever it is that we’re thinking and feeling even if we don’t like the thoughts or the feelings that are coming up and wow, this can be so damn hard.

We have tightly held beliefs and values.

Some of them we’re not even aware of, but they’re there.

We have ideas about how people should behave, how we should behave, how we should show up, how they should show up.

We have ideas about the way things should or shouldn’t be done.

We have so many biases.

Some of them are conscious, some of them are unconscious, and our favorite labels, our polarity is like good, bad, right, wrong, male, female, ugly, beautiful, acceptable, unacceptable.

When we’re not being mindful, judgment becomes the expression of all of those things.

And guess what? Judgment still pays me visits after all of these years, but here’s the difference.

Now when she shows up, I know why she’s here. I can understand and I can make an active choice that completely transforms my mindset, my energy, and my day.

So again, mindfulness is a practice and it is a way of life.

It helps us develop awareness and coping skills that empower us to actively participate in our lives, to meet those stressful moments, to manage overwhelm, to manage our fear and our worry, to stop us from time traveling, and to get us right here in this present moment that is so full of goodness if we just choose to see it.

Now, practicing mindfulness doesn’t prevent us from feeling anger, resentment, judgment, sadness, or fear.

It doesn’t mean that we will never feel self-doubt, stress, worry, insecurity, or frustration.

Not at all.

But mindfulness does help us know what we are feeling and why.

And that puts us in a position, a very empowering position, to make a choice about what we want to do with the information we are observing.

Mindfulness doesn’t mean that we will magically start living a perfectly harmonious life or stop making mistakes.

We will.

But mindfulness does help us course correct, learn and grow from every single mistake that we make.

It helps us forgive ourselves, accept ourselves, love ourselves.

It helps us get super clear about how we want to live and it makes getting there a hell of a lot easier.

Now that you know what mindfulness isn’t and what it is, let’s talk about what’s in it for you, because today, that’s what matters right now.

There’s plenty of science to talk about mindfulness and how it affects our mind-body health, and there is much more to come.

This field is absolutely exploding!

I want to give you a couple of examples of the science, and then we’ll talk about kind of the more practical effects that mindfulness can have on your life.

From a scientific standpoint, mindfulness activates your calm, steady, good vibes command center, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system, P for peace.

This system helps reduce stress in your body, which helps reduce cortisol in your body, which helps your organs function more efficiently.

All of that sounds really good, right? That’s the mind-body health piece and these things improve your overall physical and mental well-being.

Mindfulness improves your brain and the way that it processes information. It improves your cognitive function and your memory.

Now, from a practical standpoint, when you’re aware of what you’re thinking and feeling, you have a tendency to be less emotionally reactive, less of a tendency to say something regrettable, fly off the handle, or get that really super bad feeling in your body when you know you are mad as a hornet.

You’re more able to control how you feel and how you think.

Imagine feeling less stress, anxiety, and overwhelm.

Imagine having fewer meltdowns, angry outbursts, crippling frustration, or rumination.

Imagine speaking less hurtful words and making fewer regrettable choices that you have to apologize for later.

Mindfulness can get us to that place.

From a practical standpoint, mindfulness increases our self-awareness and that is the key to growth.

Being aware and fully present helps you see whatever and whoever is in front of you through an objective and accepting lens.

It takes the sting away. It dampens emotional reactivity because it turns an observation into a gathering of information, and that is a game changer.

And, as I mentioned, mindfulness brings us into the right here, right now, this present moment.

Again, this can be a really hard concept to grasp because a lot of us have never been fully here in this present moment because we have that tendency to time travel that I mentioned earlier.

Here are a couple of examples to help you understand what presence could feel like for you:

Okay, imagine that you are walking in a bustling city on a beautiful bright sunny day, and you pull out your phone to snap a couple of pictures because it is just tremendous, like the weather is tremendous, the scenery is tremendous.

But when you take the first picture, you hold your phone in your hand and you spin in a circle.

The image that you wind up with is blurry, and you miss all of those details that you wanted to capture.

But when you take the second picture, you make the choice to stand still. You focus your lens on one big yellow bus that is right in front of you and you snap the shot.

Now in this picture, you notice things that make you smile.

You notice like squiggly children’s handwriting on the bus, the elderly woman who’s driving the bus, with hot pink punk rocker hair.

You can see the shiny hubcaps on the wheels and the smiling face of one little kid wearing turtle sunglasses and waving at you through the window.

Focusing our lens on what’s right in front of us changes what we see, and this is mindfulness.

Okay, here’s another example.

Scenario one: You’re having dinner with a family member who does not share your political or social views, and you already know this.

And you also know that your conversations have a tendency to heat up quickly.

Before you even sit down to have dinner with this family member, you’re already thinking into the future about your rebuttals and all of the reasons that you’re going to tell them that they are wrong.

That happens, and as the conversation rolls on, you get angrier and more frustrated as they stand firm in their views and they disagree with you.

You get caught up in your emotions, you feel the anger rising, you feel the frustration, you feel the stress, and those emotions, that emotional reactivity, it takes you for a ride to nowhere.

You don’t even know where you’re going. You’re just on the bus.
It’s driving down the road out of control.

Things are happening so fast that all of a sudden, you say a few choice words.

Now, the two of you wind up in a full blown argument that wrecks your dinner and ends with one of you leaving the table in a huff.

Scenario two: You’re going to have dinner with that very same family member. But this time, you know that you have a tendency to feel angry and frustrated.

Before they can build, you catch the thoughts and you catch the feelings.

And what you connect with is the ‘why’ behind your thoughts and feelings. You understand that deep down, their views scare you.

So you decide to take another path this time.

Instead of reacting and convincing them that they’re wrong, you choose to listen openly with acceptance to your thoughts and feelings and to the person across from you.

You’re able to come to a place of presence where you can tell them the thoughts and feelings and views you have scare me.

This gives them a chance to understand where you’re coming from.

Now they may not change, because at the end of the day, the only thing that we can control is our response, our thoughts, our feelings.

But you’ve set the table for a conversation to take place where the two of you may have more understanding together and a conversation that might just continue through dessert.

This is mindfulness.

Now, I will tell you, there is a downside to mindfulness. Sometimes, as I mentioned, you might not like what you’re thinking or feeling.

Your tendency may be to shove those things down deep inside, to judge yourself for those thoughts and feelings.

Because they might represent something negative and something painful.

They may ding your pride.

I know because I have experienced all of that firsthand.

And sometimes, I still do.

Here’s what I can tell you.

I have experienced the most profound growth when I have been willing to swallow my pride, look at all of the things about myself that I did not want to accept, and to humbly sit in that muck and ask myself, what is here for me to learn right now?

Acceptance and non-judgment turn our thoughts and feelings into information, removing that sting that I mentioned earlier.

And once we have the information, we can decide what we want to do with it, and that is super empowering. That’s the whole point here.

You might see those thoughts and feelings and choose to do absolutely nothing about them.

You might choose to go into a rage, and if you do, okay, you’ve made a choice.

But you might, you just might sit back and say, wow, those thoughts and feelings that I’m experiencing right now don’t even belong here.

They belong in the past.

Or maybe I’m worried about the future. Let me get present with what is.

Let me see what I can do to change my response in this moment.

Now, here’s the most bomb diggy thing about mindfulness.

As I mentioned, you can practice anytime, anywhere you want to.

You could be brushing your teeth.

You could be sitting on a crowded airplane.

You could be waiting in line at the grocery store.

Hanging out on the beach.

Or you could be sitting in a board room in a high stakes meeting.

Mindfulness is there anytime, anywhere that you want to call it up.

Because it’s a way of life, it is free, and it is always available.

So, how do you get started?

I’m going to give you three practices, very simple practices that will give you a solid foundation.

I recommend trying these in order.

1.  Come to your senses. Getting present can be really tough at first, because as I mentioned, we have this tendency to sort of travel through life on autopilot, hanging out in the past, hanging out in the future, not really being aware at all of what we’re thinking and feeling.

Putting your five senses to work, and then paying attention on purpose to what’s happening with those five senses can be super grounding and a really great way to experience what presence feels like.

And hey, you know what? If you want to, you could even give this a shot right now.

Once you start paying attention on purpose, what can you smell that you didn’t notice before?

What can you see?

What can you hear?

What can you taste?

What can you feel with your fingers, your toes on your face or on your shoulders?

What can you notice that you missed when you weren’t paying attention on purpose?

In that moment, notice how it feels to be fully present.

This is so awesome! It’s a really powerful way to stop time traveling and to get grounded right here, right now.

And again, you can do this anytime, anywhere. This is mindfulness.

2.  Watch your mental movie. If your thoughts were in front of you on a big drive-in movie screen, what would you see?

Are they thoughts from the past? Are they thoughts from the present?
Are they thoughts from the future that does not yet exist?

Are they loud or are they quiet?

Are they sassy or are they polite?

Are they fast or slow?

Are they negative or positive?

What can you learn by paying attention on purpose without judgment?

3. Connect the dots. Now that you’ve come to your senses and looked at your thoughts on the big screen, focus your attention on how you feel and why.

What emotions can you pick up on?

Are you happy?

Do you feel sad?

Do you feel judgment, fear, worry?

Do you feel stressed?

Look for the connection points between your thoughts and feelings because they are always there.

Because mind, body, soul, they are one piece.

All right. Now that you have a little taste of mindfulness, practice, practice, practice.

It doesn’t have to be for a long period of time.

You could practice for 60 seconds. You could practice for three minutes.You could sit on your deck and practice for much longer if you wanted to. You could practice for an entire airplane ride.

It’s totally up to you.

But practice is the key because consistency and repetition build new neural pathways in your brain.

And when you start practicing mindfulness, when you start practicing observing in this present moment, non-judgmentally, you’re learning something new- just like a language or a musical instrument.

And whenever you’re learning something new, you need consistency and practice.

That repetition helps to build that neural pathway and build your mindfulness muscle.

That makes learning anything new so much easier over time.

Remember. Mindfulness is a way of life.

You can actively choose to practice.

There is no barrier to entry except a choice.

The coolest part is, you can start and restart every single second with every new breath that you take.

So, if you make a mistake and you say, “Oh shoot! I wasn’t being mindful in that moment,” that’s okay.

Take a breath, reset, start again.

That’s  the beauty of mindfulness.

It is a practice.

It is a tool.

It is a way of life that can help us learn so much about ourselves and squeeze every ounce of delicious goodness out of this life that we have, because it puts us in a place of active choice.

And that is so empowering.

All right, if you want to dial up your mindfulness practice to grow and live your best life, I can help you.

Head to the contact page on my website, colebakerbagwell.com.

Send me a little note. Let’s grab some time and talk about what’s possible for you.

Before I sign off today, I want you to remember this.

There is only one you on this big, beautiful planet.

And just in case no one’s told you yet today, that’s what makes you simply amazing.

Thanks so much for being here!

I hope you’ll join me again next Wednesday.

Until then, big love. See you soon.

And that’s the end of the show today, everybody.

I hope it has served you well.Thank you so much for tuning in.

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If you’d like to learn more about me or my work, check out my website, colebakerbagwell.com.

Until next time, remember to be super kind to yourself and do your very best to leave everyone and everything just a little bit better.