**🔼 Up:** [[Organisation of Experience]] **⏺️ With:** [[Core Material]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychotherapy #Healing #Wholeness --- Us humans are quite spectacularly blessed with the gift of awareness. We not only have the ability to ***be*** our experience, but also the ability to ***know*** about our experience. That's an ability that so far, only we know we have (animals don't ***know*** they're animals, they're just ***being*** animals). This is the ability of mindfulness in which we have the ability to know about something, to study that thing, and to fully experience it. With mindfulness, we can direct our attention and focus to a specific point in our experience, whether that be a specific location in the body, a sensation, a thought, a feeling or an emotion (objects within our experience). When we do this, we have the ability to be with an object, to study it and to gather more data about it. It is therefore focused on what is here in the present moment (you can't focus on an object that isn't present in your experience). With mindfulness, we use our focus and intention to send our full awareness to whatever object in our present experience we are studying, which allows us to become more intimate with it. Mindfulness is both a principle in ancient wisdom traditions, as well as a state of consciousness. It is very different to normal every day waking consciousness. When we are in normal everyday consciousness, there is a lot going on within our bodies we don't typically know about. All day, our lungs are breathing, our hearts are beating, our digestive system is digesting. But if we were to become mindful, really slow down and become mindful, we could zero into and bring these bodily processes into consciousness. **So why should we care about mindfulness? I thought it was only for meditators.** We care about mindfulness because it is an extremely powerful tool (perhaps even the most powerful) for understanding and studying ourselves intimately. Without mindfulness, we wouldn't be able to gain the awareness around what's going on within our inner worlds, our bodies and our overall, holistic wellbeing. This is precisely why many of the leading psychotherapeutic modalities include some form of mindfulness. Some of those are; Internal Family Systems, NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), Somatic Experiencing, [[Focusing]], The [[Hakomi Method]] and [[Aletheia Coaching]]. If we can't become aware of our breath without mindfulness, how could we possibly know about the [[Parts#Hurt Parts|hurt child parts]] deep within our psyche that are modulating and directing our way of being? So we use mindfulness to both notice and study how we [[Organisation of Experience|organise our experience]] as well as work with our [[Core Material]].