Mind Full of Now: A contemplation on the practice of mindfulness
A mindfulness practice is a mind full of what?
A mind full of now.
Mindfulness is the quiet art of returning — again and again — to the immediacy of this moment.
So much of modern life invites the opposite: a dispersal of attention, a restlessness that believes fulfillment lives just beyond this breath. We rush toward the next thing, the next insight, the next version of ourselves. Yet the heart of mindfulness asks something radical — to stop moving long enough to feel where we are.
“The practice is simply to notice what is happening—right now—and to allow it.”
— Jack Kornfield
The Discipline of Resting the Mind
In the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness begins with shamatha, the cultivation of calm abiding.
Here we train the mind — not through force or suppression — but through a patient gentleness. We choose an anchor, most often the breath, and allow attention to rest there.
The purpose of this is not to achieve a blank mind, but to soften the habitual grasping that keeps us split between past and future.
In the rhythm of inhale and exhale, the nervous system begins to entrain toward steadiness.
The body unwinds its urgency.
Awareness gathers itself back home.
Every time we notice we’ve drifted — that the mind has galloped off into memory or anticipation — we are invited to return. That return is the practice. Each recollection of presence is a small awakening, a remembering that we can inhabit our lives as they unfold.
Seeing Clearly
As shamatha deepens, vipassanā — insight — begins to arise naturally.
In this phase of practice, we turn the same steady awareness toward the subtle movements of mind itself. We begin to see rather than be swept away.
Sensations, feelings, thoughts, and moods become objects of curiosity rather than identification.
We observe:
How a sound arises, trembles, dissolves.
How a thought blooms, flickers, and fades.
How emotion surges and ebbs like weather across the open sky of awareness.
Through such seeing, we discover that nothing in our inner world is fixed. Experience is a continuous unfolding — vivid, ephemeral, alive. The grip of self lessens, and the field of consciousness becomes luminous and tender.
The Subtle Obstacles
To be here, now, can feel deceptively simple — yet it often exposes the restless edges of the psyche.
We encounter boredom, resistance, the ache of wanting things to be other than they are.
We meet the ancient reflex to flee our own stillness.
In shamatha-vipassanā practice, these are not failures but teachers.
Restlessness reveals the mind’s momentum.
Doubt exposes our need for control.
Sleepiness shows where awareness has dimmed.
Each is an opportunity to inquire gently: “What is this energy asking for?”
Through this compassionate curiosity, mindfulness becomes more than attention — it becomes intimacy. We learn to accompany our own experience as we would a dear friend: quietly, without fixing, without judgment, simply staying close.
Mindfulness as Embodied Presence
In the yoga practice, this same spirit unfolds through the body. Yin postures invite us into contact with the ground of being — sensations rippling beneath still shapes.
The physical form becomes a mirror for the mind: we practice releasing resistance, pausing inside discomfort, and attending to the breath as it moves through the body’s subtle chambers.
Mindfulness, then, is not an escape from embodiment but a descent into it.
To be mindful is to let awareness saturate the tissues — to feel breath, gravity, pulse, sound — until there is no longer a separation between “the one observing” and “that which is observed.”
This is what it means to be a mind full of now.
A mind that no longer strives to arrive, but relaxes into being.
A mind that is not elsewhere, but here — awake, porous, tender.
A Simple Practice
Arrive. Sit comfortably. Let your body settle as though it remembers how to rest.
Anchor. Place your attention on the breath — its rise and fall, its texture and rhythm.
Notice. When the mind drifts, acknowledge the movement. Name it softly — thinking, planning, remembering — and return.
See. Begin to sense the impermanence of all arising phenomena — the sound, the breath, the thought — each appearing and dissolving in its own time.
Rest. In moments of stillness, rest in awareness itself — open, vast, awake.
With practice, the edges between you and this moment begin to blur.
The mind grows less like a container, more like a sky.
And what fills that sky is not noise, but now.
May this practice remind you that there is nowhere else to be,
and nothing to become beyond what is already here.