From Total Chance to Everyday Practice: How Mindfulness Has Changed My Life.

by Danny Newman

I haven’t practiced mindfulness for all that long.

In fact, my first hands on experience with the practice happened by fluke just a few years ago.

It was late afternoon in London and I remember walking back from somewhere unimportant to my house in East London, where I lived with my parents.

It was a typical London day: busy, a little grey and dreary overhead, with traffic streaming past periodically.

As was standard, I was daydreaming at the time, lost in thought as I trundled slowly home.

Then, for a reason I don’t recall (it could have been choice or chance), I happened to break from my trance to look up at what was happening around me.

And suddenly I was aware of my surroundings.

Objectively, there was nothing special about what I saw. It was just another residential street in East London.

Flats and terraced houses all around me, a council estate to my left. Street lamps lined the pavement, cars sped up and down all around; the occasional pedestrian passed by on their own homeward journeys; a pub sat in the distance up the road. Clouds drifted above me.

Yet, for what felt like the first time, I really saw it.

It’s hard to describe, but there was just this peculiar and noticeable difference to what I perceived. Or, rather, how I perceived it.

I was looking at my environment with acuity that I hadn’t experienced before.

Lines were sharp and in focus, objects in my environment took on a novel form; even the light looked different. I was aware of the space around me and myself within it.

Everything had this special and ineffable quality. It was like I was seeing these everyday things- houses, cars, street lights, which I must have seen thousands of times before- for the very first time.

I was acutely aware of what was going on.

So taken was I with the experience that I recall getting home and trying to explain it to my Dad- like I needed to educate someone else about this revelatory advancement in human perception!

I hate melodrama and unnecessary hyperbole, but at the time it felt quite miraculous. I had absolutely no idea what had happened and no way of accurately describing it.

Now, of course, I recognise that ‘miracle’ as simply a taste of the present moment. I’d stumbled upon mindfulness for the first time.

That initial, memorable encounter with mindfulness was only fleeting, but it was as if I’d had a blindfold lifted. I was on a high, like I’d tapped into some hidden secret of the world that was unbeknownst to me just minutes previously.

I’d had a surprising and enlightening first dip into present moment awareness. It whetted my appetite for more; I’d looked behind the curtain, as it were, and liked what I saw.

Throughout my life I’ve been a thinker, worrier and planner; acutely self aware and self-conscious. These traits have helped me in lots of ways. However, they also situate me firmly in my head for much of the time.

I’ve also frequently felt one step removed from my experience: sometimes indifferent, or apathetic to it all.

At a cognitive level, I knew what I should feel in a given situation, but was unable to truly tap into that emotion. It’s as if I couldn’t connect the dots between my internal and external experience. At one point I even came to wonder whether there was something wrong with me.

Notice what was happening there: over thinking and worry, with a large side of negative judgment to top it off!

Everything but simply being.

Over the last few years, mindfulness, with its emphasis on non-judgmental, present moment awareness has been a revelatory education and tool for regaining what I’ve lacked in the past.

Just to be made aware of the internal mental chatter that goes on inside, which I am all too often caught up in, was fantastically useful. To begin to notice it for the first time and then realise it needn’t be this way- that there’s another way of being- has been downright enlightening!

Mindfulness has been an education into that alternative, and often preferable, ‘way of mind’.

It helps root me in something tangible. It slows me down and brings my focus back. It enables me to actually embrace the physical and mental space that I’m in, as opposed to drifting mindlessly from it.

And, like the revelatory walk home in London a few years ago, mindfulness paints (literally and figuratively) my experience in a new light.

I’d be lying if I said I now have this miracle cure for over thinking and mindless internal chit chat. I don’t. I truly wish that falling into a mindful state would be as easy as clicking my fingers but, alas, it isn’t for me.

To this day I still spend an exorbitant amount of time in my head- everywhere but the present.

But with mindfulness I now know there’s another way of doing things.

I’ve been involved in a couple of mindfulness courses and try to practice daily, with 10-15 minutes every morning. I also write about the importance of mindfulness and the present moment in my travel blog. However, I value it most in a less structured environment, when I’m simply out and about, wanting to make the most of the moment.

On a sunny day for instance, to feel the warmth on my face and the glint of the sun as it enters my eyes; or, sat down with a coffee, to actually taste it on my tongue as I raise the cup to my lips.

When the wind blows, to feel the cold brush against my skin; or when my legs move, to notice my balance shift, and muscles flex and relax. Or to feel the tightening grip of my partner’s hand as we watch a scary film together in bed.

Then, to pay heed to whatever emotions appear, accepting whatever’s there with the same compassion I’d feel and express for someone else.

To be mindful is a gift.

It’s funny though…

I find it difficult to try and be mindful. Indeed, some of my most mindful moments are when it just…happens. And the frustrating irony is that when I realise I’m being mindful I get distracted; my mind flickers quickly back into thought.

Thus, I see mindfulness as a strange balance between effort and effortlessness.

Don’t try at all and your mind wanders limitlessly; try too hard and it fights back, wandering just as determinedly and frustrating my attempts to rein it in.

Again, it’s hard to turn the old noggin off sometimes!

I have days when it’s particularly tough. My trick, cultivated largely through learning more about mindfulness, is not to fight it; to allow my brain to think and accept whatever’s there.

To paraphrase Alan Watts: ‘the first trick to stopping thoughts is not to try to; to try not to think is like attempting to smooth a rough sea with a flat iron’.

Ultimately, from inauspicious beginnings on that day in London, mindfulness has become an integral part of my life and I have no plan on allowing that to change.

Mindfulness can change your life.

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Danny Newman is a travel enthusiast with a passion for writing and inspiring others to live fully. He runs a travel blog called Coddiwomp, which is dedicated to helping aspiring travellers travel for the first time. For Danny, the essence of travel is found in the feeling it elicits. He wants to inspire and support as many people as possible to experience this ‘travel feeling’. You can find him on Facebook @coddiwomp and Instagram @coddi_womp.