Expanding our definition of mindfulness as an embodied practice of active engagement.
This article is a slightly edited version of the podcast (audio at the bottom of this page).
One of the most tangible benefits of mindfulness meditation is the clarity that gradually emerges when we give ourselves space to settle. That is certainly what I experience when I sit to meditate. At the beginning I often feel scattered, mentally noisy. The first few minutes can feel like stepping into choppy water. But if I stay with the practice, something shifts. The turbulence does not suddenly disappear, and my mind still rises and falls, yet there is a noticeable settling.
A Felt Sense of Clarity
The settling brings what I call a felt sense of clarity. And I want to be clear about what I mean by that. It’s a sense that clarity is possible, rather than feeling that a particular issue has been clarified. Most of the time, nothing concrete gets resolved. Instead, it’s more like feeling less weighed down by the usual mental clutter.
The sense of clarity doesn’t come from solving problems. Instead, mindfulness tones down the background noise: the reactivity, the unresolved tensions, the coping strategies we inherit from our past.
Experiences like this have gradually reshaped how I understand mindfulness. Rather than passive observation, I have come to see mindfulness as active engagement, i.e., an embodied practice that changes us through participation.
Observing vs. Engaging: Is Mindfulness Passive?
Mindfulness is often described as taking the perspective of the observing self. That description fits my experience. And yet the word observing can be misleading. It can suggest something passive, as if we were sitting back and watching events unfold from a safe distance.
Watching a movie is passive; nothing you do changes what appears on the screen. But mindful awareness of the body is different. The moment you pay attention to your breath, it changes. The moment you notice your posture, something shifts. Observation, in this context, is not neutral. It participates.
Let me give you an example from my own meditation practice.
I usually center my practice on posture, especially my back. It gives me something concrete to shift my attention to. Telling myself to not be “in my head” would be just as unrealistic as telling myself to relax: all it does is draw more attention to what I’m trying to avoid.
As I sit, I make small adjustments. Some happen on their own; others are intentional. But “intentional” doesn’t mean forcing a particular movement. It means gently experimenting’ trying a slight shift here or there and noticing how it feels. This is an intentional, moment-by-moment process of tweaking and tuning. It’s very different from passively watching the movie of my life.
The clarity that gradually emerges in meditation seems to come from this engagement — from doing something different, however small. It is less like solving a problem and more like resetting a system: like returning from a vacation refreshed, or like soil regaining vitality when crops are rotated. What changes is not the outside world. It is how I place my attention. Instead of being carried along by thoughts or external events, I become engaged with the living experience of my body, moment by moment.
Psychotherapy as Mindfulness in Action
So far, I have been describing meditation. Mindfulness extends well beyond sitting still. In my experience, mindfulness as active engagement can take many forms.
As a therapist, I see psychotherapy itself as a mindful process. A therapy session creates space for a reset. The client notices patterns and experiments with small adjustments, sensing what happens when they respond a little differently. In this sense, therapy resembles the posture adjustments of meditation: attention, experimentation, feedback.
Now, calling this “mindfulness” only makes sense if you don’t think of mindfulness as something static. It only works if you see mindfulness as active engagement, learning from moment-to-moment adjustments by staying attuned to their effects.
And it is not just the client who participates in this mindful engagement. The therapist does as well. We are not engineers watching from a control room but human beings participating in a living interaction while also aware of our own internal responses. Describing that layered awareness, engaging and observing at once, is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.
Mindfulness Beyond Meditation: Embodied Practices
Many embodied practices cultivate this same quality of deliberate attention: yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais, the Alexander Technique, Tai Chi, Qigong. All involve slowing down, sensing, adjusting, and learning directly from the body.
Japanese martial arts are deeply rooted in mindful engagement. Karate and judo, for instance, include a practice called kata, sequences of movement performed in a deliberately slow way that resembles Tai Chi. As you do it, you’re fully engaged with every aspect of the movement. It’s the opposite of mindless repetition.
This isn’t exclusive to Eastern practices. Consider very Western sports like tennis or golf. Effective training in these sports involves slowing down reactivity and being fully present in the moment, including rehearsing movements in a slow and intentional way.
Once mindfulness is understood as embodied engagement rather than detached observation, a much wider field opens up.
Mindfulness as Active Engagement
Mindfulness is not a static state. It is not a spectator sport. It is an active, embodied process of engaging with what is happening inside and around us and learning from the small adjustments we make along the way.
We can find mindfulness in any practice that helps us pause, engage actively with our present experience, and create space between our automatic reactions and our responses.
The article above is an edited transcript of the podcast episode below.
Podcast: Download (8.8MB)
