answer:I was taught that mindfulness is a practice. The practice allows you to “be here, now” as the saying goes. That is: you are present and focused on what is happening now, instead of being all caught up in your mind’s thoughts about something else that may or may not happen and all the emotions associated with those thoughts. Mindfulness is about being present and focused, whether it is with a lover, your work, your actions or with others. Mindfulness is also about taking actions that are helpful to you, and letting the thoughts and actions generated by unhelpful emotions slip on through. Many times we get all excited because some thought has led to a feeling or some feeling has led to a thought that is unhelpful or harmful to you. Sometimes there are problems you have that there is nothing you can do about. You might get all caught up in feeling you should be doing something about it, and that makes you feel worse. It can make you feel like a failure. These are unhelpful thoughts and feelings. In a case like this, you would want to give up. You can’t fight it, whatever it is, so trying to fight it is unhelpful. Better to see if you can let it go, or even be friends with it. Mindfulness helps you do these things. It uses the method of focusing on your breath. If you focus on your breath, your mind is using up a lot of its processing power. If you also focus on what is happening now, there is little room left for all those unhelpful emotions and thoughts. This was shown to me somewhat dramatically in a workshop about mindfulness and the harmonica recently. We were given an exercise—breathe through the harmonica, steadily and slowly. It’s a lot like other breathing exercises, except you also make sound, which helps you focus on your breathing. We were broken into pairs, and we coached our partner on how to enact a situation that makes us very tense and anxious and threatened. The partner then enacted the scene to the best of their ability while we did harmonica breathing. It was so much easier to keep your heartbeat steady while doing this. Our teacher explained that with breathing through the harmonica and listening to our partners, there is no room left to freak out. Our minds just don’t have that much processing power. Mindfulness, I think, is about letting go of the extraneous stuff, and focusing on who we are with or what we are doing. In doing so, we can help ourselves to avoid anxiety and other feelings and obsessive thoughts that don’t help us. We focus on the here and now, and we can live our lives without so much frustration and anger. We can avoid creating more pain for ourselves than we already have. I’ve been fighting depression for a while, it I have found mindfulness to be a useful technique. I’m new to it and it’s hard and I can’t always make it work for me. But I have been able to help myself with it. I like it a lot. It takes the pressure off me at the same time as it allows me to feel better. It’s weird. It’s like giving in and winning by giving in.