When we practice mindfulness, which is simply internal awareness that is non-judgmental and curious and doesn't add any concepts just

observes our inner experience.

He said there's four different things

that we could pay attention to.

They're known as Foundations.

And so the famous suta the Buddha called the four foundations of

mindfulness the four areas where we can focus our attention inwardly. And there's, by the way, a lot of very, very good

clinicals and neuroscience that demonstrates the efficacy of why internal awareness is such an important

thing to do.

It not only works very well with reducing obsessive ideations, addressing anxiety.

It also is very, very useful and strengthening neural regions of the brain that you

would want to strengthen such as the cingulate which focuses attention as well as the

hippocampus which keeps your memory intact

while it also diminishes other areas of the brain that you would want to

diminish such as the amygdala which is the fear. People who meditate 20 minutes a day have noticeably less amygdala activations.

So mindfulness is good for you. If you want to read the research, Sarah Lazar at Harvard has done meta analysis on it and she's particularly

readable in that arena.

So anyway, there's four areas we can pay attention to, the sensations of the body, so right now I'm sitting, I could pay attention to my body breathing, and the feelings associated with sitting in a chair.

But then the other three areas of mindfulness would be feelings,

which are the way emotions express themselves in the body,

and generally emotions express themselves in the front of the body

so they can be communicative to other people.

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