Practicing and cultivating the skill of “mindfulness”, for me, has been one of the single most important, transcending, and life altering changes I’ve ever made. As Sam states – as well as any other practitioner of mindfulness will tell you – it is an absolutely necessary skill to develop for one to be able to navigate through life with less effort and more happiness.

It’l is always now. This might sound trite, but it is a truth. … The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.

But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth – overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeeded. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain – and thinking interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. As a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content that we might otherwise be. We often fail to appreciate what we have until we lost it. We crave experiences, objects, relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the craving puts it. I speak from experience, of course.

…the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There’s nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, non-judgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.

Sam Harris