What is mindfulness?

I found my way to the idea of mindfulness after reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.  Many believe Tolle to follow a Buddhist sort of spirituality, but I find his ideas to be more practical; not religious at all.  In fact, after thinking about his ideas I noticed that he was right!  And when I started practicing some of his suggestions, I found it helped me.

So . . . what is mindfulness?
Simply put, mindfulness is when you are "mindful" of the thinking going on in your head.  Weird, right?  At first I thought, "but there's no one in my head but me!"  It certainly feels that way.  But Tolle made a point that sticks with me.  When he was living in England, he rode the subway with a woman every morning who talked out loud to herself.  He figured this woman was nuts, seeming to have a conversation out loud with herself. He explains the experience in an interview with Krista Tippet:

I would sometimes see her on the train. I call it the tube, the subway, in the morning. And she would continuously talk to herself or, rather, to an imaginary person in a very angry voice. Continuously complaining, "And then he did this to me. Then he said, and I said — then how dare he tell me this," and I watched in amazement how can anybody be so insane and still apparently have a job? Because she would catch the subway every morning.

One day I was sitting opposite her on the subway, and she got off at the same station that I needed to get off to go the university library. I followed her, and we got closer and closer and finally I realized, oh, my God, she's going to the university.

Because at that time, I still thought the university was the great temple of knowledge, and all the answers — the professors and so on, they had all the answers and I would eventually find them too. I was washing my hands in the bathroom and I thought, "My God. Her voice. She never stops talking." And I suddenly realized, well, I do that too, except that I don't do it out loud. And then I thought, "I hope I don't end up like her," and somebody next to me looked at me and I suddenly realized in shock that I had actually said these words aloud just like her. I said, "I hope I don't end up like her." [Laugh] So I realized my mind was as incessantly active as hers. 

The point Tolle makes is that we are all having these conversations with ourselves in our heads, and for most of us these conversations happen all the time.  For many people, these conversations lead our lives and make us unhappy or angry or frustrated or depressed, or worse.  

Mindfulness is when you are aware of those thoughts.  It means you slow down enough to be, what Tolle calls, "conscious."  You notice the thoughts and make sure they are not driving you the wrong way.  And when those thoughts tell you that you're "stupid" or "fat" or "slow" or "doing this wrong" or "you'll never get it right" or "he/she will never love me"  . . .  you stop and recognize that those thoughts aren't YOU.  It is the ego.

Ok, so this is a pretty basic explanation of mindfulness.  Good thing there'll be more posts about it!