Thread: Mindfulness - An Alternative Approach to ADA

Today I caught myself in a problem that might occur while trying to be "mindful" of the present moment; you can get too caught up in the concentration side, basically if you constantly feel "gotta be mindful, gotta be mindful, gotta be mindful" (not thinking that precisely, just really concerned / concentrating on it) you are in fact not being mindful, as I have observed.

Getting so caught up in what you are doing currently means you are not using the most important part of mindfulness and that is memory.

2009 – XVIII

sustained voluntary attention (samadhi) is closely related to memory, because in order to deliberately sustain one’s attention upon a chosen object, one must continue to remember to do so from moment to moment, faithfully returning back to refocus on that object whenever the mind wanders away from it. Likewise, in Buddhism, the faculty of “mindfulness” (smrti) refers not only to moment-to-moment awareness of present events. Instead, the primary connotation of this Sanskrit term (and its corresponding Pali term sati) is recollection. This includes long-term, short-term, and working memory, non-forgetful, present-centered awareness, and also prospective memory, i.e., remembering to be aware of something or to do something at a designated time in the future.

So basically, if you concentrate too hard on mindfulness you're not leaving any room for actual mindfulness.

This may be one of the reasons you sometimes see the suggestion to forget about lucid dreaming for a while, take a break, actually helping to achieve lucidity.

So while doing your daily ADA / mindfulness / prospective-memory etc... try and strike a balance between being mindful and concentration, if one is too extreme the other suffers.


Take a step back, take some deep breaths, loosen up.