While a year ago we were in free fall, and while this experience was replicated many times in many ways in 2020, there’s something else that has been happening that I want to name.

Lots of people are practicing mindfully. In my mindfulness organization that has itself transformed in the past year, I talk every day to more students, people, groups, and firms who realize that their daily work needs are to have both a steadying and easing force present. On some level of course they were aware of this before. Now, though, in the absence of the sociocultural, in-person contact we had all spent however long taking part in, for both work and to live life, many of us are filling the gap with new and different thoughts, activities, and practices.

The path to steadiness and ease in the mind, breath, and body comes through mindful activity and practices. This has long been known by monks, long-time meditation practitioners, long-time yoga practitioners, and others who earnestly and over some period of time have invested their energies in these practices. There are many way to define mindfulness, and this excellent recent study from the Harvard Review of Psychiatry offers a comprehensive look at the term to date and describes neuro-biologically the difference, for examples, between focusing the perspective versus opening it up.

The stressors and effects of social deprivation of the past year have piled on top of another; they are cumulative and chronic and will be residual for some time to come. We are openly discussing the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) implications of going back out into the world: For how long and deeply will we still feel fearful to be near, hug, kiss, and hold each other? As the fear subsides, what will fill its place?

Practicing mindfulness of any kind, whether mindful movement, mindfulness meditation, meditation, or other mindfulness based interventions (MBIs), yields the primary result of being able to observe how you feel, what you feel, what what you’re thinking in the moment the observation occurs. Longer term, this practice for the brain, which is never not taking its cues from the body, develops patterns, or correlates, that enable the mindfulness patterns to awaken more easily and steadily. In other words, every time you practice, it’s easier for you overall even though your attachments to thoughts and other habits will suggest otherwise.

The people I see moving mindfully right now have been doing so, steadily and easefully, for most of the past year. Even through the obvious stumbles and major other adjustments, these people have developed a sturdiness and steadiness to their gaze, body, and comportment that has emerged from the time they have regularly given to opening themselves up to mindful actions (yoga, for example), thoughts and feelings (meditation), and relationships (using Zoom to stay in touch as they practice). This is healing, and it’s also very real.