
Course Breakdown
Mindfulness Skills For Life In A Crazy World.
The Right Here, Right Now Course: A Breakdown

Mindfulness Skills teach you how to respond using both your logic and emotions, together, what to do to practice mindfulness, and how to do it.
You’ll also get a glimpse of skills in other perspectives on mindfulness like mindfulness as a spiritual practice, skillful means through mindfulness, finding freedom with mindfulness, contemplative practices, loving-kindness, doing mind vs. being mind, walking the middle path, and how to set intentions. Students can expect to grow in deeply supportive skills for a tuned, present, and more satisfying life.
Mindfulness Skills
Mindfulness is a practice that orients you and brings you where you are. There are three main goals of Mindfulness (1) to reduce suffering and increase happiness, (2) to increase control of your mind and (3) to experience reality as it is.
Mindfulness has you learn to take your time and give yourself space. really engage with and get to know other people, intimately. Mindfulness skills allow for everything to be valid. The significance that you give to experience, though it might not be objectively true, impacts what and how you experience. Where you are at this moment in time may have some increased validity around things that are not objectively true. You can fact-check that but, coming from the place that it is valid and you are valid and you are in a process that is also valid, helps you stay here to work through it.
Mindfulness is intentionally living with awareness in the present moment.
It is participating, choosing, and being responsible for how you show up in your life. When you do these things you do not judge or reject the moment. You will learn wise mind, “what” skills, “how” skills, and other perspectives.

Wise Mind
Wise Mind is finding, inside yourself, the wisdom that each and every one of us has within. You can call it your intuition. you can call it your connection to God. you can call it your highest self. However, you identify and whatever you’d like to call it that sounds like when you feel that you can listen and just know.
That’s the wisdom of Wise Mind.
Wise mind is a balance between your reason and pragmatic thoughts and your emotional state. Wise mind helps yo appreciate and experience reality as it is.
Inner wisdom includes the ability to identify and use skillful means for attaining valued ends.
It’s also the ability to access and then apply knowledge, experience, and common sense to a situation. This is hard for some people but everyone has the capacity to use their wisdom.
Mindfulness “What” Skills
“What” skills are what we do. They include observing, describing, and participating.
Observing is being very intentional about paying attention to the present moment and seeing what’s objectively there.
Describing is putting into words what you have observed and distinguishes what is observed from what is not observed.
When we describe a situation, we can hear ourselves and discern whether or not we are confusing mental concepts of events with the events themselves. This can lead to unnecessary emotional distress and confusion and unnecessary suffering. When you describe what you are observing. you can get feedback from a larger community. You can also describe what you observe by writing it down.
Describing is adding words to an observation. Putting your experience into words gives you access to thoughts and emotions (together, in wise mind) regarding what you observe.
Participating is entering wholly and with awareness into life itself.
When you participate, you feel present to your own life and with the people around you.
Participation is the principal, fundamental characteristic of skillful behavior.

Mindfulness “How” Skills
“How” skills are HOW we observe, describe, and participate.
There are three How skills – acting non-judgmentally, one-mindfully and effectively.
Non-Judgmentalness is letting go of evaluating and judging reality.
There are two types of judgments – judgments that discriminate and judgments that evaluate.
To discriminate is to discern or analyze whether two things are the same or different, whether something meets some type of standard, or if something fits the facts.
To evaluate is to judge someone or something as good or bad, worthwhile or not, valuable or not. Evaluations are something we add to facts. They are based on opinions, personal values, and ideas in our minds. These are not always factual. When they are, it is part of our factual reality.
One-mindfulness is being completely present in this one moment, just for this moment.
One-mindfulness also means doing one thing at a time with awareness. it is focusing attention on only one activity bringing the whole person to bear on this thing or activity is practicing one-mindfulness.
Acting effectively is doing what works to achieve your goals.
The goal here is to focus on doing what works rather than what is right or wrong, fair or unfair.
Acting effectively means using skillful means to achieve your goals.