02/23/2026
Mindfulness for Beginners: Peace in Solitude
By pulling yourself away from the crowds of noise in your mind, you can then sit back and organize them, listen to them from a safe distance, and try to understand where they’re coming from and why. You don’t need to react or respond, and you don’t need to create anything with what you hear. All you need to do is actively listen to the conversations taking place inside of you, and slowly come to the awareness that not all of them may be yours.
When you pause to listen, you have the chance to realize what detachment feels like in action. It can feel like sitting still, allowing whatever you hear to just be there, and being within a moment in which a choice presents itself to you on what you want to claim as yours, and what you want to release. This is the rudiment of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the reflection process at the heart of self agency; the self which wants to look out for your best interest within the chaos of a world blasting instructions on who you ought to be - otherwise known as conditioning, be it parental, familial, community-based or societal.
There are various methods of mindfulness, which range from simply sitting still in the comfort of your bed to active breathing, journaling, and even forest bathing. There isn’t always a need to correlate mindfulness to the intentional practice of meditating, but often, becoming mindful overtime can take on the shape of meditation. This is primarily because once you click inward and start listening, your internal world invites you to spend more time with it than with the heavy focus our current world places on degrees of external validation centered on image control. Status, wealth, and physical appearance have increasingly become the hallmarks of our capitalist system machinized by consumption, productivity, competition and comparison.
Over 250 studies have documented direct correlations between socio-evaluative threats, which is a type of anxiety arising from fear of being judged by others on tangible markers, and declining mental wellbeing. The materialism trap promoted by consumer-based capitalism has created a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill, where people chase better jobs and more money while simultaneously quickly adapting to new levels of wealth, hence feeling perpetually in lack due to a temporary and fleeting feeling of satisfaction. Social media can also amplify this with its likes-based economy, reflecting metrics on social standing based on how desirable we are to others; or better put, how desirable the commodification of who we are, appears to be to others.
Mindfulness is the decision to get off the treadmill, leave the circus even if for a moment, and give yourself the chance to practice feeling comfortable in solitude with whatever comes up while you pay attention to your thoughts and emotions. It’s the chance to search for, and sit with, the parts of yourself that won’t be objectified by others, and then choose if you want to build a private relationship with what you find that’s impenetrable by another's input.
