Everywhere you look there are books, workshops, classes, and webinars on mindfulness, all of them promising to lower your stress, bring you peace and tranquility, and improve your sex life. With all this, you might think mindfulness was complicated, challenging, something you need lots of education and training to understand and practice. I mean, with all this material it must be difficult, right?

Actually, it's not difficult to understand. It is actually very simple and straightforward, but it is also very challenging to implement. Like the Chinese game of go, mindfulness can be learned in 20 minutes but it may take 20 years to master. Why is that? Because a central part of mindfulness is being able to observe your surroundings without judgment, and that is not easy for most of us.

Don't believe me? Try this experiment. Look around you, right now. Are you at home, in your home office, curled up on the sofa? Take in your surroundings, including anyone else in your space. Are your children next to you, or maybe your spouse? Now pay attention to your thoughts. Are your thoughts positive or negative? Are you considering if things are good or bad? Positive or negative? How's the chair or sofa you sitting on? Comfortable or uncomfortable?

If there is music playing, did you stop to think if you liked the song or not? Or perhaps you are trying to decide whether you like this blog post? Should you keep reading? Maybe there's something good on Netflix...

Most of us spend much of our time judging and evaluating our surroundings, labelling everything about us based on whether we like or dislike whatever it is we are thinking about. The trick with mindfulness, what makes it so challenging, is that it asks us to suspend all evaluations and judgments and just observe. A song is not a good song or a bad song: it's a song, nothing more or less. A picture is not a good or a bad picture: it is just a picture.

Try it for a moment, and you may find yourself feeling relieved, even peaceful because our habit to always be evaluating everything around us is actually a lot of work. We may not fully realize how much effort we put into labeling and categorizing everything around us. It's exhausting! Yet we are so used to it, we do it without even fully realizing that we are doing it.

So how can we break this habit? How can we take a break from this constant evaluating of everything around us? Where do we start?

Here's a quick exercise you can do that might help break this cycle and help you be more mindful. It goes something like this.

• Close your eyes
• Be aware of your breathing
• Notice your thoughts passing through your mind, and try not to label them as good or bad. Let them pass through your mind in a constant stream, much like water flowing down a tumbling stream
• Don't try to clear your mind or slow your breathing. If you find yourself thinking about a conversation you had, then let those thoughts come and go. A shopping list? Like water in a stream, let it flow down river.
• There are no good or bad thoughts, just thoughts, flowing through your mind like river
• Open your eyes.

Congratulations, you have just had your first mindfulness meditation session! How do you feel now? Do you feel any different then when you started? As you may guess, one of the principal things mindfulness meditation does is to give you a break from all that judging and evaluating. For that 5 minutes, 10 or 15 minutes, you are giving yourself permission to stop judging. You are giving yourself a break!

Furthermore, because you cannot do it 'right', you therefore cannot do it 'wrong'. There is absolutely no way to be a good mindfulness meditator, just like it is impossible to be a bad meditator because mindfulness is all about releasing judgments of all kinds. The moment you say "that was a great meditation!", you are no longer practicing mindfulness, just like you can never have an awful meditation.

So what is the only real answer to the question, "how was your meditation?"

It was :)