ABSTRACT
The direct experience within mindfulness practice for many participants of perceiving their thoughts in this radically new way is often fleeting and momentary. The tendency to relate to experience in general and thoughts in particular as representations of reality or fact is the cause of much distress and difficulty. Mindfulness cultivates skills in both witnessing experience and in engaging and participating directly in the actuality of experience. De-centring involves cultivating the ability to not be identified or lost within experience – for example seeing thoughts as thoughts rather than as a representation of reality. Direct engagement with experience involves being with the sensory nature and qualities of it. Participants are learning that we have choices in how we relate to experience. On a broader level, awareness can be seen as a wide container within which experiencing is happening moment by moment.
