The stillness of Yin Yoga’s long-held poses is a perfect container for cultivating mindfulness, which literally means ‘a mind full of nowness’. When mindful, you are focused on the present moment rather than analysing the past or anticipating the future. It isn’t about stopping thinking, it is about understanding that your mind is more than your thoughts. It is a process of awareness—or relaxed alertness. You pay attention to what is happening inside and outside of yourself right now, without getting caught up in your thoughts and letting them define what is real in this moment. Mindfulness is a way of connecting with yourself through compassionate self-exploration, by staying alert to what is happening within you rather than manipulating what happens.

When being mindful, the shadow aspects of ourselves are not excluded. All of us must deal with negative mental states, including stress, anxiety, delusion and depression, but you can be open to, and curious about, these states instead of running from or fighting them. Suffering is alleviated when you understand—deep within you—that whatever difficulty has happened to you, isn’t happening to you now.

Through mindfulness you increase your capacity for acceptance. Your sense of accountability is strengthened and you have greater control over your actions. You learn to understand the mind better and, over time, you become less reactive and more psychologically and emotionally resilient. You build an inner domain: a loving space in which there is no self-condemnation for your basic human mind.

Common ways to cultivate mindfulness include meditation and breath awareness, but really, nothing in your life needs to change in order for you to be mindful, because being in the moment as it is, is already an enormous change.