What Is Mindfulness? Radical Presence and Acceptance in an Uncertain World

April 20, 2026

Why the most important skill you can build has nothing to do with emptying your mind

I was fifteen years old when Rocky DiRico, my sensei, first taught me to meditate.

I was studying the martial arts, and early on Rocky introduced meditation as a core part of the practice. I worried it would be almost impossible — how do you quiet your mind and just focus on your breathing? Sure enough, like most people, I found it really challenging. Thoughts kept intruding. My mind wandered constantly.

But I quickly realized that amidst the intruding thoughts, I was building a new kind of muscle. The muscle of focus. Of calming my nervous system. Of being more present in the now, in this moment.

What I didn’t fully understand yet was how much I would need that muscle.

Years later, I was on a road trip in Mexico with colleagues during my first tour in the Foreign Service. Bandits tried to force us off the road with trucks, cars, and automatic weapons. In that moment, everything Rocky had taught me kicked in. By calming my nervous system, staying present, and focusing on the task at hand, I channeled what little training I’d had in Foreign Service Junior Officer Training for that kind of scenario — and made it out alive.

This muscle saved my life on more than one occasion. And it has served me in countless ways since — in ways far less dramatic but no less important.

That muscle has a name: mindfulness.

So what is mindfulness? At its core, mindfulness is about being fully present — paying attention in this moment, right now, with intention, on purpose. It’s not about self-improvement or fixing yourself. It’s really about meeting yourself where you are — meeting the context in which you are, the circumstances in which you are right now. There will be self-improvement that comes from a mindfulness practice, but that’s the byproduct, not the point.

The only thing that’s really real is this moment. The past is a story we inaccurately remember — and there’s nothing we can do to change it. The future is unknown. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. There could be people who are going to be pivotal in our lives and we don’t even know them yet — they might be coming into our lives tomorrow or next week or next month. So the only thing we have any real control over — partial control, but still some control — is this present moment.

What often distracts us from being truly present, even when we’re not time traveling, is that we fall into judgment. We start judging ourselves and other people and we get lost — pulled away from being present and observant and into our heads with all of the noise. Curiosity and kindness in place of judgment — and people don’t talk about this enough — are key components to being mindful and to having a good mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness isn’t about zoning out. It’s not about positive thinking. It’s really about being present, being conscious, being aware, being observant. Being the observer allows us to observe our thoughts non-judgmentally and then choose what to focus on moving forward — not to be controlled by our thoughts. You’re trying to be neutral. You’re trying to see things as they are and to see yourself as you are. To meet yourself where you are.

And it’s a radical acceptance of who you are and the way things are right now. Often we create suffering in our lives by resisting the current realities of who we are and where we are and what’s going on around us. Mindfulness allows us to just be observant. To get clarity. And that clarity — that radical acceptance of the way things are right now — means we have a solid launchpad for moving forward. That’s empowering. It’s really different than the way most of us go through life.

Many people resist mindfulness or meditating because they believe in one or more myths about them. Let me address the myths, because they’re what stop most people before they even start.

The biggest one: you have to have an empty mind. You don’t. Even the Dalai Lama says sometimes he only goes three or four seconds between thoughts intruding while he meditates. You’re not going to out-meditate the Dalai Lama! One study showed a typical experienced meditator goes only 10 seconds between thoughts. Thoughts are going to intrude. That’s what they do. The practice isn’t to stop the thoughts — it’s to observe them without judgment and then choose where to refocus your attention. Every intruding thought is an opportunity to practice, not a failure.

The second myth: I’m just not good at mindfulness. Here’s the thing — noticing that you’re distracted is mindfulness. You are being mindful. You’re being aware of what’s going on up there right now. You’re not failing at mindfulness. You just may be having more opportunities to observe what’s going on up there than some other people do.

The third myth: I’ll do this when things calm down. No. This is how things calm down! There are always going to be a lot of things going on in your life — a lot of the time. A mindfulness practice — not just sitting on a cushion once a day, but bringing mindfulness into your daily life — is one of the ways to create more calm, more presence, to slow things down. It is a practice. It is a way of being. And it will lead you to experience more calm, more joy, more presence, more appreciation, more gratitude as a result.

Another thing that gets in the way of buying into mindfulness is the feeling that we are not being “productive” while meditating. But we are not here to be productive. We’re here to be human beings and to live with purpose and meaning.

A lot of us treat mindfulness like another item on the to-do list. And I get it — we’ve been programmed to value productivity above everything else, to treat every aspect of life like it’s work. But sitting on a cushion for ten minutes in the morning doesn’t look productive. Neither does a mindful walk, or washing the dishes with no headphones, or just standing at the window for a minute watching the rain.

Except it actually is. Sleep is maybe the most important thing for your health and your wellbeing and your success at work and in your relationships. It doesn’t look productive. But it’s one of the most productive times of your day in terms of what goes on inside your brain and your body. Same with mindfulness. That’s a different definition of productive. 

What actually brings people a greater sense of life satisfaction — what the research consistently shows — is the health and quality of their relationships, learning and growing, and making a difference in the lives of other people. Not how busy they looked. Not how much they produced. And the only way to make values-driven decisions about what really matters is to be fully present. To live a mindful life.

The heart of mindfulness is radical acceptance. And I want to be clear about what acceptance means, because it gets misunderstood.

Acceptance isn’t resignation. It isn’t approval. It isn’t giving up. Some people struggle with mindfulness because being fully present and not just reacting instinctively to situations feels like approval. It’s not. It’s really just getting clarity.

It’s not about surrendering in the sense of “I give up, there’s nothing I can do.” No — it’s the opposite. It’s saying, “I’m surrendering to the reality that right now, this is the way it is.” But that clarity about where you are and who you are right now and what’s going on around you is what empowers you to make change moving forward. If you don’t see things clearly — if you’re being dishonest or unclear with yourself about where things are at right now — how can you be expected to be successful at making change? That makes no sense.

So it’s not about giving up. On the contrary. It’s about understanding that I can’t change what happened to get me here. Here I am. That’s just an objective reality. Here are my circumstances. That’s an objective reality. Now I can be rational and thoughtful about where I want to go next. What do I want to do with these circumstances? Which do I want to try and change? What do I want to try and change in myself?

I spent three weeks in Thailand about eight years ago and I was really taken with the Thai Buddhist approach towards this and the saying they had: sabai sabai (it is what it is). It became my mantra coming back because I was really burned out on my job at the time. And in Thailand I really realized: I’m resisting reality. I’m resisting these facts. I’m in this job. Here’s where I’m at. This is what the job is. This is what it isn’t. These are the parts I like. These are the parts I don’t like. That’s all reality. What do I want to do moving forward?

I realized there were certain parts of the job I didn’t like but had to do and make my peace with that. But there was time most days where I could choose where to put my energy, and I would purposefully choose to spend my time and energy in the parts of the job that had the greatest impact and brought me the most joy.

When I shared this new mantra with my colleagues, it became our mantra! When something went sideways, we’d say, “Okay, it is what it is — sabai sabai! What do we want to do moving forward?” It reduced our stress and allowed us to focus on what we could control and move forward with intention.

Here’s something that might surprise you: I was talking with another coach recently and shared some research that suggests we get a greater improvement in our quality of life from reducing the volume of our negative thoughts than from increasing our positive ones. She pushed back — it didn’t feel true to her. And I said: think about it this way: When you are truly present and mindful and the inner critic voice is quiet, your default — the authentic you — is some combination of peace, contentment, joy, love. At a minimum, when things go quiet, you feel peace. Maybe contentment. Maybe gratitude pops in. Your baseline isn’t suffering. Your baseline is what you’re seeking.

So reduce the negative first. Focus your energy there. You should also try to enhance the positive — gratitude is great for that, curiosity great for that. But first and foremost, reduce the suffering. Because if you can reduce the things that cause you to suffer, your default is at a minimum peace and contentment, calm. 

Mindfulness doesn’t manufacture good feelings. It removes the interference that’s been drowning them out.

So how do you actually build this practice?

I journal in the morning and set intentions. Mindfulness is almost always one of them — it tells my brain first thing when I get up that this matters, I’m practicing it right now, and I’m setting it as an intention. I meditate, ideally in the morning and again before bed. And I do some visualization in my meditation and journaling — I visualize situations where I could really benefit from being more mindful, more present, having more clarity in the moment, being less reactive. I visualize those situations and how I’d like to handle them in a way that reflects mindfulness and clarity and objectivity. And the more I do that visualization, the more I’m in the moment when I’m facing those situations. My brain thinks I did it before and it worked out well, so it wants to do it again.

I also try to find other opportunities to practice mindfulness throughout the day. I used to hate washing the dishes. Now I love washing the dishes. It’s part of my mindfulness practice. I try to make sure that at least part of a walk has no headphones, just being mindful and observant. I’m fortunate to live right near the ocean, so later today I’ll take a walk down by the water. Part of it will be listening to the waves and the birds, watching the rhythm of the waves going in and out, being really present. No agenda. Just being observant.

I used to reach for my phone at every moment of stillness — checkout lines, waiting rooms, any pause. I’ve mostly stopped. And almost every time I don’t reach for it, something good happens. A real conversation with a stranger. A moment of actual quiet. Something I would have missed entirely. A new insight.

We’ve engineered boredom out of our lives. But out of boredom and stillness come creativity, inspiration, and epiphanies we never get the chance for when we’re constantly distracting ourselves. The discomfort of quiet is temporary. What it opens up is not.

And think about the things we might hear and see and experience by being more present. When you’re on a walk instead of always putting on a podcast or listening to music — you get to listen to the birds, children playing and laughing. You see the trees and the flowers and the animals running around. There’s so much beauty around us all the time that we just race by or distract ourselves from. Mindfulness allows us to be fully present. To be connected to each other and to nature and to the universe in ways that can’t happen when we’re distracting ourselves.

Rocky DiRico gave me the foundation for all of this when I was fifteen. I didn’t know then that I was building something I’d spend the rest of my life returning to — something that would save my life on a high altitude desert road in Mexico, and quiet my mind on countless ordinary mornings since. That’s the practice. Not a destination. A return.

Rocky taught me to sit with discomfort at fifteen. I'm still learning. But every time I return to the practice — on a walk, at the sink, in a moment of quiet — I find the same thing waiting: not silence, but clarity. Not peace from the world, but peace within it.