There are practices—small, inward gestures—that help us return, not to some ideal self, but to the unadorned reality of our experience.
Mindfulness, at its heart, is an invitation to notice how you’re holding yourself in any moment, in any action.
With time, a gap opens. You notice the pull toward reactivity—the impulse to rush, to distract, to grasp—and in that noticing, you find some space.
Where once you might have moved irritably through the world, treating others as obstacles, now you catch yourself. You feel the rising tension, but you no longer merge with it. You remain near to yourself.