The real challenge, as we shall see as we engage in the actual practice of mindfulness, is that the practice itself gives us instant access to other dimensions of our life that have been here all along, but with which we have been seriously out of touch.
I am using that sensory metaphor of being “out of touch” intentionally, to acknowledge how astonishingly easy it is to be unaware, to be more on the mindless side rather than mindful, to see without really seeing, or hear without hearing, or eat without tasting. In other words, we can easily zone along on autopilot for most of our lives, meanwhile thinking we know what is happening, we know who we are, we know where we are going. That could be said to be our current default setting: the highly conditioned and tenacious mode of unawareness, of automatic pilot, of mindless doing.
This is why the cultivation of mindfulness is both so necessary … and so challenging.