MindFULLness - It's Not About Empty. It's About Full.
“MindFULLness - the deliberate practice of filling your mind with what serves you, rather than letting it fill itself with whatever is loudest.”
Gary Walker
The best practice is the one you do
Let me say something that might surprise you.
I’m not a big fan of mindfulness. Or rather - I’m not a fan of the way most people teach it.
Many people who want to do more meditation sometimes struggle and give up.
"Empty your mind. Be present. Let thoughts pass like clouds. Breathe."
If that works for you - genuinely - keep doing it.
But for a lot of people, especially people who are wired for doing and thinking and solving, “empty your mind” is the most frustrating instruction in the English language.
So let me offer a different frame.
I call it MindFULLness. Not mindfulness - MindFULL-ness.
The deliberate practice of filling your mind with what actually serves you, rather than letting it fill itself with whatever is loudest.
The problem with empty
Your mind doesn’t do empty.
Try it right now.
Stop reading, close your eyes, and think of nothing.
What happened?
Probably a grocery list. A conversation from last week. A worry you’d forgotten about for a moment. Maybe the sound of traffic or someone’s voice.
The brain defaults to something. Always.
It’s not a blank screen waiting for input - it’s a pattern-recognition machine running constantly in the background, making connections, replaying memories, anticipating futures.
Trying to make it empty isn’t just hard. It’s working against the grain of how it’s built.
What full looks like
MindFULLness is the practice of choosing what goes in.
It’s the mental nutrition approach applied to your present-moment experience.
Just as you can choose to eat well or eat poorly, you can choose what you feed your attention to.
Some things fill you.
Others drain you.
The practice is learning to tell the difference - and then deliberately choosing more of what fills.
What fills varies by person. For some it’s nature. For others it’s music, movement, conversation, making something with their hands, reading, cooking, running.
The common thread isn’t the activity - it’s the quality of presence it creates.
Full engagement. Full attention. The sense of being here, not elsewhere.
That’s MindFULLness.
Name what fills you and do more of it
Sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it systematically. Make a list of five things that leave you feeling genuinely better - more present, more settled, more like yourself.
Then check: how often are those things actually in your week?
For most people, the answer is not often enough.
Notice your mental diet in the first 30 minutes of each day
What’s the first thing you put into your mind? Social media, news, other people’s problems — that’s fast food for the brain. Stimulating, low nutrition, leaves you flat by mid-morning.
Try something different. Ten minutes of something that genuinely fills you before you reach for the phone. Movement, breath, a few pages of a book, your morning questions.
Choose the input before the day chooses it for you.Find the overlap between attention and enjoyment
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow — the state where challenge and skill are perfectly matched, and you lose track of time entirely. It’s the opposite of scrolling. The opposite of multitasking. It’s full presence without effort.
You’ve experienced it. The question is how to create the conditions for it more often.
That’s the practice.
Not emptying. Filling - deliberately, consistently, with what actually nourishes the mind you’re trying to train.
My practice ?
I start my day with a habituated process:
Move my body
Meditate and be still,
Map out my intention for the day then
Make plans for whats important.
As much as I like to do this for 7 minutes each - sometimes its longer - most of the time it is shorter.
Then during the day - I catch myself often falling into habit and daze and say to myself
"Isn't that interesting.."
Then I smile - and get back to doing things mindFULLY.
I set my day - read more..
Training starts now.
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In my blogs / newsletters - I share practical, science-backed content across 4 key Mental Fitness areas.
I added a 5th category - Musings - thought pieces, articles to ponder and ideas to expand your thinking and maybe make your life better.
Neuroscience - how your brain actually works, in plain English
Mental Health - how to notice, support, and help yourself and others build mental resilience
Performance - how to train your mind like an athlete trains their body
Habits - How to create great habits and remove ones that don't serve
No jargon. No crisis framing.
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Welcome to your training ground.
Gary Walker, Mental Fitness Coach
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