You are, at this moment, sitting down reading these few lines. As you do this, notice what that feels like, how what you're sitting on supports you, how your feet at positioned on the floor. Notice how it feels when you breathe in and out (I assume you're breathing!) - how the air passes through your nostrils, how your chest and stomach gently move with each breath, how your shoulders rise and fall. You'll also be surrounded by sounds at this moment - hear them, don't evaluate them, just listen and hear. For these few moments, just be where you are. Being present is the essence of mindfulness... and mindfulness is the key to success and happiness.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO MINDFULNESS

Mindfulness is all the rage. After 2,500 years it's in danger of becoming the flavour of the month. The Western world has finally woken up to the blindingly obvious... the more present you are, the more likely you are to do what you have to do to get to where you want to go.

How this has taken so long is beyond me. After all, consider the alternative: mindlessness. Who, in their right mind, would choose to be mindless. Who, in their right mind, would opt for lunacy. The problem is, as we're wired, we're not in our right mind. We've got to take steps to be in our right mind, to discover mindfulness. If you don't you will remain mindless. There is no middle ground - you can't be a little mindful, just like you can't be a little bit pregnant!

There is an alternative to mindfulness, it's our default state of mind - and you'd want to be completely crazy and hellbent on a life of misery to choose it.

In all my travels, in conversation with people that I meet at workshops and conferences, I regularly hear people using the word authentic. I hear phrases like authentic leadership, authentic listener... in fact, it's becoming trendy to add authentic as an adjective to pretty much anything. The strange thing is, though, that people using this phrase seem to think that you've got to add something to your repertoire to be authentic. In fact, you've got to take something away. Again, people seem to think that you need to strive to be authentic - but striving to be who you really are is a contradiction. Surely, you just are who you are. By this, I don't mean who you think you are. In fact, this is the bit that you need to take away.

All our adult lives we live in close proximity to our personality - to the extent that we believe it to be who we are. Yet our personality is learned during our formative years. You may have been born with blue eyes and sandy coloured hair, with big bones and long limbs but you weren't born with a personality... it developed. Now you carry around that weight on your shoulders. It doesn't feel heavy because you're so accustomed to carrying it but that doesn't mean that it weighs heavily on your ability to be who you really are - someone who is open-minded, alert to opportunity and of real help to those around you.

Being authentic means being, full stop. People who use the phrase think that its being more than you already are. In fact, its being less - you without the baggage. Just you. That's why I cannot stand the phrase. If you could just be you, if I could just be me, how much better would our lives be? How much better a place would this world be if we could drop our personal agendas, our fears and anxieties, worries and stresses - all the things that are the product of our learned selves.

Wake up from your slumber - your personality-induced coma. Open your eyes to the present moment. Get in touch with reality. Come to your senses - you have five of them, use them.

We've just been chatting over breakfast about the crazy people you regularly meet. From the lady who decided to build a house on a communal open space (seriously) because nobody seemed to want it, to the couple who were furious with themselves when they accidently let slip to us, over a drink, that they had plans to tap and bottle the local mountain spring that feeds the communal water supply; from the guy who fed his son Class A drugs in the hope that he'd become a tennis star, to the mother who screamed down the 'phone at the US State Department: "If you gave a f*****g special visa to Hugh Grant, why can't you give a f*****g visa to me son?"

On reflection, every where we turn, we meet crazy people. As Tony deMello said, the morning that you come to the point where you begin to question if it's you that's crazy, because you think everyone else is, you've arrived.

PS: Not everybody we know is completely crazy!