Use it as a tool, along with your prayer, to improve your mental and spiritual health. By Rosie Herreid Catholics can be wary of “mindfulness,” which they many equate with new-agey Eastern-style meditation. While some kinds of meditation may be harmful to your faith, mindfulness isn’t meditation. Rather, it’s just a tool that can be used to improve your mental health and even benefit your faith. In therapy I learned that mindfulness is a way of observing the thoughts and emotions that pass through your head — observing, but not judging. The goal is to be aware of the feelings and ideas that rush through your head, observe them, and let them go, instead of dwelling on them and succumbing to the harmful ones. Your thoughts and actions form a cycle: thoughts and feelings give rise to actions, and actions in turn cause feelings. By noticing our thoughts and feelings and preventing them from influencing our actions, we can step in and interrupt this cycle. ...