In mantra and breath meditation, you focus on a word or your breath and try to empty your mind of everything else. This mental clearing is what most people mean when they refer to meditation. But there's another kind of meditation, a practice Buddhists call vipassana or sometimes called mindfulness , or insight meditation. It is the art of becoming deeply aware of the present instant.
Mindfulness means fully experiencing what happens in the here and now.
It is the art of focusing our minds on what's happening in and around us at this very moment. Mindfulness helps you turn down all the noise in your head- the guilt, anger, doubts, and uncertainties that upset us moment to moment. It is a technique that encourages you to stop and smell the roses. The key is not so much what you focus on but how you do it. What is more important is the quality of the awareness you bring to each moment.