Mindful Awareness and COAL

An excerpt from my recent book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, now available at Amazon.

Mindful awareness is more than just an absence of judgments; mindful awareness adds positive qualities to awareness. Mindful awareness, as Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. further defines it, is paying attention in the moment with curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love of and compassion for yourself. He uses the acronym COAL to describe this state and to make it easier to remind ourselves of the qualities that characterize it.
C stands for curiosity (inquiring without being judgmental).
O stands for openness (having the freedom to experience what is occurring as simply the truth, without judgments).

A stands for acceptance (taking as a given the reality of and the need to be precisely where you are).
L stands for love (being kind, compassionate, and empathetic to others and to yourself).