"Being mindful" sounds like an appealing concept, but I've never been able to understand what it means.
In what ways should focusing on the present help when you actually hate your present? Also, how can you not worry about the future when you know almost for certain that it's going to be painful?
By being mindful you can actually see why you hate your present and why you worry about your future and there by change the way you react to such feelings and sensations happening in the present that have roots way deep in your conscious and sub-conscious parts of your mind.
'Being Mindful' helps by providing you helpful insights into yourself. there by enabling you the power to change how you react to a given situation. Only when we are not mindful, we tend to react to events unaware of what's happening within ourselves there by creating sensations and feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, frustration, hate, worry, anxiety, distress, fear, sadness, anger, confusion etc., again these are just fleeting sensations and feelings which are impermanent in nature. Mindfulness makes you become aware of the nature of such feelings and the impermanence of these feelings. Same is true to the opposite sensations and feelings of Pleasure, craving, absolute power, etc.,
It takes lots(Not all about how much time) of practice to get empowered, to be in control of your present. which ultimately leads to peacefulness with past, present and future. It connects one to consciousness, consciousness in all its planes. Mindfulness puts you in control of how you feel about Life. We all seek happiness, bliss. true experience of happiness and bliss comes through being mindful or one truly be happy and in bliss only by being mindful.