Proactive Mindfulness: How We Get More Present & Engaged In Life
Proactive mindfulness involves being aware of what prevents us from being present and engaged in what we do. It also takes understanding it and dealing with it.
All of this has to do with how our nervous system deals with interaction. We are wired to get a sense of whether a situation is safe or hostile. This is not an objective assessment but an automatic, unconscious reaction. We are often unconsciously triggered into a heightened sense of danger that is not warranted. That is, we are triggered into reacting to our preconceptions, our baggage, instead of the actual situation.
Fear
In other words, fear takes over. And, often, we don’t even know that we’re afraid. We cannot push away our reactivity through willpower. It has to do with fear, and evolution has made fear very powerful because it leads to survival. For the fear to lift, we need to sense that the situation is safe. This means we need to stay present enough to see beyond our baggage. To see the situation as it really is.
Staying present is not an abstract concept. It means being in touch with our body. All of it.
What fear does, it disconnects us from parts of our body. Just like a circuit breaker cuts off connection when there’s too much intensity. This happens even when we are not aware of being afraid. The disconnected parts are still there. But there’s no flow of information, of energy, going through them. So they’re not available to us. As the brain keeps track of our inventory of resources, some of them have disappeared from that inventory.
We function with diminished resources, and we’re not even aware of it. Before we can effectively engage with the situation, we need to engage with our body to recover its full resources.
Why we need to engage with our body
It seems obvious, and yet this is so different from what we usually do. We keep trying to engage with the situation when we don’t have a full deck, when we don’t have all of our bodily resources available. Instead, what we need to do is first engage with our body to recover its full resources.
Now, that may seem strange. For instance, if your feet are disconnected, what does this have to do with your capacity to think? Of course, there’s the phrase “thinking on your feet.” But it’s just a way of speaking, isn’t it?
Well, no, it isn’t just empty words. Our nervous system constantly scans our body. When parts are offline, it’s as if they didn’t exist, and our system is unbalanced. Think about what happens if you have a flat tire. Your car still has three functional tires. But the whole system has now become much less able to handle the road. Disproportionately so.
So we need to engage with our body to recover the disconnected parts. To re-inflate the tire, so to speak.
How we engage with your body
Engaging with our body means switching our focus to our body. We need a roadmap. For instance, if my feet are offline at this moment, it will not occur to me to put my focus on them. But my roadmap tells me there’s such a thing as feet. So I can direct my attention toward them and do little experiments in moving them ever so slightly. I start noticing that my feet are responding, ever so slightly. It’s all very subtle.
Being present means engaging. And engaging means being in that process that’s like attunement. It’s subtle. It’s a slow rhythm. Making a move. Taking the time to notice what happens. Adjusting based on that. Noticing. And so on.
When engaging, or attuning, there’s a different sense of time. It’s as different from regular time as savoring a single bite of a delicious food is from stuffing your face.
And so, as we follow the roadmap, we re-engage with parts of our body that were disconnected. We now have our whole system available to us in this time of need.
Changing relationship
We still feel the fear. But, now, a bodily sense of safety counterbalances the fear. Feeling safe is not an abstract concept. It comes from the felt sense that our body is not disengaging in the face of danger. We have all our resources to face the situation. So it is now possible for the fear to dissolve and for us to have an appropriate response to the situation.
I said, at the beginning, that proactive mindfulness involves being aware of what prevents us from being present and engaged in what we do. And understanding it and dealing with it. I hope that what I described here gives you a little more of a sense of what it is. A little taste of it that motivates you to explore it more. Only as you explore it will you get to really understand it. Just like you can’t fully understand what swimming is like unless you actually swim.
I mentioned a roadmap. What I mean is a sense of where to look for. Our roadmap in Proactive Mindfulness is to shift our focus from the head into the three segments of the body: the feet and legs, the torso, and the core. We develop embodied skills to reconnect with the disconnected parts.
Training involves practicing some simple embodied experiments to get into the attunement-like process of engaging with your body. It is also the entry point into a journey of mindful change. The entry point into a process of developing a different relationship with your body, your sense of self, and how it manifests in facing the challenges of life.
