Tipping Points To Mindfulness
For years, I had been reading about the benefits of meditation. Often these words were convincing enough to get me to try the practice once again, giving it another go, but I could never make it stick.
Eighteen months ago I stumbled into a practice of mindfulness, and a daily meditation practice has been a big part of my life since.
Looking back at that journey, I can pinpoint a couple of tipping points that either accelerated my adoption of the practice or deepened it. Below I have described these tipping points, also in the approximate that they happened.
1. Experiencing an exhale
I have described part of this experience here. I’ll add some more colour to this today.
I was in a therapy session with my psychologist, and she had asked me to tell a specific story. My storytelling style was probably more akin to a rant, and as I got the climax of my story, it was as if my body and mind just let go. My body and shoulders sunk back into the couch, almost as if it wanted the earth to swallow it. And I released a big breath. Exhale.
My therapist looked at me and just said: ”Did you see what you just did there?”
I was confused.
”You exhaled. How did that make you feel?”
In the moment, I understood what I had experienced; not in a cognitive way, but just by way of how I felt. I realised in that moment that by releasing my breath, I had also released pent-up emotions, experiences, mental models and the stories I was telling myself. It felt good, and I was convinced I wanted — and needed — more of this.
2. Understanding my mind
With this new energy and perspective, my therapist suggested that I read “Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life”.
The book helped me understand one thing about the way that our minds work and how our ability to reason also means we can relate various unrelated things to each other. Sometimes to our detriment.
The mind’s natural way is to consider past events, connecting the dots that it believes to be related and then jumps beyond the present moment as a way to forecast the future.
This helped me understand just how much suffering I had been experiencing as a result of my mind that was just constantly making up stories about my life, work, relationships, etc. It never shut down, and I never got a break from my mind spinning on that hamster wheel.
In learning though that this is just the natural state of our minds and that our ability to reason, to think logically and to relate seemingly unrelated things to each other, is also one thing that positively separates us from other mammals. This helped me identify when my mind was merely spinning or when I was connecting dots that just didn’t need to be connected.
3. Finding simple advice
By now the idea of mindfulness was gathering a lot of momentum in my life. I had also started using Headspaceas yet another attempt to get into meditation and make it a routine practice. Suffice to say the early days were not as obvious or easy.
It wasn’t until I heard Andy — the narrator in all of Headspace’s guided meditations — explain mindfulness in a way that just seemed to click. He explained that, while meditating, once you realise you have been distracted that this is already practising mindfulness.
Hearing this lowered the barrier to my expectations or the standard to which I felt I had to work towards mindfulness in my meditation practice. But it also instantly made it much easier to be more mindful in the rest of my life; every time during the day that I found myself distracted or with my mind running furiously in a direction, I could give myself a pat on the back for being aware that I was distracted.
4. Extending the benefits
At the same time that I settled into my new meditation practice, I had also started to train to run my first marathon.
Once I had progressed beyond Headspace’s foundation packs, they offered quite a few other packs that were related to training: motivation, perseverance, big match temperament, etc. This felt very topical for me at the time, so I worked my way through those packs. I also often incorporated one of their guided meditations when I went for longer runs, where I’d use the first 10 or 15 minutes of the run to find some calm.
By combining two things that had a lot of its own momentum (my training and meditation practice), I seemed to find an exponential benefit in strengthening both of those practices. It also meant that I could rely on two different types of practices to assist me in establishing a daily mindfulness practice.
Through this practice, I believe I experienced what I would describe as mindful running, and this experience culminated when I eventually ran my marathon.
Before the marathon, I had discovered Tara Brach’s work, and it was especially her story of “Inviting Mara to Tea” that resonated with me. She tells the story of how Buddha faced many challenges and temptations that Mara, a demon, presented to him and instead of resisting those difficulties, he said: “I see you, Mara. Come have tea with me.”
As I was running my marathon, I invited Mara to tea at the start of every new kilometre and ended up finishing the race having one of the best moments and experiences of my life.
I wish there were a way for me to write this article as more of a generic blueprint to help you incorporate a practice of mindfulness in your life. As I wrote this though and reflected on my own path of discovery, I find that many of these tipping points where very contextual and almost tailored to my own experience, perspective and situation at the time.
That is not to say that you would not find value or benefit from trying to replicate some of these tipping points or having similar experiences or realisations.
I believe what is more important is the acceptance that journeys ultimately differ and to a large extent are unique. There is no right or wrong; there are only journeys.
This reminds me of the words I recently published after reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The plot is all about one individual’s journey to discovering themselves. This is what I wrote down:
”Every person has their journey. Often that journey involves many wrong turns, pursuits of desires and fleeting experiences of the indulgence of worldly pleasures. This is probably exactly how we “find” ourselves; once we have exhausted all obvious ways to find ourselves, we come to the truth which was always present: when we stop seeking, we will find.”
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