Presence, Absence & Balance
Reflections on Dan Hurley’s article “Breathing In vs. Spacing Out”
Real talk: sometimes, I space-out during yoga. Especially during home practice. I’ll come out of crow with my mind still churning over a conversation that happened the day before. Today’s humble-warrior was a lament over the superficiality of a certain pop-music awards ceremony. My plans for lunch solidified during wheel pose. And I don’t regret it.
Because that’s what it’s all about. My obsessive-compulsive tendency once led me to over-emphasize presence as some kind of eternal mandate. But since then, I’ve learned that spacing out — being absent — has its own value. Dan Hurley’s article “Breathing In vs. Spacing Out” offers some good food for thought on the topic of presence.
Hurley surveys recent science measuring meditation’s effects on the brain:
Michael Posner, of the University of Oregon, and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas Tech University, used diffusion tensor imaging before and after participants spent a combined 11 hours over two weeks practicing a form of mindfulness meditation developed by Tang. They found that it enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving.
Naturally, these benefits have already been put to use in the military. Hurley describes a daily-meditation program within the US Marines to cultivate the mental resilience needed in a war zone, to great success.
That a practice once synonymous with Eastern mysticism could be put to the service of Western rationalism may sound surprising, but consider: By emphasizing a focus on the here and now, it trains the mind to stay on task and avoid distraction.
This shows how mindfulness, like any technology, is vulnerable to political usage for problematic ends. We can just envision how the glorification of presence could be exploited as a mandate to submit to one’s prescribed role. Red flags rise for me when meditation is used to serve military purposes- and when it dredges into the new-age cheer of campus corporate culture. What we need to be really mindful of is the co-optation of mindfulness as a shiny, new, secular iteration of ye old Puritan work ethic. By constantly snapping into present attention, could we actually be distracting ourselves from the critical-thinking that would otherwise creep into our minds? What do we lose when we disown the freedom to imagine beyond the here and now?
…One of the most surprising findings of recent mindfulness studies is that it could have unwanted side effects. Raising roadblocks to the mind’s peregrinations could, after all, prevent the very sort of mental vacations that lead to epiphanies. In 2012, Jonathan Schooler, who runs a lab investigating mindfulness and creativity at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a study titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” In it, he found that having participants spend a brief period of time on an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering improved their subsequent performance on a test of creativity. In a follow-up study, he reported that physicists and writers alike came up with their most insightful ideas while spacing out.
‘A third of the creative ideas they had during a two-week period came when their minds were wandering,’ Schooler said. ‘And those ideas were more likely to be characterized as ‘aha’ insights that overcame an impasse.’
Sometimes, presence just isn’t happening, and that’s okay, even during meditation and yoga. Once the sequencing of the poses embeds in your muscle memory, your body flows into the groove, opening space for the mind to wander. Some of the most interesting ideas surface in the midst of a meditation or a yoga practice — challenging us to accept that if these ideas are truly important, their value will stay with us once the practice is over. It’s an exercise of a non-attachment, aparigraha, to observe the “monkey-mind’s” chatter, acknowledge its benefits and limitations, and guide the attention to the breath. Only to let the whole process begin all over again. Om.
“Yoga citta vrtti nirodha,” the second of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, can be loosely interpreted as “yoga is the stillness of the mind’s fluctuations.” One thing I’ve learned from doing my fair share of yoga is that the yoga is never done. Sometimes, stillness comes. Sometimes we awaken into deeper presence. Other times, presence feels as dull as life in a goldfish tank and we’re instead drawn to explore the cosmos of our daydreams.
Yoga is the stillness of the mind’s fluctuation between feeling like a goldfish and a space-cadet.
Absence and presence alternate and interweave. Thoughts always arise, feelings, memories, perceptions of good versus bad rear their heads and distract us from unconditional immersion in the present moment. Softening our attachment to these passing thoughts, while also softening our desire to achieve some ideal of success in our practice: that’s the challenge.
The trick is knowing when mindfulness is called for and when it’s not. ‘When you’re staring out the window, you may well be coming up with your next great idea,’ he said. ‘But you’re not paying attention to the teacher. So the challenge is finding the balance between mindfulness and mind wandering. If you’re driving in a difficult situation, if you’re operating machinery, if you’re having a conversation, it’s useful to hold that focus. But that could be taken to an extreme, where one always holds their attention in the present and never lets it wander.’
As with anything, it’s a matter of balance. I agree that, in general, we could usually strive for more presence. In many ways, we suffer from detachment from ourselves and eachother. Presence helps us step into the reality of the moment and move into our highest selves. And it works wonders in helping us inter-personally connect and communicate. But there’s also so much value in absence. When the mind wanders, it envisions realities outside of our current circumstances, giving us perspective and opening new potential realities- and how cool is that?!
So next time you catch yourself planning a sweet get-together with your friends, only to snap back into the moment with your arms pretzelled between your legs in a revolved triangle pose, go ahead and send yourself a smile with the exhale: nothing was lost while you wandered. Offer some gratitude for the third-eye’s power: the imagination is such a gift! To paraphrase Timothy Leary: sometimes to use your head you must go out of your mind. Mindlessness, in moderation, can be as healthy and yogic as mindfulness. Let’s not attach to presence as a mandate. Infinite creative potential is ours to explore when we un-focus our eyes and spiral out with the streams of thought that pass through. Honor the imagination by allowing time in these dreamy spaces where inner-dialogues dance and critical thinking explores uncharted fields. You’ve been a very good yogi because you’ve been watching the mind’s wild ways. Now finish your practice and then go make that lunch you’ve been scheming up.
Yoga is hard. You deserve it.
