5) Recap: Mindfulness for the win.
Awareness. Of present experience. With acceptance.
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” — William Butler Yeats
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is being in the here and now. Concentration on our everyday routine, moment to moment. It is knowing what we’re doing while we’re doing it. Because most of us spent our lives on auto-pilot, lost in memories of the past and fantasies of the future, with minds in one place, bodies in another.
“The richest banquet, the most exotic travel, the most interesting, attractive lover, the finest home — all of these experiences can seem somehow unrewarding and empty if we don’t really attend to them fully — if our minds are elsewhere, preoccupied with disturbing thoughts. By the same token, the simplest of life’s pleasures — eating a piece of fresh-baked bread, seeing a work of art, spending moments with a loved one — can be amply rich if we bring a full attention to them. The remedy to dissatisfaction is inside us, in our minds, not in groping for new and different outer sources of satisfaction.” —Tara Bennett Goleman, author of Emotional Alchemy
How about mindfulness meditation?
Mindfulness is the state we’re after, and mindfulness meditation is the way of training your mind to let go of the thoughts and feelings that pull us out of the present moment, so we can be aware and present in our current experience.
It can be done in many different ways. Breathing. Mantras. Music and dance. Progressive muscle relaxation. Paying attention to any or all of the five senses. Getting in the zone or flow. Yoga.
“It happens that music and rhythm and dancing are excellent ways of moving toward the discovering of identity. We are built in such a fashion that this kind of trigger, this kind of stimulation, tends to do all kinds of things to our autonomic nervous systems, endocrine glands, to our feelings, and to our emotions. It just does.” —Abraham Maslow
Where does mindfulness meditation come from?
Buddha’s brain. Roughly 2500 years ago. Mindfulness comes from the Pali word sati, which means awareness and attention (which is focused awareness).
One of the most ancient forms of meditation, Vipassana, means to see things as they really are. It’s one of India’s oldest meditation techniques, taught by Gautama Buddha (aka Siddhartha Gautama, or simply the Buddha) who lived around 500 B.C. The reason vipassana is so appealing, in my opinion, is because what turns many people off of meditation is the perceived religious nature of it. I.e. Most people quickly associate meditation with Buddhism or even mysticism. It’s a tragic shame for people to get scared away from something so universally good for you as meditation, because of religious or spiritual differences.
Mindfulness, by itself, is not new. It’s part of what makes us human—consciousness and awareness. But it’s somewhat elusive in the sense that it’s hard to articulate, and you really have to experience it directly and play around it to really get
Why do it?
Well, there are practical benefits, like decreased anxiety, better sleep, improved mood, stronger immune system, etc., etc. Oh, and there’s also improved creativity, cognitive flexibility, memory, etc., etc.
However, the real purpose of meditation looks something more like this:
- Affectionate awareness
- Mindful acceptance
- Openhearted presence
- Widespread compassion
Meditation → Conscious, Accepting, Responsible, Assertive, Purposeful → Love (self-love, love for others, lovingkindness)
Mindfulness can reduce needless suffering. Personal transformation. Change what? Change the way we respond to the unavoidable difficulties of life. The capacity for sustained moment-to-moment calm awareness, especially in the middle of emotional turmoil, is a special skill. But, thankfully a skill that can be learned. The problem is that most people never develop this skill, and are only in this blissfully present state of mindfulness for brief periods of time, then are sucked back into familiar daydreams, unnecessary worries, and and ongoing ever-distracting personal narrative.
Mindfulness meditation gives us our brains the street smarts to self-regulate our awareness so that we can keep our attention on the immediate experience with openness, curiosity, acceptance.
Practice Makes Progress
Meditation is 1% theory and 99% practice. As we jump into practicing, we quickly see how easily distracted our mind is and it can be frustration. However, everytime the mind wanders, and we acknowledge the thought with calm awareness, then bring our minds back, it’s a form of exercise that strengthens the mind.
Harbhajan Singh Khalsa (aka Yogi Bhajan), the man who brought Kundalini Yoga (a form of meditation with both poses and breath work) to the West, used the analogy of a seed to describe this transformation. He said if we do practice for forty days we have planted a seed within our consciousness. If we practice daily for ninety days we have let that seed sprout. Daily for 120 days, we have let that seed begin to grow. And 1000 days represents mastery and the tree has blossomed.
Try it. Now. Really.
We’re not only rushing through life, we’re doing it in a terribly distracted state of mind. Rushing through the dishes to get to your cup of tea or reality TV show. Day dreaming on the freeway, zoned out completely, sometimes whizzing by the exit. Watching the clock, counting down the minutes or hours until a work shift is over. Eating lunch in front of a screen, not even tasting the food. When we rush time, we get rid of a significant chunk of our life experience while trying to hurry along “the good stuff.” Treat it all as good stuff.
Take a few seconds right now to recall a moment if your life that you really valued. Really, stop reading for a minute and think of one. Maybe it was a special time with a loved one, or a magical experience in nature. But whatever it was, I can guarantee you that you were present during this moment. The moments we value the most in life are the ones in which we’re fully present, noticing what is happening here and now.
Try it right now. Notice the position of your hands. The sensation of holding a book or phone or computer. Be aware of your body sitting on a chair or in a car or laying down, and the sensations of touch. Hear the sounds of the room or the space you’re in, whether it’s the hum of a heating unit or birds in the distance.
What it comes down to is practicing regularly, even just minutes a day at first, but even more importantly reminding ourselves throughout the day to pay attention to what is happening in the moment.
“If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly.” — Andrew Weil, MD
