In this chapter, we explore mindfulness, which is the practice of being fully aware of the moment in which you abide. To be mindful is to be conscious and awake to what is happening right now. As a person who is awake, you are not trapped in your mind. Your awareness of what is happening does not pass through the filters of the mind’s thoughts, opinions, and emotions.
Mindfulness is a state wherein you attend to what you are doing and what is happening in this moment. Your attention is not on your memory, or your thoughts of the future, or thoughts of other matters. It is the moment to moment awareness of “now.” Because you are fully aware of “now,” and you are not lost in the mind’s labyrinth of thoughts and emotions, you hold the power to choose your experience. With this power, you can choose happiness.
What Is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness means being aware of the moment in which you exist. It is the practice of being aware of the world, your body, your mind, and your emotions, as they are right now. You practice mindfulness without commenting on or judging the way you find the world.[84] When you are mindful you are intensely aware of what you are experiencing, and you are not absorbed in the self-criticizing, self-congratulatory, “narational” part of the mind.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has written a lot on this subject, uses a sports analogy to talk about mindfulness. Being mindful is like watching a game on television with the sound turned off. You see the game, as it is, without the play-by-play commentary, and without the constant stream of opinion and analysis.
Mindfulness is seeing your life as it is, without your internal narration of your life. You observe your life without being absorbed in all of your opinions and analysis about your life.
Mindfulness is much like meditation, which I talk about in the next chapter. In fact, mindfulness is a goal of meditation. However, unlike formal meditation, which one normally does while sitting or lying down, you can practice mindfulness while walking, working, or performing any simple movement.
For example, when I am mindful while walking down the street, I allow in all the sights, smells, and sounds, as they exist “right now.” When being mindful I am not in my memory, I am not thinking of the future, and I do not imagine myself somewhere else, doing something else.
Mindfulness of the Body
To be mindful of the body is to be aware of everything the body is doing and feeling, right now. To be mindful, you should be aware of what you currently see, feel, smell, taste, and hear. You allow your body’s feelings and sensations to absorb your attention. For example, when practicing mindfulness in formal meditation, you may start by being aware of your breathing. Then you can expand your focus to include your entire body.
You can practice mindfulness while performing simple tasks, like showering, cooking, looking out the window, walking, and even driving. Whatever you do, you do it with your entire attention on the activity.
I used to meditate in the Zen Center of San Francisco. Walking meditation, a form of mindfulness, was one of the practices there. Slowly and silently, we walked along the four walls of a meditation room, focusing full attention on the simple act of walking, and not thinking of anything else.
I also performed simple tasks at the Zen Center, silently, with full attention. One task was to dust the meditation room. I went to each of the little meditation cubicles with a small duster, and silently dusted the sitting area and the walls.
These mindfulness exercises had a marked effect on the quality of my daily meditation. My meditation was deeper and more concentrated because of extended periods of practicing mindfulness.
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Long-distance runners sometimes share their experience of focusing only on their bodies, with few other thoughts, and the resulting surge of happiness and contentment they feel. This is mindfulness.
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One morning I took a 20-minute walk in my neighborhood and tried to be mindful the entire time. I allowed the sights, smells, and sounds to fill my awareness, to the point where I had no room left for thought. I remember walking past a neighbor’s house and seeing Mexican Sage on the strip between the sidewalk and the street. The color of the flowers was a brilliant purple. As I walked further, I noticed the beauty of the little brown leaves that had fallen with the coming of autumn.
Mindfulness of the Emotions
You can be mindful and aware of your emotions as they occur. Are you happy, sad, anxious, or peaceful? Mindfulness of the emotions involves noticing your emotions without judging them and without them catching you and drawing you in. You let your emotions be, and they let you be. If you begin to have thoughts about your emotions, just let the thoughts be. Simply be mindful of your thoughts, without allowing them to disturb you.
Mindfulness of the Mind
The nature of the mind is to talk. It talks to itself, talks to us, and talks to no one. To be mindful of the mind is to notice this constant chatter without it drawing you in and without judging it. By remaining aware of the mind’s chatter, without it drawing you in, you can notice that its thoughts are just thoughts, and cannot control you.
Mindfulness of Dissatisfaction
In Appendix 3, where I discuss Buddhism, I talk about human dissatisfaction with the way things are. As you “go about your business” in the world, you can be mindful of the pervasive nature of dissatisfaction. You can be mindful of how dissatisfied you are with what happens in life.
Waking Up
Learning to be mindful and seeing things as they are is a lot like waking up from a dream. Most of us walk around with our attention trapped in our minds. As you will find in Chapter 4, we are not present here and now. Much of the time, we must keep attention in the mind. The mind carries within it an image of the world in which we live. To navigate the world, we need to focus on that image. It is like our internal map (or GPS) and guidebook to reality. But it is not the real world. It is an image of the world, and it enables us to move around in reality.
Living like this is a little like sleepwalking through life. Because we are not fully present in the world, we keep seeing and feeling the same things repeatedly. At times, we feel good, at times bad, but we keep experiencing the same good or bad feelings, replayed repeatedly. Living like this can make us dull, and can make life dull.
As you practice mindfulness, you can begin to wake up. When you do, you will find that life is a lot more interesting. You may also find that you have the power to be happy, without anything changing in your life. Living in the moment lets you tap into the natural happiness that is available to you. You can escape from the patterns of thinking and feeling that prevent you from finding happiness in the here and now.
The Continuous Experience of “Now”
Mindfulness is the continuous experience of each successive moment. It is the continuous experience of “now.” Your awareness is in the present when you are mindful. No part of your mind is thinking of something that is not here right now. No part of your mind is remembering something. No part of your mind is judging or criticizing or even evaluating the merit of what is happening right now.
As each new moment arises, you are present in that moment. You do not focus on the moment before, and you are not worrying about the moment to come. You focus your complete attention on each moment, as it presents itself to you.
The Power of the Moment
There is power in the moment. If you are mindful of the moment, you are free of the past and not straining to see into the future. You hover in the instant with the power to choose. You harness the power to choose by being present in the current moment. There is no such power if you focus on remembering the past, worrying about the future, or on anything that is not right here and right now.
Being mindful is finding what Viktor Frankl called the space between the stimulus and response. You can even make that space larger. If you are mindful, your responses are less likely to be automatic and unthinking. An automatic response to something closes the space to choose before you even know it exists. If you are mindful, and do not respond automatically, you find the space to choose. You may even hold that space open until you decide the best way to respond.
The power to choose, which you cultivate and strengthen through mindfulness and meditation, is the most powerful ability that you have. With that power, you can choose happiness.
A Continuous State of Happiness
Mindfulness can be a continuous state of happiness. When you are mindful of what is happening right now, this allows your natural state of happiness to arise. It arises because you do not let your attention focus on the many unfulfilled desires that cause dissatisfaction with life. When nothing is happening that prevents you from being mindful, you can stay happy indefinitely.
Self-Criticism, Self-Judging and Self-Praising
We comment on ourselves, all the time. We carry a little image of ourselves in our minds that we can, by turns, judge, criticize, and abuse, as well as aggrandize and embellish. Often while we’re doing something, we simultaneously see a little picture of ourselves doing it as well. It may be a pathetic little thing when it appears, or, at the other end of the spectrum, it may seem earthshakingly grandiose. In any case, our self-image is distracting and distorted - it is what we have made up about ourselves.
The mind grabs ahold of these images and starts torturing or praising us for what we did — whether wrong, or superlatively right. We are likely to replay in our minds images of what we did. We may fuss and worry about how we did what we did. Even if we performed admirably, our worry about future behavior can taint any fleeting satisfaction. We may replay conversations in our mind, cringing at what we said, and kicking ourselves for what we did not say.
Psychologists refer to the human tendency to self-judge and criticize as rumination. Rumination is compelling. The mind gives us reasons for fretting for hours, pouring over all of our faults, or threats to our self-image. Rumination is very destructive. The more we worry about our faults, the worse they will appear.[85]
To be mindful, try to avoid self-judging and self-praising. When you feel yourself starting to criticize or flatter your ego, tell yourself to come back to the moment. Fill your mind with the moment. Do something that takes your attention away from beating up on or inflating yourself.
Negative Self-Consciousness
To be self-conscious in a negative sense is to be uncomfortable, nervous, or embarrassed about how we think others see us. To be self-conscious about how others may see us is another form of judging or criticizing ourselves. Here, however, we do it through the eyes of others. Going through life in this way can be a constant torment.
Unless people tell us what they think of us, we cannot know how they see us. What we imagine are the thoughts of other people are just our own thoughts, projected onto them. We do not know what others think of us. The sensations we feel come mainly from our minds, not from other people. This is not to say we cannot intuit what others think about us. Obviously we can. However, what we get from intuition is mixed with our own fears, emotions, egoism and memories. We rely on intuition because we often must do so, but it is not the truth of how people think of us.
To be mindful is to shut off self-judgment and self-criticism, including the imaginary criticism (or praise) of others.
Mindfulness and Negative Thoughts
As previously discussed in the chapter on how we experience the world, our body-minds evolved to keep us alive in a once hostile environment. The world is much safer now, but our body-minds, have not let down their guard. Perceived threats may include dangers that currently exist, may exist in the future, or are simply memories of old injuries. To protect us, our minds allow negative thoughts about these threats to rise to the top. Our minds have a bias to notice and respond to the negative in life before thinking about the positive.
Mindfulness offsets the mind’s tendency toward negative thoughts and allows you to stay in touch with happiness while you are moving about in the world. Mindfulness minimizes the hold that negative thoughts have on you.
Dropping Out of Mindfulness
Periodically, the mind can capture the attention and pull us out of mindfulness. Dropping out of mindfulness and being stuck in our minds is like falling down the fabled rabbit hole. When our thoughts and worries narrow our focus, we are not attending to what is happening right now, and we become subject to whatever we find. Many of our thoughts come from emotionally charged memories. These charges are what draw us to them.
With practice, you can learn to notice when you are no longer being mindful. You can learn to return to mindfulness and spiritual happiness. In addition, even if what pulls you out of mindfulness is an event that is unpleasant, you may be able to preserve some degree of mindfulness. If you can remain even a little mindful, you can lessen the pain of the event. As a mindful person, you have a frame of mind that lets you know, “This too will pass.”
Escape from the Labyrinth
The labyrinth of Greek legend was an impossibly complex maze of passages. One could just walk out if one knew the way. However, it was built so cleverly that it served as a prison for the Minotaur.
The mind is also complex. It is a maze of thoughts and emotions that most of the time traps the attention, and prevents it from escaping to find happiness.
When our thoughts and emotions capture our attention, our vision of the world is subject to the distortions of the mind. If we are lost in our thoughts and emotions, we are in the labyrinth. We are also subject to the mind’s negative bias and its mistaken beliefs about how to find happiness.
To find happiness, you need to free your attention from your mind’s grasp. In freeing your attention, you gain the power to look for happiness in a new way.
Mindfulness frees your attention. It does this by filling your awareness with all of your immediate sensations of “now.” You are no longer looking out at the world from deep within the labyrinth. You are quieting your mind and looking at the world directly. In this quiet, you find the freedom to control your attention. You find the freedom to be happy.
Body Mindfulness Meditation
Here is a meditation that explores mindfulness of the body. We examine meditation in detail in the next chapter, so you may want to take a look at that chapter before doing this meditation.
Sit or lie down in a meditative posture in a quiet place. If you are comfortable doing so, close your eyes. Otherwise you can leave them open. Whether your eyes are open or closed, allow your gaze to be unfocused. Take three or four deep breaths to relax. Once you are relaxed, focus on what your body physically feels. Notice the feel of the air on your skin, the surface on which you are sitting or lying, and any sensations within your body. What you want to do is be mindful of your sense of feeling and touch while remaining still. After spending a few minutes focusing on your sense of feeling and touch, direct your attention to what you hear. For a few minutes be mindful of only the sounds around you and within you. Then turn your awareness to what you see. Allow yourself to be aware of what comes to you through your unfocused gaze, even if your eyes are closed. Now switch to your sense of smell. Be mindful of the fragrances or odors, regardless of how subtle, which come to you. Next, explore your sense of taste. Be mindful of the taste sensations within your mouth. Just be aware of them without moving your mouth or tongue. Last, be aware of your thoughts and emotions. Spend a few minutes being mindful of what you are thinking and what you are feeling emotionally. When you are finished, start over: feeling, hearing, sight, smell, taste and thought.
Cycle through your six senses a few more times. Then, when you are ready, start over, but this time do not let go of one sense when you turn to another. For example, after you spend time with feeling, ADD hearing, then seeing etc. Try to be mindful of all six senses at once. Here, the challenge is to allow a sense impression to come into awareness, without focusing on that sense. The mind will find it difficult to focus on more than one sense at a time; however, if you just allow yourself to be aware of each new sense, without letting go of the other, you may find yourself expanding your mindful awareness to include each new sense as it arises. Do not fret if you cannot experience all senses at once. Whatever comes into mindful awareness is enough.
One way that I practice this meditation is by listening to a recording of Tibetan bowls. The one I like is by Karma Moffet, called “Golden Bowls.” In a meditative posture, with my eyes closed, I try to sense the sounds with full awareness — what they feel like, sound like, look like, and how they smell and taste. I then observe the thoughts that come up. After cycling through all six senses, I allow myself to experience them with all of my senses at once. In this full bodied listening, sometimes sound is featured in awareness, sometimes feeling, sometimes thought. I allow what comes into awareness to be there, while staying with the moment-to-moment awareness of the singing bowls.