What Happens When You Mind What The Mind Minds
What We Are Talking about When We Talk about Mindfulness: Let’s start with the first question: What is mindfulness? The definition of mindfulness that seems to resonate most within the movement—just typing in the whole definition into Google resulted in 15,400 hits—is one that Kabat-Zinn coined, almost in passing, in the first pages of his 1994 book Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way:
On purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. Maybe an example will help to show what is meant by this. The author of that 2014 Time Magazine’s cover story, Kate Pickert, opens her article with a
description of a popular beginner’s mindfulness exercise—how to eat a raising mindfully: The raisins sitting in my sweaty palm are getting stickier by the min-ute. They don’t look particularly appealing, but when instructed by my teacher, I take one in my fingers and examine it. I notice that the raisin’s skin glistens. Looking closer, I see a small indentation where it once hung from the vine. Eventually, I place the raisin in my mouth and roll the wrinkly little shape over and over with my tongue, feeling its texture.
Ms. Pickert is eating the raisin, and while she does so, she is paying attention to its visual appearance, its texture, the sensations of its skin bursting open under the pressure of her teeth, the tiny explosion of taste enveloping her mouth, the muscle contractions of swallowing, the aromatic lingerings.
She pays attention to this on purpose—unlike most of the time when we snack and just pop the food into our mouths, she pays attention to every step of the process, deliberately slowing everything down. She does this in the present moment—this is all that fills her awareness—she is not doing anything else, and she lets no memories of raisins past or hankerings for (or maybe fears of) raisins future disrupt her communion with only and precisely this raisin, right here, right now. Finally, she does this nonjudgmentally—she is not comparing the raisin with any other raisin, or any other food, and she is not letting herself be swayed by likes or dislikes for the raisin’s appear-ance, texture, or taste; Ms. Pickert just is with the raisin.
Put yourself in her place. When you are eating a raisin mindfully, there are just two things in the universe: you and the raisin. Maybe there is just one, actually: you—seeing, touching, chewing, tasting, swallowing.
In a very simple way, we can define mindfulness as actually being present in/for whatever it is you are doing, without letting your judging mind (Is this good or bad? Do I like or dislike this?) interfere. If you are listening to Bach, just listen to Bach; if you are dancing to Girl Talk, just dance to Girl Talk; if you are cooking, just cook; if you are sweeping, sweep. To be fully present. That is mindfulness.
This does not mean that every moment of your life should be lived non-judgmentally in the present moment. Stuff needs to get done, so you need to plan; you might want to revisit that fight with your spouse to see how you can do better next time; and—on a grander scale—social or personal change isn’t possible without a critical eye filled with wisdom. What mind-fulness teachers are saying is that it is good to have mindfulness as a tool in your toolbox, to be used when appropriate or opportune.
Part of life’s wisdom is figuring out—that is judgment, or discernment, right there what that appropriate or opportune moment is, and noticing when you have missed it. And then, nonjudgmentally, remind yourself not to miss it next time.
A MINDFUL MIND IS A HAPPY MIND
Why be mindful?: One simple and smartly selfish answer is that being present in the moment is associated with happiness, and happiness is one of those things most living beings are quite interested in. You can see this on a small scale: actually tast-ing a good piece of chocolate or a nice mouthful of wine, actually getting an earful of your favorite music, with full concentration, makes you enjoy it (or maybe even life) even more.
Let’s widen this up a bit. In a groundbreaking but very simple study, Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert had more than 2,000 people from 83 different countries download an app on their iPhones. The app beeped people at random times during the day, asking them three questions: “How are you feeling right now?” (on a sliding scale from 0 [very bad] to 100[ very good]), “What are you doing right now?” (pick one or more from a list of 22 activities), and “Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” (no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; yes, something unpleasant).
A first finding was that, generally speaking and as you would expect, some activities made people quite happy (in descending order of happiness: making love, exercising, talking, listening to music, and taking a walk), while others not so much (in descending order of unhappiness: sleep or rest - maybe because the beeps woke you up?—working, being at your home com-puter, commuting, and grooming).
Another finding was that people’s minds wandered a lot: On average, people were not with the task 47% of the time. Unexpectedly, the activity people were doing did not have much bearing on whether their mind wandered or not (the one exception was making love—people like to be present for that).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when people were daydreaming, their mind most often strayed to pleasant topics (42% of the time). You might be tempted to think they were doing this to escape the unhappiness of their present circumstances, but the interesting finding was that people were no happier thinking about pleasant topics than they were when they were simply present with their current activity. And, even more important, how people were feeling was much more related to their level of mindfulness than to the actual activity they were supposed to be engaged in. As the authors state it: “People were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not, and this was true during all activities, including the least enjoyable.” It really feels better to just be there.
In general, then, a mindful mind—or at least a mind that is present for the experience it is having—is a happy mind. (Killingsworth and Gilbert—in what may have been a moment of absent-mindedness—titled their paper with the negative conclusion: A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.)
This post raises an important question: If a mindful mind is a happy mind, why aren’t we simply mindful all the time? Why do we naturally stray away from this most rudimentary, uncomplicated form of happiness?
The simple answer is that we don’t know why we do that. In the next chap-ter, I discuss the finding that our mind, when asked to be at ease, does nothing of the sort but instead becomes restless and flits from association to association. Buddhist teachers call this “monkey mind”—just like a monkey swings from one branch to the next, lets go, then grabs another branch, lets go again and grasps for another branch, and so on, our minds tend to just go with whatever mental flow is flowing. It’s human. It’s what we do. In fact, we have a whole network of the brain—the default-mode network—dedicated to just that: to daydream or mind wander (or, as neuroscientists like to call it, “to engage in task-unrelated thought,” or—my favorite—“mental time travel”). But why that is, what deeper evolutionary origins can explain our mental rest-lessness, is an open question. I would assume—but I don’t know—that part of our restlessness has helped us, as a species, with survival: We’re forever pondering our mistakes so we don’t need to repeat them, and we’re forever wondering what lies behind the next hill, so that we actually get going, out into the world.
TRAINING MINDFULNESS
A quick look around you will teach you that people differ greatly in their ability to be in the moment. Psychologists have called this ability “trait mindfulness”; in the past decade or so, quite a number of questionnaires have been designed to tap this quality.12Typical questions to measure trait mindfulness are: “I watch my feelings without getting lost in them,” “When I take a shower or bath, I stay alert to the sensations of water on my body,” “I pay attention to how my emotions affect my thoughts and behavior,” “In difficult situations, I can pause without immediately reacting,” “I am aware of what thoughts are passing through my mind,” “When I do things, I get totally wrapped up in them and don’t think about anything else,” or the opposite of “I rush through activities without being really attentive to them,” and “I break or spill things because of being careless, not paying attention, or thinking of something else.”
Kabat-Zinn’s insight was that although mindfulness may be a trait—a knack that certain people possess and others don’t—it is also very much a skill that can be learned, and thus taught, and that acquiring it would be very useful in people’s daily life. For Kabat-Zinn “useful” means what Killingsworth and Gilbert showed—that being mindful can make us happier or, in Kabat-Zinn’s more Buddhist terms, that mindfulness can relieve suffering; that is, it can make you feel less stressed, less anxious, less depressed, more open, more content, more joyful.
This is not a new or original idea. Kabat-Zinn’s work can be read—in fact he does so himself14—as an adaptation of Buddhist principles and techniques to modern Western concerns. Pickert sees this as a first example of smart marketing on Kabat-Zinn’s part (we’ll get to the second one in the next section): He avoids any talk of spirituality, which would be off-putting to many, but emphasizes that mindful attention is like a muscle—it can be trained. The goal is not to reach some nirvana but to become a little more present, a little less stressed, a little happier—a small, modest, gradual form of awakening: awakening to what you have been missing, to who you are, and to what life is all about.
How do you train your mind to do this?
Kabat-Zinn was not naïve; by the time he had his vision, he was exqui-sitely proficient in quite a number of contemplative techniques. He had been practicing Zen for 13 years; he was a yoga teacher; he had been director of the Cambridge Zen Center; he was a teacher-in-training under the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn. He had also been extensively trained within the Theravāda tradition, he was in fact attending a Theravāda retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, when inspiration struck.
All these traditions rely extensively on meditation as a tool to gain mindfulness, and when Kabat-Zinn started to build his own program, he freely borrowed techniques from each of those traditions.
Except for yoga, all of these traditions trace themselves back to the historical Buddha—teachings that are about 2,500 years old. One of the techniques the Buddha taught extensively16 was to build a foundation of mindfulness by becoming aware of, first, the body, in particular the breath and the posture; second, of sensations and feelings; third, of the current state of awareness; and, finally, of that what is held in awareness. In the Buddhist tradition, a steady focus on the breath—merely observing, without intervening, while suspending both your judgment and your potential urge to conceptualize, and without reacting to whatever comes up in the mind in the process—has remained one of the prime teaching tools for basic meditation. Meditation is the laboratory, so to speak, in which you learn to develop mindfulness, first by observing it as it occurs (or rather, in the early stages, by observing the seething of its absence), then by deliberatively cultivating it.
Note that because MBSR and other such programs are derived from Buddhism, they have also inherited some of the lingo. To meditate is often called “to sit”; a meditation session itself can be called “a sit.” A meditator is sometimes called “a yogi.” What you do to foster your mindfulness is often called “the practice”; this term can also be applied more narrowly, so that meditating is also called “practicing.” I personally like this concept, because of its inherent double meaning in English—you practice mindfulness both like a musician practices the piano (if you’ve been meditating for a while, you know that there is definitely artistry involved, and no end in sight) and like a doctor practices medicine (with diligence, aplomb, and selflessness).
Comments
Post a Comment