Mindfulness is about choosing to pay attention to what’s happening right now and accepting things as they actually are. It’s something that you can apply to almost everything you do. You can eat mindfully, converse mindfully, move mindfully, shop mindfully, drive mindfully, have sex mindfully. All it means is that you’re fully present for whatever it is that you are doing.
Are you with me? Because Lord knows, there’s been enough written on the subject of mindfulness. Most of it makes mindfulness sound like Mensa: a club for people capable of reciting 200 digits of pi. Impressive, but dreadfully boring and out of reach for mere mortals.
Often mindfulness is touted as a way to rewire your brain so that you can become a machine of productivity and calm. These might be happy byproducts of mindfulness, but its true value is that it helps you to feel more alive and discover what’s really here—inside and all around you. It doesn’t make you into something better, it simply awakens you to who you already are.
Let’s talk about what mindfulness isn’t.
Mindfulness isn’t blocking out distractions. Not only is this impossible, but it is actually unhelpful. You want to open your awareness, not narrow it. Your sensations, feelings and thoughts have important messages for you. If you wall them off or ignore them, you will limit your perception. You will miss important information: a faint whisper that something is wrong, a pale spark of inspiration, an intuition about which path to take.
Mindfulness isn’t mind control. The mind is like a river—sometimes meandering, sometimes gushing. You can’t control it. You will get carried away by the flow of thoughts in your head and miss what is in front of you sometimes. This goes with the territory of being human. You can’t stop the flow, but you can learn how to recognize when you’re getting carried away before you’ve gone very far. Then you can make a choice to redirect your attention with a quality of gentleness.
Mindfulness isn’t harsh. If you yank your attention around like a donkey on a short rope, you will get a stubborn, closed mind. Gentleness creates a free, open mind.
Mindfulness isn’t passive. It’s about choosing. Choosing where to direct your attention and choosing how to respond. Being mindful doesn’t mean that you don’t yell. Shouting at the top of your lungs might be the appropriate response for the situation. A different situation might call for asking a thoughtful question or stepping away.
Mindfulness isn’t magic. It might have moments that feel like magic. Simply immersing yourselves in the present will make you feel more grounded and even-tempered. That can be pretty surprising. But mindfulness won’t give you special powers. It will give you clarity that’s already in your reach. You will see what is there rather than what you hoped was there or what you think ought to be there.
Mindfulness isn’t an intellectual exercise. It’s a full-bodied experience. It’s not about analyzing or evaluating, although that has its place. Mindfulness is about perceiving, feeling and choosing.
Mindfulness isn’t beyond your reach. You had many mindful experiences in your life. Moments where you were fully present and curious. No doubt, your childhood was full of them and you can probably remember some quite vividly. Every moment is an opportunity for you to be mindful to it. It’s a choice you make, a habit that you can develop, more than a skill you need to learn.
Mindfulness is a choice to experience the present moment fully. We recommend it not because it will make you smarter or more effective (it might) or because there’s something wrong with you if you don’t (there isn’t), but because there’s a gift for you in each moment.
Mindfulness can open you to your inner wisdom. It can help you to identify the various inner voices that speak to you and gain understanding about where they are coming from (spoiler: it might not be what you think).
Tool: Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation practice is a shower for the mind. We take a shower to rinse off the sweat of the day and start fresh. We generally feel better afterwards. It doesn’t have to take long and once we’re in the habit of it, we can’t imagine our day without it.
There are many different forms of meditation. The Buddhists, yogis and Desert Fathers of early Christianity each designed meditation practices to help cultivate a calm and present mind so that its powers can be put to good rather than squandered.
Not all meditation builds mindfulness. Just as different types of physical exercise build different muscles and capacities (e.g. rock climbing vs. dance vs. soccer), different types of meditation develop different aspects of the mind.
Loving-kindness meditation is especially helpful for enhancing compassion and self-compassion.
Visualizations help open the mind to its own wisdom
Mantra meditations are typically used to relax the mind.
Zen koan meditation trains the mind to open to reality beyond thought by presenting riddles that intellectual reasoning cannot solve.
Mindfulness meditation (also known as Vipassana meditation and Insight meditation) trains the mind to pay attention mindfully. It’s a practice that’s designed to exercise the key elements: opening awareness and directing attention.
Most of us don’t work out so that we can win deadlifting competitions. We go to the gym so that we can be strong in life. Likewise, meditation is something we do so that we have the capacity to tap into mindful awareness when we need it.
Just as regular physical movement changes the body, research is showing that mindfulness meditation actually changes the brain. A Harvard-led team at Massachusetts General Hospital studied participants in an eight-week mindfulness mediation program.
The study showed that aside from the relaxation and stress-reduction benefits reported by the participants, the brain structure itself changed. Regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress showed signs of strengthening.
Starting a meditation practice is a bit like taking up running. You know it’s good for you, but it’s not something you look forward to because it won’t feel good right away. You’ll have a much better experience and success if you start small. You wouldn’t run a marathon out of the gate, you’d start with a 10 minute run. Likewise, don’t start with a 30-minute meditation. You can get tremendous benefit by doing just five minutes a day and building the habit. It’s much more valuable to do five minutes every day than 35 minutes once a week.
If your mind is jumpy (which is to be expected), you might be tempted to think you are “just no good” at mindfulness meditation. We hear this a lot. You sit down to meditate and within two breaths your mind has wandered off. Noticing is cause for celebration, but you might be more likely to beat yourself up.
Jack Kornfield likens mindfulness training to puppy training in his seminal book on mindfulness, The Path with Heart. “We put the puppy down and say, ‘Sit. Stay.’ What does it do? It gets up and runs around. ‘Stay.’ It turns around again. Twenty times, ‘Stay.’ After a while, slowly, the puppy settles down. Through practice, gently and gradually we can collect ourselves and learn how to be more fully where we are.”
There are lots of books and even apps that can help you develop a meditation practice. In our experience, we find that it’s best to learn how to meditate from a “flesh and blood” teacher who can answer your questions and help deal with common obstacles.
Don’t forget that the objective of mindfulness meditation is to pay attention to the present moment without judgement. It is not to turn off your mind.
When I first started meditating, I was determined to develop a laser-like and unwavering focus that silenced all distractions. I tried to achieve a state of “not thinking.” At some point, it dawned on me that being at war with my mind was not helping and that there was never going to be a day when my mind would stop wandering. In fact, even after 25 years of meditating, my mind can still be as active as when I first started.
Mindful Body Scan
Here is a very simple mindfulness practice that you can do anywhere, anytime. It will help you get in touch with your body and return to the present moment.
Direct your attention to the top of your head. Slowly scan your attention down your body to your neck, arms and hands, back up to your shoulders, down your torso and legs, all the way down to the feet. Connect with each place on your body with curiosity and gentleness. You are running your mind’s eye over your body to see what sensations are present and welcome the wisdom they have for you.
Just paying attention will awaken sensations: tingling, warmth, tension, pulsing. It’s all good.
As we learn to receive the body's information, however uncomfortable it might be, we find that we can more easily let go of what we are partial to think and ultimately arrive at a more accurate conception about the situations, one that is less disguised by our biases. Over time, we develop a more flexible way of seeing the circumstances we face, one that is less informed by past models, and more consistent with a here-and-now reality.
When you learn to work with the tension that you hold in your body, you also work with your mind. You body contracts to protect itself
When something happens that contradicts the reality we want to believe, the body habitually contracts as a way of protecting us. By non-judgmentally feeling the contraction, we face the thing that we naturally turn away from. By turning toward it, we are able then to accept the information, however, contradictory it may be with our beliefs or assumptions.