Mindfulness/ Awareness

A Brief Introduction to Mindfulness

Defining the problem: we get stuck in moods of depression, anxiety, anger, apathy, guilt, or other uncomfortable internal places, and we don’t know how we got there, and we don’t know how to get out of them again.

The nature of this: we are creatures of a) automatic thinking/feeling reactions and b) conditioning. There are a lot of benefits to both. An easy to see example of automatic thinking is what we do behind the wheel. We spend the laborious process of learning to drive by reading the driver’s manual, and taking lots of practice drives. But once we have learned and established the good habits of driving, much of this continues on auto-pilot. Conditioning is the notion that we develop powerful associations between certain sights, sounds, smells, textures, and times with thoughts, feelings, and actions. The holidays are a good example. Most of us love them or hate them, and these strong feelings are due to the “conditioning” of past associations of those feelings with all of the sensory delights vs. overload of the holidays. For those of us that love them (or love the power of the smell of freshly brewed coffee on a wintry morning or love the hopefulness of seeing the first crocuses pushing up in spring), part of the richness of these experiences is our capacity to bring the richness of our past to these current experiences. Conditioned responses are not always a bad thing. We rely upon conditioned responses to fall off to sleep at night even if we have had a hard, anxious day. But we are all conditioned to quite negative feeling states and commonly refer to this as being “triggered” by something from our past. Lots of these sudden difficult moods that we fall into “out of nowhere” are simply triggered/conditioned moods from our past that are being triggered on an unconscious level. Between our automatic thinking and our conditioned responses, we often do not fully appreciate how little of our thinking and feeling is under our control. An easy experiment: try to spend 5 minutes concentrating on one thing without letting your mind wander. It’s hard! Automatic thinking kicks in pretty quickly. Automatic thought and conditioned responses are huge driving forces in our “stuck” moods.

Mindfulness is: the name of a variety of ways of being and thinking that is about pushing back against automatic thought and becoming aware of conditioned responses. One way to think of mindfulness is to notice how much the past and the future intrude into the present. People have estimated that when under stress we spend more than 95% of our thoughts on the past (regretting it, judging ourselves or others harshly for the events that have left us in these uncomfortable circumstances) or the future (worrying about it, imagining that these uncomfortable experiences are going to continue forever). Mindfulness is simply the things we do to bring ourselves back to being in this moment, bringing awareness to being: just here, just now, just this. We are all already doing some mindfulness practices to promote this. We just might not call it that. “Recreation” (re-creation) activities are essentially mindfulness activities. What we mean by “taking a break”, “getting away”, or “having fun” is to engage in an activity where we have much greater likelihood of “letting go” of work, pain, and worries and accomplishing “being in the moment.” Gardening and playing games are easy examples of kinds of mindfulness activities. The gardener is “grounded” in the moment, one plucked weed at a time, one planted flower after another. The game “holds” us in the moment of one card after another in solitaire or one “play” after another in a video game. Less obvious mindfulness activities are the powers of riding a Harley, fast, on a twisting road for being in the moment. The feel of the elements combined with the risk of spilling the bike combine powerfully to anchor a person in the moment. I worked with a veteran with severe PTSD who interrupted our conversation about mindfulness to tell me he knew all about this: “That’s what I do when I reload ammunition.” Come again, I said. “Well, sure. I have all of these flashbacks, you know, but my hands seem to know something that my brain does not: if I don’t keep concentrated on one shell after the other, I’ll blow my hands off. Reloading is the only thing I can do that brings me peace. I’ve never had a flashback while reloading.” I’m not making a general recommendation for people to take up reloading, but he was right: this is mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a kind of perspective and awareness that is at the heart of this poem by Mary Oliver:

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, "Stay awhile." The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say, "and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."

The “practice” of mindfulness: pursuing mindfulness through endless vacations, constant ammunition reloading, retiring to the garden, or daily long walks in the trees are not options for most of us. There are ways to train the brain to concentrate and thereby reduce automatic thinking and conditioned responses. People have been “practicing” (as in both “utilizing” but also “practice makes perfect”) these techniques for thousands of years. In some traditions this is called “yoga”, in others “prayer”, in others “meditation.” What these have in common is the setting aside of time to make space for “being” rather than our usual state of “doing.” One does not need to “believe” in anything to practice mindfulness. On the other hand, for those with Beliefs, it is easy to incorporate these into one’s mindfulness practice.

How to get started: a body-scan is a great mindfulness practice to begin with. This involves finding 10 minutes in which one finds a comfortable sitting posture or a comfortable lying down position and simply brings one’s attention to the breath. The breath is a powerful tool for concentration for several reasons. Like the semi-automatic thought, breathing is a semi-automatic process. We do not will each thought; we do not will each breath. Most of both just happen. But on need, we can hold our breath, let it go with a sigh, or take a deep, long, fresh breath to start us on a new path. For some advanced meditators, they can be successful with simply focusing on the breath. On our way to get there (if this seems to be where you feel called to go), making a concession to these brains that wander like a puppy being trained on a leash can be a kind place to begin. So a body scan calls us to “breathe” into one body part after another, bringing our concentration and attention to one part after another. Commonly, we start with the toes, breathing in relaxation to this area, exhaling tension; breathing in a noticing of whether the toes are cramped, cold, clammy; breathing out a letting go of any impulse to change them or judge them. This is about acceptance of what is, not a time to plan a new “toe improvement program”! After several breaths of “being with the toes” we let go of this area and bring our attention to the bottoms of our feet, breathing in relaxation, healing, and awareness to this area. After several breaths, we let go of the soles of the feet and breath into the heels, tops of our feet, calves, knees, thighs, etc, from toes to the tops of our heads. This is somewhat arbitrary practice. One could choose other things to concentrate upon. Some do. But many of us will be able to quickly learn a “relaxation” response with this particular form of mindfulness, and given that most of us are “results oriented”, getting some relatively quick positive feedback for our efforts is a good thing. Something to notice with the body-scan: it involves a brain practice of “letting go” every few breaths as we adjust our attention from one body part to the next. This ends up being a quite good practice for our later efforts in “letting go” of certain feeling states. Do not be surprised or discouraged to find that your mind has wandered off to the things needing doing, to the thoughts/feelings we are “stuck in.” This is what these brains or our do! And this does not mean that you are failing in your mindfulness practice. It means you are normal. Simply allow yourself to come to the realization that your mind has wandered. Notice where it went. Breathe awareness and acceptance into the intrusive thought, without judging it, without responding to our desire to get up and “do” something about it, without attempting to change it in any way. Just breath in awareness. And after it is known fully in this present moment, let it go as you return to where you ended up leaving off in the body scan.

YouTube Resources: Jon Kabat-Zinn has been one of those who have “medicalized” mindfulness (stripped the practice of most of its religious roots and proven through the scientific method that these practices are helpful in the reduction of stress hormones, improving healing, decreasing pain, etc.) to make it more approachable to all. There are dozens of videos on YouTube that will pop up with simply putting in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s name. Some of these come and go. But currently, the specific recommendations below are available and hopefully helpful.

Videos for an overview: (place the title in the YouTube search engine to find the video)

- “Life is right now - Jon Kabat-Zinn on Mindfulness” (7 minutes)

- “How Can Mindfulness Change Your Life Jon Kabat Zinn” (24 minutes, lots of testimonials)

Videos for jumping straight into a mindfulness “practice”:

- “Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn” (a guided body-scan meditation. He has a long, general preamble explanation of some of the attitudes of mindfulness that takes up the first 6:30 of the 27 minute video. After listening to this once, if time is limited, one can skip to the 6:30 mark and take it from there. Generally, we want to set ourselves up for success. Simply taking 10 minutes for our first “practices” of mindfulness is a good place to start. So setting a timer for 10 minutes and just going as far as this makes a good beginning).

- “Jon Kabat-Zinn - Body Scan Meditation - GUIDED MEDITATION” (a 45 minute body scan. Something to work up to! We get out of mindfulness what we put into it. It is like a good diet and exercise. Having some vegetables with dinner is a good thing, even if the rest of the meal is processed junk; walking the stairs to the appointment rather than taking the elevator is a good thing, even if it is the only exercise we get for the day. But it is hard to notice much overall improvement in our weight or endurance if these small efforts are all we do. Still, we need to start someplace! So we start with what we can manage with our mindfulness practice while having some notion of where we are heading in order to take full advantage of our good intentions).

Books: For those of us lacking access to the world-wide-web, ordering resources from a local book-store can be a way forward.

Looking at Mindfulness, Christophe Andre. My all-time favorite book on awareness training/mindfulness. The chapters are 5-10 minute reads. A wonderful overview of 25 different contents and qualities of consciousness to savor and attend to.

Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn. This is his first book, there are lots out there (so if you know of someone with a computer who will order this for you, you can get a hard-bound copy for $1 + shipping), and even new it costs only $16. The heart of the book is in the first 145 pages.

Mindfulness for Beginners CD, Jon Kabat-Zinn. $20 new. This is a 2+ hour CD of various guided meditations, quite helpful for getting started in a mindfulness practice and getting a feel for it. Be careful, there is a book of the same title (likely also good, but if you are looking for a guided meditation CD, you will be disappointed!).

Awareness Training Videos on Dr. Brown’s website! These are very much about mindfulness work.

The point: Mindfulness practice is simply a tool for getting out of automatic thought, automatic/stuck feelings, automatic life and making more space for being fully present in our lives. It is comparable to exercise. In exercising in a concentrated period of time (our work-out), we train our bodies for endurance and strength to meets the physical demands of our lives all the rest of the day. It is like diet: we spend concentrated time shopping/preparing/eating a good diet so that our bodies are nourished and not bloated by excess all the rest of our hours. In a mindfulness practice, we spend concentrated time training the brain to a way of living through all the rest of our hours, a way of awareness, of acceptance, and of compassion. We “recondition” our brains to find the peace and joy inherent in the preciousness of our existence in this moment if we can just “wake up” to it.