The Power of Practice

Recently I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. We had planned to walk and talk on the seafront but a high wind made this difficult, so we headed one block inland and found a table outside a busy café-bar.

We both wanted a mug of black tea but the place served only pomegranate tea, which arrived after much delay in small glass cups. By this point, I had picked up from our conversation the extent of the difficulties and frustrations that had beset my friend through the pandemic, such as family problems and ill-health.

What particularly irked him, he confessed, was how his formal meditation practice had also broken down. His longstanding commitment to sit daily, or at least regularly, had buckled under the strain of events and tumbled, along with his mood, into a downward spiral. The last straw was not being able to attend a residential retreat that had been called off because of the lockdown.

I felt bad for my friend, struggling as he was with adversity and loss and knowing how important mindfulness practice was for him. Life can be such a pain, I thought. The wind whistled around us and I began to feel cold. The boozy drinkers nearby grew louder and, it seemed, more abrasive in tone. I wanted to get away. My glass of pomegranate tea looked so puny and my friend, his eyes cast downwards, so lost in his circumstances. I wished we had gone walking on the seafront after all.

Sweet Sufficiency

We sat on in silence. Then he lifted his head and told me something he had recently realised. Throughout his years of practice he had often wrestled with the language of renunciation due to its implication of quitting and spurning things. It also bothered him that it encouraged a certain fixation on the very object or behaviour that is relinquished.

Recent events, however, had offered him a deeper, truer understanding of renunciation – one that is about things being sufficient and acceptable just as they are. “This is enough,” explained my friend, sweeping his hand in the air as if scattering seeds in a field, and referring to, well, everything. All of it. It dawned on me, as I huddled in my chair, bracing against the wind and sipping lukewarm tea through pinched lips, that my friend was just fine despite his circumstances. If anyone, it was me who was resisting the conditions of the moment.

He went on to tell me more about discovering new reserves of equanimity and poise in life. It was a glimpse of how the residue of his years of practice allowed his appreciation for life and natural wisdom to flourish regardless of what was going on. This is the power of mindfulness, one that leads to no barriers for attention, where nothing is excluded or clung to, and where every experience, no matter how taxing, holds the potential for insight.

Grand Narratives (III)

Where and how do you ‘situate’ mindfulness in your life? The previous two posts overview why this is a valuable question to consider. Wise reflection is an essential part of practice. Without it, we lose our bearings. Similarly, if we do not develop self-reflexivity, we become blind to how we are swayed by assumptions and narratives that may not be coherent, useful or true.

Mining your beliefs about mindfulness is always illuminating. It reveals what you identify with and, by extension, something about the nature of identity. It deepens your practice by opening up new channels for it. Nothing is off limits on the path of awareness. Mindfulness meets its potential in its engagement with the fundamentals of existence – meaning, identity, freedom, death – without any compulsive fascination but with the greatest sensitivity.

What’s the Story?

Below are fifteen avenues for self-enquiry. You could parachute any one of them into your depths and see how it lands. You could do this in any way you choose, such as through contemplation, dialogue or artistic expression. The method is not the point. The point is to give time to exploring yourself deeply.

• Why do I practise mindfulness? In what specific ways does my practice give me a sense that I am making the most out of life?
  
  
• Do I deliberately cultivate or aspire to attain particular mental states through meditation? Why?
  
  
• How is my practice informed by ideas about health and connection? What does health mean to me?
  What about connection?
  
  
• Do I believe that mindfulness practice is linked to wisdom, empathy or ethical engagement? Why? If I hold no such beliefs, what capacities do I believe my practice links to?
  
  
• Who or what garners my interest, respect or adoration in the mindfulness world? Who or what does the opposite, perhaps even repels me? What do my preferences have to tell me?
  
  
• If I achieved my goals in life, what would change about my practice? Would I approach it differently? Would I relate to others and the world differently? What role would mindfulness assume in how I conducted my life?
  
  
• How do I view the current human era? Do I perceive a crisis or end-time? Do I believe there is a great turning, a new era beckoning? Do I believe neither? What ideas does my mind harbour about human existence over time? 
  
  
• Do I hold particular beliefs about the nature of reality? Who or what do I have abiding trust or confidence in? What do the paradigms of science, materialism, religion and spirituality mean to me? How do these relate to practising mindfulness? How are my beliefs in turn affected by my practice? If all such ideas are insignificant to me, do I think that I have no metaphysical beliefs, that I am free of all baggage? If so, what is this belief?
  
  
• What do I consider mind to be? A non-physical, personal faculty? An impersonal process? A function of the brain in the skull? An emergent property of energy? Something else?
  
  
• What do I understand to be the relationship(s) between body and mind? 
  
  
• When I am mindfully aware of thoughts, who or what do I think is doing the thinking?
  
  
• How does my practice contribute to my self-image and/or inform my sense of being part of something bigger than me (e.g. a community of sentient beings, a transcendent value, a cosmological matrix)?
  
  
• How are self-worth, personal popularity, status or material ambition bound up in my motivations to practise? If I think none of these are factors, what other anxieties or insecurities might compel me to keep practising?
  
  
• If I knew I had one month to live, would mindfulness practice figure in my plans? If so, to what degree? What would be meaningful about spending time in this way? 
  
  
• Do I hold particular beliefs about what happens to consciousness upon physical death? How do these beliefs affect my practice?
  
  

Click here for Part 1.

Grand Narratives (II)

Since its emergence in mainstream culture, ‘mindfulness’ has come to denote many things: a mental quality, a meditative practice, a stress-relieving tool, a clinical intervention, an uplifting way of doing something, to name but a few. 

‘Being mindful’ is now a popular phrase that straddles a spectrum of meanings, from the frivolity of eating one piece of chocolate at a time to the potentially life-transforming experience of sitting an intensive meditation retreat. 

The Profound and the Profane

The concept of mindfulness is flexible and adaptable. Hence, even at the clinical end of the spectrum, in programmes like MBCT and MBSR, where mindfulness is sometimes called an ‘intervention’ (i.e. a way to prevent or alter something), you always find poetry recitation forming part of essential course content. 

Poetry is a medium that lends itself to the provocation of perplexity and wonder. It seeks, even demands, no end meaning. Yet here you find it rubbing shoulders with the sterile language of ‘symptom management’ that characterises evidence-based mental health protocols. 

Mindfulness seems to have developed an ingenious ability for bridging the divide between the soulful and the scientific while still leaving room for nibbling that singular chocolate. Cap doffed.

Part of this versatility can be explained by the fact that mindfulness is still establishing itself in western culture. Like many fancy foreign imports, it will need time to move through its fad/fashion/fetishised stages before discovering where it truly fits. This is a process, one that every practitioner contributes to. A decade from now, mindfulness will be closer to finding its place as much through your efforts as anyone else’s. 

Reflecting upon how you ‘situate’ mindfulness in your life is a worthwhile exercise. If this is a new idea and you don’t know where to start, below are two different analogies, both from the western tradition, that might serve as useful reference points. 

Ornamental Health

The first is from the late 18th Century when, inspired by the ideals of Romanticism, grottos were popular places for affluent members of society to spend time in for the purposes of contemplation. This fashion for meditating in natural surroundings subsequently gave rise to the phenomenon of the ornamental hermit, also known as a garden hermit.

A garden hermit was a man hired by a landowner to inhabit a purpose-built grotto or folly and play the part of a resident contemplative. The deal was that the man had to live permanently on-site while dressing and acting the part. Often this entailed growing a beard, not cutting fingernails and toenails, and speaking to no-one. Occasionally, the hermit might be obligated to break his silence and entertain dinner guests, for example, to offer them the best sagely counsel he could muster. In return for his labour, the hermit received a stipend, free room and board, generous amounts of downtime and an excuse not to wash. 

The hermit was a kind of live-action, one-man theatre which everyone – dinner guests included – knew wasn’t fully real. They went along with the show because it was a respectable way for a wealthy person to outsource their spirituality. Here lay the value of the pretence: it gave the landowner a license to flaunt their romantic sentiment and appear to be more ‘contemplative’ than they were. The fashion for garden hermits died out. Their lasting legacy is they are the forerunner for garden gnomes.

Gnome Truths

Garden hermits might seem silly now, a cheesy combo of fashion and façade, but they were an attempt to connect with the majesty and wisdom of nature. At the time, everybody involved followed the charade and imbued it with meaning. They were not unique in this regard. Humans of every era are prone to naïve and superficial interest in life’s profundities, never mind our perennial tendency to privatise and fetishise the spiritual. 

I appreciate the honest insincerity, as it were, of garden hermits. They are a reminder of how easy it is to reduce interfacing with the sublime to something materialistic and literal. When an existential enquiry becomes a ‘thing’, the arcane appears as a sketch. Any authentic encounter with the mysteries of life stands little chance if it is laced with a homogenized formula concocted from other people’s views and opinions.

I find it useful, if uncomfortable, to consider how my mindfulness practice might, at times, resemble a garden hermitage – something I separate off from the rest of my life, mix up with ideas I don’t truly understand, make into a ‘thing’ and project romantic ideals onto. At some point, I will get wise to what is going on. I will uncover my own insincerity and reconnect with something deeper and richer than ‘mindful me’. Then, the show is over and the real practice can resume.

Rock and Roll

A second analogy for situating mindfulness in one’s life comes courtesy of philosopher and writer Albert Camus’ famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus compares the absurdity of human existence to the situation of Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology who is condemned for eternity to pushing a large boulder up a mountain, only for the boulder to roll down every time he gets to the top. 

Just as Sisyphus is obliged to repeat his meaningless task over and over again, so we humans search relentlessly for meaning where there is none, says Camus, thus rendering our lives absurd. Yet his conclusion is oddly life-affirming and far from nihilistic. Regardless of your own philosophical viewpoint, there are layers within this text that are hugely relevant to mindfulness practice.

Camus’ Sisyphus accepts his fate and embraces the challenge of ascending the mountain. His task offers no reward but he commits to it nonetheless. He is present to his circumstances and regards the past and future for what they are: mental projections. He is fully in his existence, conscious of his condition, all the while refusing to surrender to its apparent futility. Each time he picks up his burden, he utters a silent “yes”. It is this attitude, says Camus, that allows Sisyphus to silence the gods, touch the deathless and conclude that all is well.

Breathing Space

In stark contrast to the garden hermit, Sisyphus offers clues on how to situate mindfulness practice at the centre of one’s life. His story is one of commitment, willingness, effort, presence and, through these, contentment. There is not even a hint of experiential avoidance or disengagement on his part. There is no artifice or wishful thinking. Sisyphus dwells in the midst of it all, unblinkered, bullshit-free. He teaches, as Camus puts it, “the higher fidelity”.

For me, Sisyphus offers essential lessons in re-homing practice when it has gone the way of the garden hermitage. He smashes down my grotto walls and urges me to wake up. When I sense the imposed limits of my situation and sit with the disquiet, nothing is off limits. Only when my cage has been firmly rattled in this way do I discern real possibilities for freedom. Then life becomes poetic again, even beautiful.

Regardless of your beliefs about life or mindfulness, Camus notes something pertinent to all practitioners. Sisyphus, on his downward journey from the summit of the mountain, is relieved of his burden and conscious of his situation. He is in motion, in his flow, fully aware of each footstep. He leans into life and is open to the task at hand. He clings to neither hope nor despair. This way of being echoes the old stories about mindfulness. Camus summarises them nicely: “That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.”

The next (and last) piece in this series will offer some reflections for your own practice.

Minding My Own Busyness

Recently, I found myself in a restaurant with three other mindfulness teachers, shovelling Pad Thai down my throat at great speed and with considerable mess. We were discussing meditation between partially digested mouthfuls while repeatedly checking the time.

We were on a short lunch break during a mindfulness conference and, time- and food-wise, had bitten off more than we could chew. Rushing back to the conference, splattered in noodle sauce, still attempting to conclude discussions, I had the vaguest glimmer of knowledge that I wasn’t so much ‘walking my walk’ as stumbling around in a state of mindlessness.

Sure enough, two hours later, during a talk on the importance of a teacher’s embodiment of mindfulness, I discovered myself – partially slouched in a plastic chair, partially propped up against the conference room wall to ease my indigestion – firing off non-urgent emails on my phone.

This was a ‘good’ moment. It reminded me that mindfulness is not about where I go, what I do, who I hang out with, or what labels I attach to ‘me’. It is simpler than all of those.

Simple as in: being sensitive to the cause and effect of actions. Simple as in: being aware of the relationship between stress and response. Simple as in: taking care of body and mind. Simple as in: getting clear about one’s priorities in the here-and-now.

Action Plans

I once received a useful teaching from a car mechanic on how to handle the human tendency for doing too much. He knew his propensity for taking on more jobs than he could handle and further overloading himself by not taking proper holidays. So he would staple together certain pages of his work diary to indicate when he would take breaks from work. Crucially, he would always stick to his plan. Skilful intention, resolution, kindness and care, all manifested with the click of a stapler. Nice work.

Something I’ve been practising myself for a while is to pause when I find myself facing an unconsidered task or situation, and to inwardly pose three questions: Do I need to take this on? Do I want to take this on? What is my intention here? Momentarily stopping and checking in with myself often clarifies how best to proceed.

Of course, I can just as easily forget to do this. These are the times when I find myself biting off more than I can chew, blundering about like a nitwit, and washing off noodle stains afterwards.

Life By Autocue

As outlined in the previous post, it can be tricky to fully know what the mind is up to, moment to moment, as life unfolds in its typically novel, mundane, stimulating and ambiguous ways.

Investigating this process through mindfulness reveals intriguing truths about the behaviour of the mind. Many mental responses, such as reactivity to perceived threats, are hardwired. Learned habits and tendencies can seem equally fixed. Through practising awareness, we come to realise that we routinely operate in automatic ways.

Automaticity is not a bad thing. It confers advantages through allowing mental attention to dexterously flit to phenomena unrelated to the task-in-hand. Hence we can walk down a street and fiddle on our phones and make plans for next week because the act of walking down a street is not something we need to figure out or perfect anymore.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

The downside to automaticity is that we fail to show up for the occasion of our own lives and so rob ourselves of its innate vividness and many of its joys. You probably know the experience (retrospectively at least) of becoming so distracted that you lose all sense of what happens next, only to ‘come to’ sometime later.

The potential for profound disconnection from present moment experience is all the greater in this age of the internet and social media. With powerful technologies at our fingertips, we are encouraged and seduced into consuming information speedily and superficially. How our minds love to skim vast directories of language and inexhaustible banks of imagery in their quest for instant gratification.

Even when we are relatively undistracted and alive to our sensory experience, it is easy for our minds to unconsciously react to a flutter of boredom, a pang of desire or an unpleasant sensation and, before we know it, our fingers are swiping screens and our eyes or ears are glued to some arbitrary object in a virtual world. Before smartphones came along, the possibilities for such mental hijacking weren’t quite so endless.

Non-Superficiality

When we get distracted, we act without awareness of acting, that is, we do not see and comprehend what is happening as it is happening. Often it goes something like this: a subtle feeling arises, either pleasant or unpleasant (e.g. sensual desire, boredom, restlessness) => the mind reacts by seeking to either maintain or build up the feeling (if it’s pleasant) or to flee from or get rid of the feeling (if it’s unpleasant) => the reaction conditions a behaviour, such as the physical act of reaching for a phone or the mental act of going into thought and fantasy.

By contrast, when there is an awareness of the initial feeling, this chain reaction does not happen in the same way. The mind does not run off. It stays with the felt experience. Blind reactivity abates. Ensuing actions arise out of clear intentions. There is a sense of stability and agency.

This is mindfulness: the ability to stay with experience for a prolonged time, and to really investigate it in detail. It is the opposite of distractedness. In fact, one of the classical characterisations of mindfulness (from the Abhidhamma, an early collection of teachings in the Buddhist tradition) is ‘non-superficiality’. This is the understanding of how mindfulness does not skim over the surface or ascertain in a shallow way. It sinks into an object and facilitates a deeper knowing of it.

When you are mindful, experience deepens. This is a natural capacity you have, which is cultivated through practice. It is a lot more likely to happen when your phone is switched off.

How’s It Going?

Can you recall, in precise detail, everything that happened for you in the moments just before you started reading this? The mental flowchart of choice-making and intention? The spontaneous co-ordination of your senses? The myriad micro-movements of your body’s muscles, tendons and ligaments?

Probably not. Even if you think you can, try extending the same question to the last five minutes of your life, which will appear as a blur of changing moments, some of which you may be able to account for, but many of which you won’t.

This is quite normal. Life flows. It's always changing. We have an experience. We remember bits of it. Mostly we don’t. Most of what happens vanishes like a dream. We like to think we are in charge of our experience when, in fact, minds are running on auto-pilot much of the time, rendering us oblivious to such facts of existence. Becoming clearer about this – getting real about it – is a central project of mindfulness practice.

You Are Reading This

Consider, for example, your experience of reading this blog. Have there been occasions when you’ve noticed that, although you thought you were reading the words and taking them in, your attention had wandered to something else entirely? And then you realized that you couldn’t remember the last bit you read?

Perhaps you decided to retrace your steps. Maybe you went back a few words or lines and read them again, only to discover that they were vaguely familiar? If you did, well spotted for noticing that your mind had wandered in the first place.

Here’s what happened. You definitely experienced those words, otherwise they would not be familiar, right? But you weren’t aware of them. Experience and awareness are different. The word ‘experience’ comes from the Latin experiri, meaning ‘to try’. The word ‘awareness’ comes from the Greek horan, which means ‘to see’.

Experience implies participating in an event while awareness implies an observation, or overview, of that participation. So, on one level, you engaged with those ‘missing’ words but, on another level, you didn’t. During those moments, the aware part of you failed to show up. This is mindlessness in action.

By contrast, that moment you ‘woke up’ to the fact that you had drifted, you assumed a position of both participant and observer. This is mindfulness in action.

Mindfulness of Habits (II)

Humans are creatures of habit. This is not surprising when you consider we make countless choices every day and our routines of behaviour often help us achieve our aims. From the way we brush our teeth and how we dress to the places we go and how we get there, we operate in habitual ways.

Some of our habits tend to work well for us while others deliver negative, unintended consequences. All habits fall into one of three broad categories: the things we do, the things we say and the things we think.

Their effects also take different forms, from the external (what happens in the wider world and to other people, or physically to us) to the internal (what happens within our hearts and minds). Deliberately noticing habits allows us to become more conscious of our lived experience and to discover how we do and don’t act helpfully to ourselves.

1. Take a few minutes to consider some of your habits and write them down. Try to be objective – as if you were an interested stranger or a curious scientist making an informal study of these habits.

Make a note of three habits you consider to be positive or helpful to you. Name and describe them. Now ask yourself these questions and write down your reflections:

• What actions compose each habit?
• When and where do I tend to act out these habits?
• What thoughts, ideas or mental stories do I tend to have at the time?
• What feelings do I experience as a result of enacting this habit?
• What other effects, personally or in the world around me, have I noticed?
• Am I aware of any habitual thoughts running through my mind now as I explore this habit? 

2. Now note three habits you consider to be negative or unhelpful. List these and question them in exactly the same way as the positive ones above, using the same questions.

Explore them with the same curiosity and open-mindedness. Be gentle with them and with yourself. This exercise is about noticing, not criticising. Simply identify what composes each habit and the results they generate.

Can you note any thoughts or beliefs that tend to accompany each habit, such as fixed labels and judgments?

3. Knowing your habits is the first (and most important) step in taking the emotional sting out of them.

As you go about your day, and on into tomorrow and next week, see if you can observe your habits in detail. What thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations do you experience at the time? What results do you notice?

Click here for Part 1.

Mindfulness of Habits (I)

Our patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving can be so habitual and automatic that we barely notice them. As long as they remain outside awareness, we reinforce them.

Every moment offers a potential for change, whether it be by one small degree or an intentional and wholesale refusal to run the same tired script for how to respond to problem x or situation y.

Notice how you can make a choice, right now, to pause reading and focus your attention on something else.

Notice how you can choose to move some part of your body or click elsewhere or engage in a different activity. Notice how you might choose to decline that invitation and carry on reading. Whatever you do, it’s your choice.

Being aware of how we respond in the moment is a gateway to greater possibilities. To become adept at knowing when we are in the grip of negative habitual patterns will likewise offer us easier release from them. The effort required is no more and no less than waking up from our compulsive reactivity to the spontaneous flow of thoughts and feelings.

Lost and Found

‘Waking up’ is something to be cultivated. Otherwise we dwell in customary states of blunt attention and dull awareness.

One time, on a train, I watched a woman standing motionless and staring at the carriage wall for several minutes. She was, as the telling phrase goes, lost in thought. Her eyes wide and unblinking, she was oblivious to everything around her, as locked-in to her experience as she was locked-out to everything around her.

Then, as if released from a magic spell, her eyes suddenly blinked, her body unfroze, and she was ‘back’, looking around, visibly startled at discovering where she was.

Her experience exemplifies many of the moments in all of our lives. Each of us has the capacity to be as absent to what’s happening as we have of being present to it.

Click here for Part 2.