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Awakening Into Mindfulness

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention.
This is how we cultivate mindfulness.
Mindfulness means being awake.
It means knowing what you are doing.

  — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Definition of "Mindfulness" —  Be Here Now; awareness of present experience with acceptance.

The ability to evaluate the things that happen so we can influence the course of events for the better gives us humans a power that is not available to other creatures. Paradoxically, the ability to abstract and problem-solve is responsible for most of the avoidable suffering that we bring upon ourselves. The mindfulness solution to self-sabotage is to take a break from problem-solving [Doing Mode], and practice simply experiencing the present moment without the intention to make things better.

When you stop trying to figure things out so you can make them better, there is no longer a need to evaluate anything. In the absence of the motivation to improve things [problem-solve], you can simply accept the things that happen without judgment [Being Mode]. Mindfulness, changing your perspective from Doing Mod to Being mode, is a path out of the avoidable suffering that you cause yourself. In contrast to the changes that result from medication or other external sources of control, the change that results from mindfulness practice is irreversible. Since the relief comes from a skill that you developed, it is yours and will always be available to you. Follow Your Breath is a good way to begin developing this skill:

Mindfulness Meditation: Follow Your Breath

For the next 10 minutes or so, selectively attend to the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don't analyze it or judge it. Just accept whatever experiences come along and return your attention to following your breath.

Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape). As you follow your breath you will notice that all sorts of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness, and some of them elicit emotional reactions. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and instead accept the experience and return your attention to your breath.

As you dispassionately observe the workings of your mind you will become familiar with subjective phenomena including thoughts, emotions, pleasures, and discomforts. As your personal research continues you will discover that if you accept your beliefs, perceptions, and evaluations for what they are— passing subjective phenomena — you become free to exercise your will.

Technical terminology has the advantage of providing a dedicated vocabulary when ordinary language would use words that mean different things to different people. Important terms:

  • Acceptance like final stage of grieving. When someone you love dies, you don't want it to be so, but there is nothing you can do about it, so you grieve. You may try to bargain, but discover it does not do any good. You  may become angry, but discover the anger is pointless. Depression is usually next, but that, too, is also pointless. Eventually will have exhausted all the methods to change what you cannot change, you must finally accept the way things are —  that is be finished with trying to change it, figure it out, or even emotionally react to it.
    • When something you cannot control goes against you, what are your options? The alternative to acceptance is a negative emotional state, such as frustration, anger, depression, which is likely to deplete the cognitive resources that would be better spent focused on things you do control. Acceptance allows you to disengage from one aspect of your environment so another can structure your attention.

  • De-Reification is a consequence of mindfulness. Reification means: To regard or treat an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence. For example, during his ruminations, Barry thinks, "I am a failure.” He does not view this as a belief that may or may not be true, but as a statement of fact. The more he believes in this concept of himself and his prospects the more potent is its depressive effect on his mood and performance. He becomes free of this trap by De-Reifying this conceptualization of himself and recognizing it is just his biased appraisal and not part of objective reality.

Awakening out of Neurotic Traps

For the person who has become a slave to her emotional reactions, one path to freedom involves De-Reifying the abstract causes of the emotional reaction through mindfulness practice.

The general strategy to escape neurotic traps advocated throughout this course involves two steps:

  1. Rational Understanding of the nature of the trap and how to escape it [achieved by the Abstract Processing System and implemented by the puppy trainer].
    • One way to escape from your neurotic traps is to awaken from the autonomous mind set of Doing Mode, in which you are continually evaluating yourself and others so you can fix the problems, by shifting into Being Mode —  in which you simply notice your current experience with acceptance.

  2. Experiential Training the puppy to react to the things that happen in ways that promote your interests and principles.
    • First explore this faculty of attention experientially by observing what happens when you practice the exercises on this page. You will undoubtedly observe that the untamed mind tends to wander. There are many competitors for your attention, but you can only fully attend to one thing at a time. Appreciating the faculty of attention and developing your ability to control it is the goal of Focused Attention Exercises.
    • After developing some mindful control of your attention, shift your perspective so that you can observe the sequence of phenomena that you experience — the Follow Your Breath exercise provides a good opportunity to develop your capacity for non-reactive observation.
    • As you become more comfortable shifting into the perspective of acceptance, mindful reactions to the things become your default.

Barry's story illustrates this Awakening Path. For him, first step of was the easy one. He quickly understood that that his thoughts, appraisals, and emotional reactions were transient, insubstantial mental events rather than accurate representations of reality. He experienced this Meta-Cognitive insight as an epiphany, which occasionally accompanies rational insight. But the real predictor of his success was that whenever he began experiencing symptoms he reminded himself of this insight and shifted to the dispassionate perspective of acceptance; "this was labor," he told me. The payoff for the labor was change that progressed at the speed of housebreaking a puppy.




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