“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the moment, non-judgmentally.”
~Jon Kabat-Zinn
What is Mindfulness, anyway?
Mindfulness is deliberately paying full attention to what is happening around you and within you – in your body, heart, and mind. Mindfulness is awareness without criticism or judgment.
Sometimes we are mindful, but honestly, most times we are not. The obvious precursor to mindfulness is need – a need to focus and pay attention such as when you are learning a new skill. Let’s take driving as an example.
Take yourself back to your learning-to-drive years. Do you remember paying close attention to your hands on the steering wheel – 10:00 and 2:00, right? You also knew exactly where your right foot and your left foot were sitting. Your eyes were focused on the road ahead and there was a need to eliminate all distractions so you could concentrate.
You were totally present, wide awake and completely focused on the mechanics of driving. Fast forward a week or two. As you built the evidence of capability, keeping the car between the lanes, you eventually loosened up, decreasing the vigilent focus, removing one hand from the wheel and turning on your favorite radio tunes. The technicalities of driving are now becoming automatic.
As this automation continues, and your evidence of competency builds, mind-less-ness rises. The NEED to be mindful is lessoning as automation increases. Thus “driving on automatic pilot.”
Before long you are driving the car in a straight line with one hand on the wheel, the music turned up, passengers talking to you while drinking coffee and following the online map on the console screen. Heck, you might even drive 50 miles and wonder how you arrived at your destination, not remembering any part of your journey.
Can you relate to this? I know I can.
As the need to be mindful decreases with the mastery of a skill, it becomes more important to consciously choose to stay awake and aware.
And this is what happens in life. The illusion is that the need to be mindful has decreased but the truth is that mindfulness is needed now more than ever.
When you are not present, there is a universal vague dissatisfaction. This sense of dissatisfaction, a gap between us and everything and everyone else, is an essential problem of human life, leading to moments when we are pierced with a feeling of deep doubt and loneliness.
With the added distractions of life, the extra pressures to succeed (whatever that means) in the Western world, the drive to ignore emotions, the rise in disease (mental and physical), the call to resurrect mindfulness is loud and clear.
The Buddha calls this the First Truth: The fact remains that every person will, at some time, experience this kind of distress – this gap between true experience of the moment and deep connection with others (people, animals, nature). And it isn’t just in boring moments or sad moments or “negative” moments that we choose to go mindless. We also fall into the mindless trap during happy moments.
Why? You might ask?
Because going mindless has become the norm. It has become the standard operating system that is running the “machine” resulting in living the unsatsified life, searching the external world for the answers – turning to drugs, alcohol, sex, overworking, over-exercising, shopping, food, blaming spouses, parents, government – anything to relieve the pain. But these are only temporary fixes, leaving a plethora of disatsifaction in their wake.
The antidote?
Mind-FULL-ness.
By breathing attention and awareness into your thoughts, emotions and actions you will feel, once again, the richness of your life – in all the moments – postive, negative and neutral – and recognize that you are the one who is in control of your experience. This inward connection is, and always has been, the truest of the hero’s journeys, giving rise to the greatest gift of all time – recognizing that “Happiness is an Inside Job”.
This means that YOU truly are in the driver’s seat of your life. YOU get to choose to live in mindfulness or mindlessness. You get to drive with one hand on the wheel, jamming to your favorite tunes, sipping on coffee, enjoying your friends AND deliberately pay attention to your body, heart, and mind, non-judgmentally, with great love and compassion. That is how amazingly wise and talanted you are.
Drive on, my friend. Drive on.