Making Mindfulness Simple (but not too simple)

Part 1: Attention, judgment, freedom, acceptance, and the paradox at heart of it all

I’m gearing up to do another cohort of my Comparative Meditation Course, and wanted to talk about making mindfulness simple.  My gripe is that I feel a lot of people oversimplify mindfulness, and as a result leave people a little lost regarding its truly transformative potential.

My intention in my Comparative Meditation Course is to give you a somewhat comprehensive orientation to the wide world of meditation, setting up a framework to better understand what it’s about, how it works, and how to direct and gauge progress in your own practice.

It can definitely get a little complicated at parts, so here I’m going to present mindfulness first in a simplistic framework that still emphasizes the most transformative aspects of the practice, without overcomplicating, or oversimplifying.

First we have to start with the basics: what is mindfulness?

The Oxford dictionary gives us two definitions of mindfulness, the first being what most people conventionally think of when they hear the word…

“The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.”

And the second being more akin to the traditional practice of mindfulness…

“A mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.”

You see, “mindfulness” in English has its own connotations that generally denote being aware, but the term mindfulness is also a translation of various terms and practices in Buddhism that have far more detail and depth than just generally practicing being aware.

My main meditation teacher Shinzen Young wrote a very thorough 76 page document exploring the term mindfulness and all the things it could be referring to.  You’re welcome to check that out if you want to dig deeper, as here I’m going to focus on making mindfulness clear, accessible and actionable.

As a starting point, I’ll say the practice of mindfulness is paying attention to experience in a way that leads to more freedom.

This is important because we can think that just paying attention to our experience is being mindful, but in the context of Buddhism and mindfulness or Vipassana practice, it’s about paying attention in a way that begins to liberate us.

One of the common ways this happens is through watching our patterns of thinking and feeling.  When you pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, you begin to notice how they feed and reinforce each other.

For example, maybe someone was rude to you and that triggered a feeling of inadequacy.  Now that you’re feeling inadequate, you are remembering all sorts of past events that also made you feel inadequate, making the feeling and also the belief of inadequacy stronger.

Or maybe you react by getting angry and imagining all the things you could have said back to them to get the better of the interaction and leave them feeling hurt and angry.  You may even run an imaginary argument in your head for a while, feeding the feelings of anger.

When you start to watch your thoughts and feelings, you’ll notice there are these programs you run, and if you look deeply at the programs, you’ll see that they are adaptations our mind has made to try to gain some sense of control in a chaotic and unsafe world.

When we first start paying attention to our patterns of thinking and feeling, we may be a bit overwhelmed by how many programs we run and how deeply ingrained they feel.

These programs inform how we make sense of the world based on very limited experience, and they feel very true.

Have you ever encountered someone with such a wildly different worldview from you, that you wonder how they came to see things that way?

Our very limited experience creates beliefs that we then project onto the much wider world.

You see, thinking we understand things brings our mind a false sense of security.

You’ll find that most of us develop simplistic and quite fixed views about how the world works and what is ultimately true.

It is much more difficult to approach things with an open mind; to put aside our personal experience, preconceptions and biases, and simply pay attention without forming judgments.

“A mind that is capable of saying, ‘I do not know,’ is the only state in which anything can be discovered.” - J. Krishnamurti

Mindfulness can be very transformative when we can see our patterns clearly, without judgment.  When we can recognize the fears, avoidances, and desires that are secretly motivating these patterns, they can begin to soften, allowing for more space and freedom.

Without Judgment

One of the key aspects of practicing mindfulness is learning to withhold or deconstruct judgment.  Our mind has a naturally judgmental tendency, and continued observation of our judgmental nature helps to soften it.

Judgment is a form of self-protection.  It hardens us, protecting us from the dangers of the world.

To illustrate, you can try this little exercise.

Imagine yourself somewhere beautiful, accompanied by people you love and care for.  You can even imagine being there with pets.  Or you can remember a time where you were surrounded by people you love and feel safe with.

Notice what happens in your body when you visualize this.  Pay special attention to the “feeling centers” in the body, like the abdomen and chest areas.

What shifts when we feel connected to those we care about?

OK, now imagine being with someone who you have a lot of judgment towards.  Or again you can remember a time when you were with someone that you judge.

What happens now in your body?  Again noticing the “feeling centers” like the abdomen and chest.

In all likelihood there was a contraction here.  Something tightened.  This is your body instinctively protecting itself.

A major function of our mind is survival and problem solving, so it’s always looking for potential threats and problems to solve.

There is no shortage of potential threats in our world, and our mind easily becomes fixated on these things, leading to a state of habitual contraction.  We end up in a near-permanent defensive state, leading to symptoms like anxiety, neurotic habits, resentment, or apathy.

But judgment pervades our experience even on a far more subtle level.

So much of our identity and therefore experience is tied up in what we like and don’t like.

One of the first things we start to do as children is distinguish what we like and what we don’t.  Adults are constantly asking kids what they like or don’t like, and what is their favourite.

For the record, I don’t think this is a bad thing, and to some degree it’s likely a necessary phase of health development.  But the mindset that we must have an opinion or preference on everything is inherently binding.

Mindfulness is all about seeing the nature of thought and its drives.  It is often said that the mind is a problem solving device, and even if there are no problems, it will create them.

The practice of mindfulness is attempting to see and transcend this evaluating, problem solving mind.

To be clear, I don’t think that being critical is bad, and in fact I think critical thinking is an extremely important skill that we can use more of in the world.

But your critical thinking is supercharged when you can see beyond your own judgments.

While it’s important to think critically, I would argue it’s equally or more important to be able to put criticism aside entirely and rest in a more relaxed and embracing quality of mind.

Mindfulness is all about having freedom, and being stuck in critical and judgmental mind states is not at all free. We want to have the freedom to move between criticism and relaxed ease, to have discernment but to also be able to embrace experience without reservation.

“Observing without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence” - J. Krishnamurti

There’s a great pointing out instruction from Tibetan Buddhism that gets to the heart of this.  It asks the question:

“What is here now when there is no problem to solve?”

Well, what is it?

To me, this really points to a dramatic yet also somehow subtle shift in awareness.  A state of mind arises that is more relaxed and more free.

This practice helped me recognize that I related to the world as if there was inherently something wrong with it.  That something needed to change.  That I needed to change.

This points to the paradox at the heart of practice: it is through giving up the idea that things need to be any different and also accepting ourselves and the world completely, as they are, that we begin to experience deep change and transformation.

In Gestalt Therapy, a modality I spent years training in, this is referred to as The Paradoxical Theory of Change.

We spend so much energy trying things, or needing things to be a certain way, and all this just leads to an inner contraction, that only makes our energy more stuck.

When we learn to embrace ourselves and each moment as they are, without needing them to be any different, we begin to relax and energy begins to move more naturally and fluidly.

Through the practice of mindfulness, you get to see that you’re in a constant state of reactivity, reacting to countless things for countless reasons.  And in seeing this you can begin to no longer feed into these patterns, you can give up the fight and start to relax and enjoy life instead.

Over time you learn to accept and therefore relax around your experience more and more, and this leads one to develop an intrinsic attitude of trust.  This is not a trust that things will go well in the future, but a trust that you will be OK even if things don’t go well.

This inherent trust that we ourselves and also the world are somehow, in spite of all the pain and problems, are somehow also fundamentally OK, allows us to be more relaxed in our experience and less reactive.

As we relax more and more into our lives, we attune to a more subtle dimension of experience that is more beautiful, comforting, enjoyable, and fulfilling.

So we can say here that fundamentally, the practice of mindfulness is welcoming our experience.

Stay tuned for the next instalment in this series where we will explore the practice of mindfulness as it relates to suffering.

Learn more and register for my Comparative Meditation Course here!