This began with my observation that I’m noticing more mental health challenges recently and wondering what I might be able to do for the students I see that would both help the suffering and immunize the healthy. Then it wandered. Ah well, this working draft will have to do since the semester has begun and there is just no time on the horizon before May in which to polish these thoughts and opinions of a layman with no particular expertise in psychology or meditation.
Which would you rather feel: the tightness in the chest from anxiety, or the openness and wonder of curiosity? The question answers itself (I hope).
This is what mindfulness can do: bend anxiety (and other negative emotions, which I lump together here despite the differences between a nuclear war and a playful tickle fight) into a sort of curiosity or similar neutral feeling. Although I’ve been aware of mindfulness meditation for more than 20 years, beginning with Stephen Bachelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs and Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are, and I had recognized its potential early on, I had never practiced it with any sort of regularity until recently. My loss.
While mindfulness meditation is not a religious practice, I’m reminded of a western Buddhist monk who, as a young man, happened upon a gathering of older people listening to an experienced teacher. The young man saw that he was by far the youngest in the room and asked the teacher if he was old enough to get anything out of meditation. In return, the teacher asked, “Do you suffer?” Of course he did. “Then, why wait?”
Mindfulness is merely paying attention– at first perhaps to the body and mind – in the present, without opinion or judgment. It’s pretty simple, but as my first chemistry teacher reminded us regularly, “simple is not necessarily easy”.
It’s important to be in the present because so much of our emotional baggage is related to ruminating on the past or anticipating the future. These abilities to sift the tailings of the past for their social implications and to envision future interactions are universal traits, part of what makes us human. In the words of eminent biologist E.O. Wilson,
“Research psychologists have found that all normal humans are geniuses at reading the intentions of others, whereby they evaluate, proselytize, bond, cooperate, gossip, and control. Each person, working his way back and forth through his social network, almost continuously reviews past experiences while imagining the consequences of future scenarios.”
So, no, it’s not just you. However, when these tendencies become problematic and interfere with sleep, school, work, or other aspects of our lives, well, then we have a problem. By gently and persistently focusing on the present moment in meditation, we pull our attention away from both past and future, helping to diffuse the emotions associated with rumination and anticipation.
Mindfulness meditation does not, in my limited experience, require or lead to any sort of pacific bliss. For me, the recurring thoughts and the associated emotions do not disappear, but by paying attention to them I can see them at one remove. By noticing the thoughts come and go in the moment and not being either swept away in either their stories or new self-critical judgments, I find that I develop a useful emotional distance from them. If I can notice my rumination, and pay attention to how it feels in my body, that noticing part of me is not troubled, it’s merely observant, curious. Observing like this provides a perspective that separates ‘me’ from my thoughts and feelings: ‘I’ am not so inseparably identified with my thoughts. By being able to think about them, I am not them. My observant mind is not identified by the thoughts and opinions that bubble up to consciousness. By staying with (or gently returning repeatedly to) a non-judgmental attention in the present moment, I have begun to notice what thoughts tend to capture my attention before I once again detach that attention, return to now, and let the thoughts go like so many individual red balloons in the breeze. By identifying my thoughts, I diminish the tendency to identify with them.
Those thoughts that loop and cycle remind me of a circular path with a deeply rutted trail bed. In recognizing the loop, I can step outside of it. As the great philosopher Erma Bombeck wrote, "Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but it never gets you anywhere." It’s here that meditation can be effective in bypassing or defusing the emotional content of the thoughts. I find I still have essentially the same unproductive thoughts, although perhaps less frequently, but I’m no longer involuntarily carried along or away by those thoughts to unhelpful actions or swept into endless emotional loops. Merely becoming aware of the system, itself, changes the system.
There is a paradox here, since mindfulness meditation provides both intimacy and distance. Maintaining a non-judgmental awareness implies an absolute acceptance of whatever thoughts and feelings come to mind, while at the same time the act of observing transmutes the emotional perspective to more neutral ground. I find that mindfulness takes both a little courage and a little kindness toward my imperfect self to facilitate the necessary intimacy; to allow myself to feel what I feel, without judgment.
Interlude:
“Geese”, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
If you’ve never experienced mindfulness meditation, try a guided meditation; I’m sure there are many great options (and readers with experience, please feel free to suggest some in the comments), but I think a fine place to start is with John Kabat-Zinn’s talk at Google from 2007. For an introduction, I think he has just about the right balance of playfulness and irreverence. Skip ahead to 21:00 minutes in to begin; the guided meditation starts a few minutes after that.
Zinn’s playfulness is important, I think, because the beneficial effects are only a byproduct of the mindfulness exercise, like something that can only be seen in peripheral vision. I can imagine that if one focused too intently on reducing stress through meditation, for example, the results might not follow because focusing on the desired result would inhibit attending to the moment and perhaps could also interfere with the non-judgmental acceptance of whatever stress one might be feeling. In standing aside and not trying to force a particular result, I’m reminded of U2’s chorus “Get out of your own way.” Practice mindfulness because doing so develops resilience, sensitivity, and qualities that help the meditator and others with whom they interact, but recognize that pushing a particular outcome could be counterproductive.