Mindfulness – short notes 01

Everybody can be more or less ‘mindful’. It involves exercising your mind using an inward looking psychological technique. The technique is hard wired into in all human beings but is often obscured.

Following scientific advances in the last ten years or so mindfulness can now be viewed as a contemplative science which is independent of religious, spiritual, or cultural beliefs.

The word and the idea of mindfulness is becoming popular. In April 2004 mindfulness was mentioned in British Newspapers just twice. In April 2014 it was mentioned 150 times. Also in April 2014 there were 7,554 returns from an Amazon books search and 5,670,000 returns from a Google search

In the 1970s Jon Kabat-Zinn (the creator of the popular Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique) described mindfulness as: “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally”.

Other definitions have been produced in the last 40 years. I have wrapped them together to give the following composite definition: “Mindfulness involves paying open, non-judgemental attention purposefully focussed on the breath and sometimes noting currently experienced sensations, thoughts, emotions, and memories. It involves waking up from a life lived on automatic pilot and based on habitual responding.”

Many people refuse to accept that they respond out of habit and that they run on automatic pilot. They do not see themselves as following a course through life based on how they were conditioned – both consciously and in their unconscious - by nature, nurture and serendipity. And this is despite the fact that they think, speak and act in a way that matches the requirements of a particular culture in a given space and time.

Most of our ancestral time involved hunting and gathering. Then relatively recently came settled agriculture, followed by cities and by nation states. There was, and still is, much myth, magic, mayhem and murder. But it is possible that the increasing interest in mindfulness indicates a cultural evolution first in individuals then in humanity as a whole. Mindfulness presents the theoretical option of widespread compassion, and peace in our time.

One of the main formal mindfulness practices is to sit quietly paying attention to your breathing. When you notice that attention has shifted to the past or future – as it will - then gently lead it back to the breathing. It soon becomes obvious that the mind has a mind of its own and that huge amounts of thinking and feeling goes on in the unconscious.

This calls for a new answer to the old question “Who am I?” Surprisingly the answer is that ‘I’ am the output from an ongoing and everchanging churn of mental activity. ‘I’ have no abiding reality – thoughts of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘self’ and ‘ego’ are mind-made constructions which are continually being reconditioned by nature, nurture and serendipity.

We do not need to add anything to be mindful. All that we need is already built in. Just remove impediments, pull back the curtains, and wipe the dust from the mirror. Be still and be mindful of InterBeing - of the interconnected Oneness that is everything.