Church of the Churchless

A mindfulness lesson in the checkout lane

This afternoon I was in a south Salem Fred Meyer checkout lane. There was only one person ahead of me, so I decided to skip the self-checkout, which I usually prefer as the lines aren't as long.

When the person in front of me moved forward, I didn't immediately do the same with my grocery cart. I heard the man in back of me say something. Couldn't make it out exactly, but it sounded something like "you can move now."

Anyway, I ignored the comment, unloaded my groceries on the conveyor belt and soon was at the head of the line. As the female clerk rang up my items, I got out some coupons for certain items I was buying. I handed them to the woman after she had scanned all of my purchases.

Everything went smoothly until she said, "Oops. I pushed the wrong button. Got to ask for an override." She picked up a phone and dialed her manager. As we waited for him to show up, I told her that it'd be nice if she could punch in her own override. Why did a manager have to do it?

She said that her manager trusts her, but the corporate higher-ups don't. That led to a discussion between the clerk and me about how employees of a big business shouldn't be criticized for having to implement policies established by executives. 

We had time to talk because even though the clerk could see her manager down at the self-checkout section, he wasn't moving in her direction. I suggested she wave her arms, which she did, but that didn't help because the manager was facing away from her. 

Eventually she phoned him again and he indicated that he'd be doing the override soon.

At that exact moment, pretty much, I saw that the man in back of me in line, who had put all of his items on the conveyor belt, was picking them up and placing them back in his cart. I said to him, "We'll be done here in just a bit."

He angrily told me, "Thanks for holding up the line," as he continued to pick up his items. I replied, "Hey, this wasn't my fault, and it wasn't her fault either. It just was a glitch." The manager then appeared, held out his override tag or whatever it is for the clerk to scan, and said to me, "Sorry it took so long. I had something else to deal with."

So the irritated man in back of me, who looked to be somewhere around my age, in his 70s, put all of his stuff back in his cart and left the checkout line just as the clerk was finishing up my purchase. I said to her, "Bad timing on that guy's part. Now he's going to have to wait in another line."

Now, since I'm in a mindfulness frame of mind, having written a few days ago about my re-reading of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are, I found this check-out line experience to be a great example of what goes wrong when mindfulness is forgotten.

Meaning, when we allow our negative thoughts and emotions to override the evidence of our senses. Believe me, I'm an expert on this, because frequently I've had feelings akin to the irritated man in the line behind me. 

It's easy to jump to conclusions based not on objective reality, but on what we believe is happening. I doubt that the man understood that the reason for my delay in checking out was an innocent error by the clerk in pushing a button on her touch screen.

Maybe he wasn't listening closely to what she said to me and to her manager on the phone. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Or maybe he knew what the problem was and still became irritated. He might have been having a bad day and this was the experience that sent him into a major irritation. 

Regardless, as noted in my previous post, there's a lot to like in Kabat-Zinn's observation:

Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The man behind me was seeing the checkout line through the lens of his impatience and irritation. Again, I've been there and done the same thing, so I can't judge the man for this. He was simply reacting from his own subjective perspective.

For me, on the other hand, the delay in checking out as we waited for the manager wasn't bothersome at all. The clerk and I were talking about what was happening. We shared a common view that big corporations like Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, can have absurd employee policies. 

I knew that the clerk was doing her best. When the manager finally appeared, I had no doubt that he also was doing his best. This was just a minor problem caused by a simple mistake. When the clerk told me, "I pushed the wrong button," I said to her, "I do that all the time." 

Hopefully I've learned something from this episode.

Maybe the next time I start to get irritated at someone, I'll pause and remind myself that whatever is happening, it's what is happening. Almost certainly no one is trying to make me irritated. I'm doing that to myself by expecting something to occur which is different from what is actually occurring. 

That's why I'm attracted to mindfulness so much, which is defined by Kabat-Zinn as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.

UPDATE: After writing this post, this morning I woke up irritated at a fairly minor health problem that bothers me at times. I was going to tell my wife how I felt. Then I realized that my irritation wasn't very different, and maybe not different at all, from the man in my checkout lane story getting upset at having to wait a while in line behind me while the clerk dealt with a problem. 

The lesson for me is that it's a heck of a lot easier to observe when someone else is being unmindful and self-centered than when I am. But maybe I've learned something. By not complaining about my problem, which wouldn't have done anything to help the problem anyway, my wife had an open conversational window to talk about some things she was interested in. I ended up feeling better listening to her than I would have if I'd done my complaining.

Sure, sometimes it makes sense to let our negative feelings out. But sometimes it isn't. 

 

Mindfulness meditation is like briefly being dead

Whenever I need a heaping dose of reality shorn of unnecessary concepts, my eyes wander to a bottom shelf in my office where the mindfulness books hang out. 

This morning I was drawn to pick up a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn that I'd read before, Wherever You Go, There You Are. 

I've read other mindfulness books by Kabat-Zinn. As he says in the introduction, his previous book, Full Catastrophe Living, is largely aimed at people akin to those who use his stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center run by Kabat-Zinn.

That book had to be quite detailed and comprehensive. Also, thick. Wherever You Go, There You Are is aimed more at a general audience. It's clearly and simply written with many short chapters, several of which I re-read today.

I was struck by how much I agree with Kabat-Zinn's description of what meditation is all about. His take on meditation is pretty much how I've come to view it. When I meditate now, I follow my breath, not trying to change my breath, like by making it shallower or deeper, faster or slower, just being aware of the sensation of breathing.

But this sort of meditation is markedly different from the form of meditation I practiced during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru which taught that the purpose of meditation is to leave this world behind and enter a supernatural better world.

Meditation, according to Kabat-Zinn and Buddhism, is almost precisely the opposite of this. Today I read:

New Yorker cartoon: Two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him and saying: "Nothing happens next. This is it."

It's true. Ordinarily, when we undertake something, it is only natural to expect a desirable outcome for our efforts. We want to see results, even if it is only a pleasant feeling. The sole exception I can think of is meditation.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

But it would not be accurate to call meditation a "doing." It is more accurately described as a "being." When we understand that "This is it," it allows us to let go of the past and future and wake up to what we are now, in this moment.

People usually don't get this right away. They want to meditate in order to relax, to experience a special state, to become a better person, to reduce some stress or pain, to break out of old habits and patterns, to become free or enlightened.

All valid reasons to take up meditation practice, but all equally fraught with problems if you expect those things to happen just because you are now meditating.

You'll be caught up in wanting to have a "special experience" or in looking for signs of progress, and if you don't feel something special pretty quickly, you may start to doubt the path you have chosen, or to wonder whether you are "doing it right."

In most domains of learning, this is only reasonable. Of course you have to see progress sooner or later to keep at something. But meditation is different. From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now.

Beautiful! So refreshing.

This demolishes the absurd notion that just because someone has a different experience in meditation than you do, that means one of you is more advanced spiritually or mystically. I love the simple wisdom in From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

There's no better or worse in meditation, no higher or lower. There's only "This is it." Doesn't matter at all what it is. 

I also enjoyed reading Kabat-Zinn's description of meditation as being akin to dying, except, of course, the actually being dead part. He writes:

People think of meditation as some kind of special activity, but this is not exactly correct. Meditation is simplicity itself. As a joke, we sometimes say: "Don't just do something, sit there." But meditation is not just about sitting, either.

It is about stopping and being present, that is all. Mostly we run around doing. Are you able to come to a stop in your life, even for one moment? Could it be this moment? What would happen if you did?

A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the "being mode" for a moment. Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are. Things get simpler. In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on.

If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way.

If this is true, maybe you don't need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don't need to read something just now, to run one more errand.

By taking a few moments to "die on purpose" to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By "dying" now in this way, you actually become more alive now. That is what stopping can do.

And when you decide to go, it's a different kind of going because you stopped. The stopping actually makes the going more vivid, richer, more textured. It helps keep all the things we worry about and feel inadequate about in perspective. It gives us guidance.

Try: Stopping, sitting down, and becoming aware of your breathing once in a while throughout the day. It can be for five minutes, or even five seconds. Let go into full acceptance of the present moment including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening. 

For these moments, don't try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go. Breathe and let go. Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.

Then, when you're ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.

More wise advice.

I enjoy taking a few breaths, feeling the air passing into my nose, visualizing the air filling an empty cavity on the inhalation, then leaving the cavity empty on the exhalation. That emptiness is akin to the dying Kabat-Zinn speaks of.

It helps me look upon whatever I'm experiencing at the moment from a perspective of me being absent. What would the situation be like if there was no "me" aware of it? Well, then there would be the same thing happening, but not with a sense of like/dislike, pleasure/pain, good/bad, and the other pairs of opposites that aren't objectively there, but are part of my subjective response to what's going on.

What if religions are wrong and there's nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique.

I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me.

If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar to me, at least) of looking for your car keys only to discover that they were sitting unnoticed in a pocket or purse the whole time.

But let's think about what's necessary for a search to make sense. To begin with, you really need to have lost something. Meaning, it was in your possession at one point, and now it isn't. Then there has to be a decent probability that you can find that thing you used to possess.

If you're on a cruise and drop your glasses into the ocean while leaning over a railing, you know what you've lost, but for all practical purposes you have a zero chance of finding that item.

In Return to the One I argued that we have a sense of loss, yet most of us don't understand what we're longing to recover: God, or the One. I feel like I did a pretty good job making that argument, yet in my current frame of mind I no longer find what I wrote to be persuasive.

I still like my first sentence in the book, though. But now I see it as pointing toward the desirability of living in the here and now, rather than a there and then. After all, where we are, where everyone is, without exception, is the present moment.

No searching required. Just be here now.

This, of course, is the essence of mindfulness. And of the non-religious aspect of Buddhism, which includes Zen. Such distinguishes these forms of spirituality from the seeking forms of spirituality and religion where there is much talk of a path to be followed, and signs of progress along the way.

Here's some illustrative passages from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life.

Not only is it always now. The "curriculum" of this adventure we call living, where mindfulness can play such a pivotal role, is always what is unfolding in this moment, whether we like what is happening or not. 

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred, and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we most need is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have -- this one.

...So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious -- even foreign -- to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.

...Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There's no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. 

It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now.

It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters.

If you don't pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India said, "You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."

...Awareness itself is what mindfulness is about. It is not about achieving an ideal, or a particularly desirable or longed-for special state.

If the mind is thinking: "If I meditate I'll always be compassionate. I'll be like the Dalai Lama. I'll be like Mother Teresa" or whoever your spiritual guru/hero of the moment is, it may help to remind yourself that you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or anybody else. Nor do you know what their interior experience is.

The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself.

The irony, of course, is that you already are.

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books.

For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me.

Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my office bookcase and noticed Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life. 

Amazon tells me that I bought the hardcover version in 2011, twelve years ago.

Since, I've learned a lot abut mindfulness, but I still consider myself a beginner, so I decided to take another look at the book. Based on my highlighting and notes in the back part of the book, I can tell that what most appeals to me now is different from what I liked in my first reading. 

Here's some passages that resonated with me in the first part of the book, which I finished re-reading today.

(1) I'm not opposed to the idea of discipline. However, I also like to flow with life as much as possible. A mini-chapter on "The Beauty of Discipline" (they're all just a few pages long) had some good things to say on this subject.

The discipline I am referring to is really the willingness to bring the spaciousness and clarity of awareness back over and over again to whatever is going on -- even as we feel we are being pulled in a thousand different directions. 

Just taking this kind of of stance toward our own experience, without trying to fix or change anything at all, is an act of generosity toward oneself, an act of intelligence, an act of kindness.

The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself.

Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. 

(2) I've never understood why some people view thinking as negative, something opposed to a spiritual life, a mindful life. A "Befriending Our Thinking" chapter corrects this misconception.

It is very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn't think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise.

If you do try to suppress your thinking, you are just going to wind up with a gigantic headache. Such a pursuit is unwise, pure folly -- like trying to stop the ocean from waving. It is the very nature of the ocean for its surface to change as a result of changing atmospheric conditions.

...The mind is similar. The surface can be extremely labile, changing constantly with the changing "weather patterns" of our lives: our emotions, moods, thoughts, our experiences, everything, often with little or no awareness on our part.

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mistake them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

(3) There's a me. But it's not mine. This teaching of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is both wonderfully appealing to me and also wonderfully confusing. Jon Kabat-Zinn explains things in a chapter called "Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns -- Especially I, Me, and Mine."

The Buddha taught for forty-five years. He is said to have said that all of his teachings could be encapsulated in one sentence. If that is so, perhaps we might want to remember what it was, even if we don't necessarily understand it at first. Imagine forty-five years of profound teaching distilled into one sentence: "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.'"

It might be helpful to reflect on what the Buddha might have meant when he used the verb "to cling." "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine'" does not mean there is no "you." It isn't suggesting that perhaps you will have to hire someone to put on your pants in the morning because there's no "you" to do it.

Nor does it mean that you should give away all the money in your bank account because it is not yours and there is no real bank anyway.

What it means is that clinging is optional, that we can recognize it when it arises and choose not to feed it. It means that the selfing habit is a major part of our default setting, that mode of mind that we revert to constantly when we go unconscious or drone on in the automatic pilot doing mode. 

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

It means that we can make the choice, moment by moment, to recognize how much we do cling to "I," "me," and "mine," how self-oriented and self-preoccupied we can be, and then decide not to cling to them, or more reasonably, to catch ourselves when we do it.

It is saying that we don't have to automatically and with no awareness fall into the habits of self-identification, self-centeredness, and selfing. What is more, if we are open to looking at ourselves afresh, we can really see that these thought-habits actually distort reality, create illusions and delusions, and ultimately imprison us. 

Important truth: what we need isn't God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying.

I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way.

Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life.

Here he describes his take on spirit.

We don't have to add anything extra or overtly "spiritual" to find deep connection with another person. Spirit emerges in our relationships through our everyday words and actions when our attention is in the present. 

We go beyond minds and bodies by fully present with our own body and mind. When we completely inhabit the shared here and now of this world, we find connection that transcends here and now, beyond space and time.

OK. I doubt that Gillihan means this literally, since being in the present doesn't really take us beyond space and time. I'll grant him that literary license, though, since it can seem like we're beyond space and time.

What bothered me much more was how he felt the need to say this on the final page of his book, which obviously won't resonate with the many readers who don't share his devotion to God.

The integrated approach of Think Act Be that emerged from the intersection of my trials and my training has been discovered by innumerable people across the millennia. Thomas Merton captured it beautifully in New Seeds of Contemplation:

"The 'spiritual life' is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete [person] who is in God and with God and from God and for God."

I suppose Christian readers of his book will like that sentiment. I sure didn't, especially since it contradicts Gillihan's statement that spirit emerges when our attention is in the present -- no need for any illumination by God.

However, as I said, on the whole I enjoyed his book a lot. I especially liked his emphasis on not expecting to gain anything from mindfulness and meditation other than a better relationship with our experience of the life we already have.

Gillihan writes:

Most of us seek security and belonging in a home outside ourselves. We look for it in relationships, in work, in acclaim or material things. In reality, the home we long for is always right here. It doesn't exist anywhere else.

"This is a country whose center is everywhere," wrote Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation. "You do not find it by traveling but by standing still."

But that doesn't stop us from searching for it everywhere except where it is, as if we were tearing the house apart trying to find the keys that we're holding in our hand. The answer must be out there somewhere, something more than just ourselves, because we're convinced we're not enough.

...So much of our suffering comes from struggling to find something more. More than myself. More than the person sitting across from me. More than this house, this table, this meal, this spoon. More than this moment.

I've also been reading a book by physicist Alan Lightman, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. In a chapter about consciousness and the brain, he describes an experience that was thoroughly materialistic, yet spiritual in one of the ways Gillihan uses that term. 

Near the end of my conversation with Professor Koch, I described an experience I had some years ago. I was out on the ocean alone in a small boat, late at night, coming back to my home on a small island. It was a clear night, and the sky bristled with stars. No sound could be heard, except for the soft drone of my engine.

Taking a chance, I turned off the engine. It got even quieter. Then I lay down in the boat and looked up. 

After a few minutes my world dissolved into the star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. Awareness of my self and my ego disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them.

And the vast expanse of time -- extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I would die -- seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt part of something much larger than myself.

After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying there looking up. I asked Professor Koch whether he thought such an experience could arise from mere atoms and molecules.

"First, it is a true experience," he said. "I call these mystical experiences. You can get them in near death experiences, you can get them with a drug called 5-MeO-DMT, you can get them when you meditate. We know that our brain can produce love and hate. This is another experience that the brain can have. And experience shows that our brain can produce all the feelings of love and hate, of ecstasy, of feeling connected."

Absolutely. The brain does this with no God, with nothing supernatural. Just with 100 billion neurons interconnected with about 100 trillion synapses. 

Mindfulness and meditation aren't about improving ourselves

I used to believe that meditation, and its close relative, mindfulness, were supposed to make me and my life better. 

Wiser. Calmer. More spiritual. Happier. And more besides.

In other words, I looked upon mindfulness and meditation as akin to exercise. I put in the work of training my mind and I benefit from that workout. Maybe not instantly, but over time I'd reap the rewards.

I can't say that I've totally discarded that perspective. However, it isn't as strong in me anymore. 

Instead, I've come around to the notion that the idea of gaining something from mindfulness and meditation is at odds with what these practices are all about: being in touch with here-and-now reality.

When part of me is resting contentedly on my meditation cushion (which happens to be attached to a chair) and part of me is expecting to become someone better than I am now, there's a disconnect.

It's difficult to embrace what is happening inside and outside of me now, while also anticipating that what I'm doing now will lead to future positive changes.

I recall that Buddhists speak of this sort of thing as having "gaining ideas." Meaning, an expectation that mindfulness and meditation will help the practitioner gain something.

Another way of putting it is being attached to the outcome of mindfulness and meditation, as contrasted with simply pursuing those activities without desiring particular changes.

Here's a few passages from Seth Gillihan's book, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that get at what I'm trying to describe.

My patient Jon had stopped meditating when he found that it didn't get rid of his anxiety. Many of us expect that meditation practice will get rid of the less desirable parts of our lives, such as stress, anxiety, and other difficult emotions.

Sometimes that happens, given the calming nature of mindfulness practice. But feeling more comfortable is not the purpose of openhearted presence -- and it is less likely to happen if we make it the goal.

Expecting certain outcomes from our mindfulness practice will get in the way of our experience. Expectations lead to evaluation -- Am I relaxing? Is my mind quieting? Am I having a mystical expericnce? -- which pulls us out of the present.

Instead, we can approach each moment of meditation as if it's the first time we've experienced it, without preconceptions or goals. 

Mindful awareness is about relationship. In my work with Jon, he practiced a new way of relating to his anxiety. When the anxious spells came, he opened to the experience with curiosity rather than resistance. 

Instead of telling himself, "I can't stand this!" and "I have to make it stop," he said, "Let me see what this is like. What's happening in my body? How does the anxiety shift over time?" Jon discovered not only that he suffered much less but also that the attacks came less often.

Mindfulness changes our relationship with our experience, not necessarily the experience itself. 

...As you invite mindful presence, you don't have to force anything or try to make it feel "spiritual." Keep it very ordinary and uncomplicated, and just notice what's happening. See what you're seeing. Hear what you're hearing. Take in colors and textures around you.

You can turn inward, too, seeing what emotions are present and watching what your mind is up to. This can all happen in real time as you go about your activities. You can try it with cooking, cleaning walking, bathing -- anything at all, including reading this book.

As you pay attention, open to anything that comes your way. Receive it. Proactively say yes to it all. Release the constant drive to improve your situation. Settle into it instead: "This is what's happening. This is my reality."

That doesn't mean you don't fix something that's wrong or tell someone no. Just stay open to all of the experience as it's happening, even the uncomfortable parts.

Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy

I got a Master's Degree in Social Work way back in 1973 that exposed me to the fundamentals of counseling before I headed off in the direction of health services research and planning.

Then I married my second wife, Laurel, in 1990. She also had a MSW, but unlike me, pursued a career in social work, ending up after our marriage by starting a private psychotherapy practice.

Laurel would talk about how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was used in her practice, since it is fairly short-term and insurance companies don't like paying for lengthy psychotherapy aimed at delving into the root causes of someone's problems.

They want results. Which is what everybody wants, really.

So when I saw that a series on "Mindful CBT" by Seth Gillihan had been added to Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I decided to listen to what Gillihan had to say. I've finished Part 1 of Mindful CBT, which includes eight short (8-10 minutes) talks by Gillihan. 

Here's some of what Gillihan had to say. I took notes, most of which I can actually read -- my handwriting is terrible, even to me -- but these aren't verbatim quotes.

In Fundamentals of CBT, I learned that traditionally thoughts, feelings, and actions comprise CBT. These interact with each other. You can change any one and affect the others. Integrating mindfulness introduces depth to thoughts, feelings, and actions. 

The quality of changes is based on the quality of attention. How do we relate to our thoughts, feelings, and actions? Instead of pushing away anxious thoughts, give them less weight. We shift from "should" to mindful acceptance. 

In Finding Leverage, Gillihan said that we have to match our intention with the right tools. Advice alone isn't very helpful. Willpower alone is a recipe for failure. For example, if someone is afraid of spiders, they need to start small and work up from there -- not by letting a giant tarantula crawl on your arm right off the bat. A ladder is a series of small steps. The question isn't why did I fail, but what can I do to succeed?

In Working With Thoughts, I heard that thoughts can cause anxiety and affect actions. But thoughts often are misguided in some way. We ask, what story is my mind telling me? Not objective facts, often, but a subjective story.

Examine the evidence underlying thoughts, like a scientist. What evidence is for and against the thought? What's true in the situation? Is there a more realistic way of thinking that fits the data better? 

These are some some common cognitive disturbances: (1) Fortune telling -- making predictions about a future that hasn't happened yet; (2) Catastrophizing -- seeing things in the worst possible light; (3) Mind reading of another person -- believing we know what someone else is thinking.

In Addressing Core Beliefs, Gillihan says that you become more aware of negative thoughts. Our core beliefs drive thoughts. These are regular patterns, a lens that guides how we see the world. Example: seeing disapproval everywhere, even though you're doing a good job. 

Thoughts can feed back into a core belief and strengthen it. This is circular, yet completely convincing. Instead, focus on what is actually happening right now. Minds invent stories that often aren't true. Be in a situation as it is. Brush off unhelpful thoughts.

Not "oh no" but "oh well." Just a mental event. One core belief might be that wellbeing depends on things working out for us. Don't assume how life has to go. Life doesn't have to meet our expectations.

In Thoughts Support Mindful Presence, I learned that mindfulness supports thinking and thinking supports mindfulness. Thinking is just what the mind does. We don't have to take thoughts too seriously. Thoughts can play a positive role in our lives. Meditation is being present with what is, noticing what's already there.

In Working With Behavior, I heard about Pavlov's dogs. Animals learn certain things go together. Ringing of a bell is followed by food. Dogs salivated just with the bell. This is classical conditioning. A baby begins to cry when at the doctor's office because previous visits were disturbing.

We also learn by consequences of actions. This is operant conditioning. We learn patterns in the world and outcomes of our behavior. Classical and operant go together. A cat goes to the kitchen after hearing the can opener.

Make it easier to do what you intend to do. Make exercising rewarding, right-sized, starting easy. Put things in place to guide actions when motivation leaves you.

In Mindful Action, Gillihan says that mindfulness determines the quality of actions. With more awareness, you experience a walk more fully. But beware of this taking on a moral quality: you're bad if you're not mindful. 

Sometimes it's helpful to be on autopilot, like while driving, when you can carry on a conversation or listen to the radio. But there are costs when we're in divided attention much of the time. We'll have richer memories if we're more present.

Act in ways that align with reality. Mindful action doesn't try to force an outcome. Stop struggling against what is. Notice when your actions are at odds with reality.

In Working With Distress, I learned there are three ways to feel better in Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Shift thinking. Act differently. Practice mindfulness. However, sometimes these tools don't work, so we need to make peace with discomfort. 

Respond with openness and curiosity to discomfort. Maybe it will feel interesting, not bad. Mindful acceptance helps us endure uncomfortable situations. Stop fighting against reality. Change your life to match your limitations. 

Focus on what's happening right now. Don't subject yourself to future pain that you're anticipating, but hasn't happened yet, and may never happen. Be present with uncomfortable feelings. Stand up for issues you care about even if it upsets some people.

Wellbeing doesn't depend on eliminating stress. Can I open to this?

If our attention wanders, the question is where it should rest

Most of us are afflicted more often than we'd like with what often is called "monkey mind."

Meaning, our attention is prone to flitting around from this to that to whatever, sort of like monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a seemingly aimless fashion.

But why is monkey mind a bad thing? Monkeys seem to have a good time in trees. Why are we humans so concerned about controlling our attention?

That's one of the themes in an article by Casey Cep in the January 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, Eat, Pray, Concentrate. The online version is titled What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention: Lessons from a centuries-long war against distraction.
Download What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention | The New Yorker

This is a book review of Jamie Kreiner's "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction."

One thing they tell us is that we can't blame our own wandering mind on the internet, smartphones, television, digital games, or the other culprits we in the 21st century summon as reasons for our inability to focus.

Because back in the middle ages books were viewed with suspicion by many monks. 

Although books are rarely associated with distraction today, desperate as we are to escape our screens, they were objects of concern in early monastic circles—diversions that might need to be regulated as carefully as sexual urges. Monks hemmed and hawed about when and where and for how long it was appropriate to read.

In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus, himself an avid reader, described a common scene in the monasteries where he lived in Jerusalem and the Nile Delta: a monk who was supposed to be reading “yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to read for a while; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings, finds fault with the writing and the ornamentation. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep.”

Evagrius had a name for this inability to focus—acedia—and scholars now variously define it as depression (the so-called noonday demon) or spiritual ennui (a kind of sloth). Acedia wasn’t caused by books, exactly, since a monk could suffer from it even without reading, but the book was initially as suspect a technology as the smartphone is today.

For me the most interesting part of the article was the end, which is a discussion of what the monks feared being distracted from.

Such careful study of the mind yielded gorgeous writing about it, and Kreiner collects centuries’ worth of metaphors for concentration (fish swimming peaceably in the depths, helmsmen steering a ship through storms, potters perfecting their ware, hens sitting atop their eggs) and just as many metaphors for distraction (mice taking over your home, flies swarming your face, hair poking you in the eyes, horses breaking out of your barn).

These earthy, analog metaphors, though, betray the centuries between us and the monks who wrote them. For all that “The Wandering Mind” helps to collapse the differences between their world and ours, it also illuminates one very profound distinction. We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most of us did not inherit their clarity about what is worthy of our concentration.

Medieval monks shared a common cosmology that depended on their attention. Justinian the Great claimed that if monks lived holy lives they could bring God’s favor upon the whole of the Byzantine Empire, and the prayers of Simeon Stylites were said to be like support beams, holding up all of creation. “Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner writes. “Attention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.”

Most people today, me included certainly, don't believe that their attention is necessary to bring God's favor upon their chosen religion and those who follow that faith. So the question becomes, what is deserving of our attention?

Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep.

One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of modern life corrode our attention is that they do not merit it. The problem for those of us who don’t live in monasteries but hope to make good use of our days is figuring out what might.

That is the real contribution of “The Wandering Mind”: it moves beyond the question of why the mind wanders to the more difficult, more beautiful question of where it should rest. 

Everyone has to answer that question for themselves. My answer is quite simple: by and large, my attention should be focused on whatever my body is doing.

Right now I'm sitting in a chair in front of my MacBook Pro, composing this blog post. For about 35 minutes my mind has been focused on what my body is doing, pressing keys on my laptop's keyboard that form words and paragraphs.

Yes, a few minutes ago I got up, went to the kitchen, and ate a cookie. Once that minor distraction was over, I went back to finishing this post.

This is the essence of mindfulness, the way I've come to understand it. Paying attention to what our bodily senses are experiencing; keeping mind and body in sync; keeping in touch with the physical reality we're part of at any given moment.

When I'm lying in bed, heading off to sleep, I try to keep my mind focused on sleepy things. When I'm in my Tai Chi class, doing a form with my classmates, I try to keep my mind focused on my body's movements.

So unlike medieval monks, I don't consider that there's any one thing most deserving of my attention. That depends on the situation. When I'm watching TV, or scrolling through my Twitter feed, what's on a large or small screen is what I try to keep my attention on.

And because I've been guilty of not wholeheartedly listening to my wife and friends when they have something to say to me, I especially try not to be distracted when we're having a conversation. I could definitely do better on this front, but I think I'm making some progress on being a better listener.

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.)

I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present.

After reading Haupt's story, I've tried to pay more attention to bringing my mind into sync with what my body is doing. As she says in the excerpt below, my body can be in either a neutral or pleasant place while my mind is worrying about something that happened in the past, or about something that could happen in the future.

Of course, our ability to time travel is part of what makes us human. So it's fine to do this in moderation. But when our mind is habitually at odds with the state of our body, that's not conducive to our happiness and well-being.

Here's the first part of the TIME story. Click on the PDF file at the end of this excerpt to see the eight non-meditative ways to practice mindfulness. Or click here for the TIME story.

There’s a certain disconnect that plagues almost everyone nowadays: Your body is doing one thing—sitting in a meeting, eating dinner with the family—while your brain is miles away.

Some might call it multitasking, but mental-health experts say it’s more problematic. Corrie Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and founder of Shore Therapy Center for Wellness in the Chicago area, says that a lack of mindfulness can deprive us of a deep connection to our most meaningful experiences. “Our body moves through the motions of life, but our head isn’t in the game,” she says.

Not being grounded in the moment—instead allowing our thoughts to skip from place to place—is an open invitation to stress and unpleasant emotions. “Our minds tend to focus on worries about the future, or upsets from the past, even when our body may be in a neutral or pleasant place.”

Enter mindfulness. The now-ubiquitous concept, which is rooted in Buddhism, has surged in popularity in recent years and is generally defined as turning your attention inward and maintaining an awareness of your thoughts, bodily sensations, and environment. The benefits are vast. A mindfulness practice can help lower stress, reduce anxiety (as effectively as medication, in some cases), increase a person’s capacity to savor positive experiences, stop rumination, promote concentration, and more.

Mindfulness can also help cure the blahs. Three years into the pandemic, Kelly Neupert, a psychotherapist in Chicago, says that many of her clients feel like they’re languishing. Becoming more mindful has helped them get in touch with what they’re feeling and why, she says—and cultivated a greater capacity to handle life’s curveballs.

After adopting a mindfulness practice, “I typically see that they’re less reactive and more intentional,” Neupert says. “They can respond to other people rather than react. The things that used to set them off, like running late for work or getting cut off, feel more tolerable.”

Meditation is the best-known way to achieve mindfulness—but it isn’t appealing to and doesn’t work for everyone. Some find that it’s awkward, or that they have trouble sitting still. Fortunately, “a person can practice mindfulness while engaged in literally any activity,” Goldberg says, and with any available amount of time.

Here are eight ways to practice mindfulness if meditation isn’t your thing.
Download How to Be Mindful if You Hate Meditating | Time

Mindfulness made simple, by my own mind

I like mindfulness a lot. It's become my favorite approach to meditation. But given how many books I've read about mindfulness, I'm struck by how overly complicated this activity can be described.

Which I think says more about the economics of the book business than about mindfulness.

After all, few people want to buy a book that's just a few pages long. So authors who write about this subject have to say a lot about something that appears to me to be quite simple.

Thus here's my exceedingly brief summary of how I've come to view mindfulness.

Naturally others likely will have a considerably different view of mindfulness. This is just what works best for me at the moment, though I readily admit that my perspective is continually changing.

When I can recall a blog post that dealt with an aspect of my approach to mindfulness, I'll share a link. (Turns out I could do this with all five.)

(1) As much as possible, I try to look without rather than within. The physical world grounds me when I pay attention to it. Often my mental world distracts me.

(2) Living in the present is better for me than living in a remembered past or imagined future, though often it is necessary to briefly sojourn in what was or might be.

(3) Emotions are to be embraced, not denied, whatever they are. What works for me is being happy when I'm happy and being sad when I'm sad. Ditto for every other emotion.

(4) The small things in life are just as important as the big things. One of my adages is I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things. 

(5) Seeking perfection is an absurd quest. I realize that just as every other aspect of my life is imperfect, so are my attempts to be mindful. 

Feel more with the body, less with the mind

When someone asks "How are you feeling?" that familiar question contains within it a lot of profundity. Because how we answer it reveals quite a bit about ourselves.

Mostly I take a few moments to think about what I've been doing recently. You know, how well or poorly my day is going. Or week for a longer time span. I'd remember what's been bothering me and what's been pleasing me, then try to describe the net effect of my joys and sorrows.

There's nothing wrong with this. But reading "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness" has led me to see that, like most people, I tend to look upon feelings in a mental fashion, not a bodily fashion.

Here's an excerpt from the chapter, "A Different Way of Knowing: Sidestepping the Ruminative Mind."

As we have seen, in doing mode we see the world only indirectly, through the veil of our thinking and labeling. If we think about our bodies in the usual way (from the perspective of our heads), then as soon as we feel listless on awaking, our mind fills with ideas about the body, what is going on in our lives, everything.

This way of paying attention will just make things worse. If, instead, we begin to focus on the body from the perspective of being mode, we open to a direct sensation of the body itself.

Moment by moment, we can become aware of body sensations but now in a new way, a way that does not keep us so stuck obsessing in our thoughts about how we are feeling in the body. This can help our feelings of sluggishness to dissipate or dissolve, like a fog lifting. We don't have to make them go away.

Sooner or later, they will inevitably fade on their own because we are no longer feeding them with incessant negative thinking, without even realizing it. In the process we shift from feeling powerless in their presence to having viable ways to be in relationship to them or anything else that arises.

The idea here is sound: we don't possess a body; we are our body.

When we look upon our body from on high, considering that we're an observer perched inside our head, we distance ourselves from the natural wisdom of the body as the varied experiences of life come and go. So if we want to know how we're feeling, being acutely aware of bodily sensations often, or usually, is the best approach. 

As we've said, doing mode and its thinking patterns tend to obscure the experiential quality of being mode. For this reason, mindfulness training involves extensive practice in getting in touch, moment by moment, with the direct experience of life unfolding.

The body is a great place to start cultivating this new way of being. The very physicality of raw bodily sensations provides an ideal base from which to develop a new, more direct, experiential, sensory way of knowing.

Anger. Joy. Sadness. Excitement. Calm. Love. Revulsion. Virtually every emotion and feeling manifests in bodily sensation. We say, "I had a sinking feeling," "My heart soared," "There were butterflies in my stomach when I got up to speak," "I was tingling with anticipation."

So instead of thinking about how we're feeling, or remembering how we've been feeling, becoming aware of bodily sensations is a more direct approach. Sure, after listening to what the body tells us, we may then want to put that knowledge into language that can be shared with others, since feelings are mostly private -- albeit often obvious to others, maybe more so than to ourself.

"You look upset," my wife may say to me. At times I deny this, but almost always my wife is right. I might be so used to that feeling of being upset that I don't recognize it in me. Dogs also are sensitive to human emotions. They don't need words to be aware of how we're feeling. 

Neither do we.

If, paradoxically, we can turn and face whatever it is that we are finding scary, difficult, or depressing rathe than perpetually distracting ourselves to no avail, we are actually still doing what the brain wants us to do: giving high-priority attention to the matter at hand.

It's just that we are no longer giving it attention in the old "doing" way. We are approaching the moment -- whatever it is, however it is -- not by reacting but rather by responding, by bringing an open, spacious, and affectionate attention to the feeling in the moment as it expresses itself in the body. 

Now we are in relationship to the alarm in a new way, one that provides us with a viable alternative to endlessly thinking about it. 

Why I find mindfulness so appealing after 35 years of religion

Having given up on organized religion, an Eastern/Indian variety, after 35 years of embracing the lure of returning to God by traversing supernatural realms, I've become enamored of mindfulness.

(See here and here for some previous blog posts explaining why.)

Before making another attempt at this, this is how a book I'm reading, and enjoying, "The Mindful Way Through Depression," describes mindfulness.

As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing to being so that we take in all the information that an experience offers us before we act.

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

It means we approach situations with openness, even if we notice that they bring up feelings such as fear. Being mindful means intentionally turning off the autopilot mode in which we operate so much of the time -- brooding about the past, for instance, or worrying about the future -- and instead tuning in to things as they are in the present with full awareness.

It means knowing that our thoughts are passing mental events, not reality itself, and that we are more in touch with life as it is when we allow ourselves to experience things through the body and our senses rather than mostly through our unexamined and habitual thoughts.

This is a wonderful balance to how religions typically view life, which definitely includes the religion I was a part of for those 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

The present moment isn't valued highly by religions. Neither are the body and senses. Nor is looking at things as they are rather than as they're hoped to be. Or giving up judgment.

For over three decades I accepted (with gradually increasing doubts, admittedly) that the purpose of life wasn't to be found in this physical world, but in leaving material existence and entering higher domains of reality beyond the physical.

So what RSSB taught basically was an anti-mindfulness: fill your mind with thoughts of God, the guru, and returning to the supernatural realm of Sach Khand; reject your weaknesses, often summarized as lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism; continually judge yourself to see if you're living up to the other-worldly standard of the RSSB teachings; look upon everyday life as an illusion not meant to be taken seriously, since your genuine divine form of existence lies elsewhere.

When I broke away from my religious dogmatism, it felt wonderfully refreshing to simply look upon myself as a human being having a human experience. Yeah, I realize that if you've never been religious, you're probably thinking, "Well, duh, why'd it take you so long to realize something so obvious?"

Good question. But not one that I spend a lot of time pondering.

The past is gone. I try to learn from my past mistakes. However, since they didn't seem like mistakes at the time, I do my mindful best to stay focused on the present rather than dwelling on what could have been if I'd done something differently in the past.

In no way do I claim to be proficient at mindfulness. I regret things that I've done. I worry about things that might happen to me in the future. I judge myself. I judge other people. Still, learning about mindfulness has helped me tone down all that.

I've learned that whatever I may think about reality, including the reality of my own life, the actuality of reality often turns out to be quite different.

So being open to surprises, to new information, to fresh insights, to being wrong -- that feels wonderful after so many years of erroneously believing that I knew what life was all about, including cosmic secrets that one day I would be privy to thanks to my initiation by a RSSB guru.

Now I look upon myself as an ordinary person living an ordinary life. After 35 years of religiosity, that feels absolutely extraordinary to me.

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it's better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness.

I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it.

In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature.

It needs fast reflexes rather than slow contemplation because by the time either prey or a predator appears in the short distance things are visible in highly murky water there's no time for planning. By contrast, when creatures evolved to live on land, now they could see a lion, say, on the far-0ff horizon, and so had an opportunity to decide on the best course of action.

Thus there isn't much need for clock making beyond intervals of a few seconds [for the sea creature], which means that there is no need for the brain to whir up an emergency motor-response plan for the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf, because there is no way to sense the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf.

This usefully constrains the metabolism needed to keep track of the far outer reaches of the outside environment and means any need to plan movements is limited to the timing of events with a small, near-reflexive range.

Hiding in the center of these plans is the observer, the conscious creature, who is just an accumulation of movement preferences and plans trapped inside a sensorium, keeping track of what it thinks the objects around it are and what it might otherwise do with itself.

Then, in his third way, House speaks of a theory of consciousness focused on movement, on doing, which fits with the first way.

A body, too, is restless to get moving; in fact, the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of those efforts. 

...Any act of thinking is just pretending to act out. Consciousness requires cells that want to move and that know roughly what will happen when they do, but are prevented from doing so.

...We are irritable animals that move well and think no faster than ten times per second; we are the product of the reduction of the one-trillion body problem [number of cells in the body, I believe] to the one-body problem; we are the product of a brain that is creating hypotheses the entire time about how best to act, knowing that all the outside world can do is irritate it and all it can do is learn, while alive, as much as possible from those irritations.

So we're hard-wired for doing, for action, for dealing with problems and opportunities in the world as conveyed to us by our senses and interpreted by the brain.

Which returns me to the depression and mindfulness book, "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness,"

The authors persuasively argue that a central problem of being human is that we try to apply the same procedures that work well in dealing with problems outside of us to problems inside of us.

This is a big mistake, though one that makes sense to most of us, since it is how we've succeeded in figuring out why our car won't start, how to get a better job, and so many other things that pop up every day that need dealing with.

In short, we assume that doing will work as well for our internal problems as it does for our external problems, while actually what we need is being.

We're rightly proud of what we can do through critical analytical thinking. It's one of the highest achievements of our evolutionary history as human beings and does get us out of a whole slew of fixes in life.

So when we see things are not going well in our internal, emotional life, it's hardly surprising that the mind often quickly reacts by recruiting the mode of mind that functions so effectively in solving problems in our external world. 

This mode of careful analysis, problem solving, judgment, and comparison is aimed at closing the gap between the way things are and the way we think they should be -- at solving perceived problems. Therefore we call it the doing mode of mind. It's the mode by which we respond to what we hear as a call to action.

...Imagine a car trip during which, every time we check to see how close we are to our destination, we find that the car has instantly moved farther away from it. This is tantamount to what happens in the interior world of emotions and feeling states when we call in the doing mode of mind.

That's why we often find ourselves saying things like "I don't know why I feel so depressed; I've got nothing to be depressed about," and then discovering that we feel even more unhappy. We've checked our destination of feeling happy and found ourselves farther away from it. We can't seem to stop reminding ourselves how bad we feel.

No big surprise, given the title of the book, but the way out of this trap is mindfulness, which puts in a being mode of mind. A subject for another blog post.

I'm reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.

 Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago.

What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one of the best books about meditation, whether or not someone is depressed.

I've only read a few chapters, but so far I'm anticipating that the reviewer was correct. I'll share a section called "Get Me Out of Here!" that illustrates a central theme of the book: how our efforts to fix ourselves can make things worse, not better.

The fact is that when emotions are telling us that something is not as it should be, the feeling is distinctly uncomfortable. It's meant to be. The signals are exquisitely designed to push us to act, to do something to rectify the situation.

If the signal didn't feel uncomfortable, didn't create an urge to act, would we leap out of the path of a speeding truck, step in when we saw a child being bullied, turn away from something we found repugnant? It's only when the mind registers that the situation is resolved that the signal shuts itself off.

When the problem that our emotions signal needs to be solved is "out there" -- a charging bull or a roaring funnel cloud -- reacting in a way that will allow us to avoid it or escape from it makes sense. 

The brain mobilizes a whole pattern of mostly automatic reactions that help us deal with whatever is threatening our survival, helping us get rid of or avoid the threat. We call this initial pattern of reactions -- in which we feel negatively toward and want to avoid or eliminate something -- aversion. 

Aversion forces us to act in some appropriate way to the situation and thereby turn off the warning signal. In this regard, it can serve us well, can even save our lives. Sometimes.

But it's not hard to see that the same reactions are going to be counterproductive and even dangerous to our well-being when directed at what's going on "in here" -- toward our own thoughts, feelings, and sense of self. 

None of us can run fast enough to escape our own inner experience. Nor can we eliminate unpleasant, oppressive, and threatening thoughts and feelings by fighting with them and trying to annihilate them. 

When we react to our own negative thoughts and feelings with aversion, the brain circuitry involved in physical avoidance, submission, or defensive attack (the "avoidance system" of the brain) is activated. Once this mechanism is switched on, the body tenses as if it were either getting ready to run or bracing itself for an assault. 

We can also sense the effects of aversion in our minds. When we are preoccupied, dwelling on how to get rid of our feelings of sadness or disconnection, our whole experience is one of contraction. The mind, driven to focus on the compelling yet futile task of getting rid of these feelings, closes in on itself. And with it, our experience of life itself narrows.

Somehow we feel cramped, boxed in. The choices available to us seem to dwindle. We come to feel increasingly cut off from the wider space of possibilities that we long to connect with.

Over our lifetime, we may have come to dislike or even hate emotions such as fear, sadness or anger, in ourselves and in others. If we have, for example, been taught not to "be so emotional," we will have picked up the message that expression of emotion is somewhat unseemly and may have assumed it wasn't okay to feel emotion either. 

Or maybe we remember clearly the drawn-out feeling of an emotional experience like grief and now react with dread when a hint of similar feelings arises.

When we react negatively -- with aversion -- to our own negative emotions, treating them as enemies to be overcome, eradicated, and defeated, we get into trouble. So understanding aversion becomes fundamental to understanding what gets us stuck in persistent unhappiness.

We run into problems because the unhappiness we are feeling now triggers old, extraordinarily unhelpful patterns of thinking from the past.

Sam Harris and Loch Kelly on nondual mindfulness

Today I set aside my doubts about Loch Kelly's approach in his "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide For Living an Awakened Life," and continued on with my re-reading of his book. 

I liked what I read, by and large. Then I listened to the daily guided meditation by Sam Harris on his Waking Up app. It struck me as highly compatible with what I'd just read in Kelly's book. Which isn't surprising, since both Harris and Kelly embrace a similar Buddhist approach, that of Dzogchen.

Here's my transcription of what Harris said.

Just sit comfortably. And close your eyes. And become aware of the weight of your body, the feeling of gravity holding you in place. See if you can let the shape of your body dissolve. And notice whatever sensations spontaneously appear.

As you pay attention to sensations, let your mind expand and become an open space in which everything is appearing. Notice if your mind feels contracted at all. Are you stressed, or tired, restless? Notice if there is any pattern of energy here that's coloring your awareness.

Recognize that too as a mere appearance in this prior condition of consciousness. 

However your mind feels in this moment, recognize that this moment is the only moment in your life that is your life. This is the only moment that stands a chance of being real. Everything else is just something you're thinking about.

Resolve to fully connect here.

The moment you realize your mind has been captured by thought, drop back and recognize thought itself as an appearance. Where does it come from? And where does it go? There is a single space of consciousness. 

See if you can feel your identity with that. Not meditating on it. Not wandering from it. Everything that's happening is happening in, and as, consciousness. And if it feels like you are the observer, the center of experience, see if you can observe how that feeling arises.

It must be something, yet another appearance. Otherwise you couldn't feel it. It too is arising in a condition that is totally undefined. Just be that condition. 

In the last minutes of the session, pay careful attention to each breath. Simply cover each inhalation and exhalation with your awareness. 

OK. Well, as you go about your day today, you might try an exercise. You'll confront many things that annoy you, that cause you anxiety. You'll see many things online about which you have a strong feeling of judgement.

As a frame for the rest of the day, see if you can just decide in advance to dial down your reaction to all of that. Dial it down to 50 percent. Be 50 percent less reactive, less perturbed, less judgmental. Just see if you can decide to do that, and see if it has an effect.

And I'll see you here tomorrow for the next session of the Waking Up course.

Before speaking more abut Kelly's approach to mindfulness, I'll share a recent Pearls Before Swine comic that illustrates what I find lacking in my own approach to mindfulness. 

OK, usually I'm not quite as bad off as Rat, but some days I'm right there with him. And I have to say that I think Rat is correct about what mindfulness is all about. Kelly includes a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a leading teacher of mindfulness.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. 

Here's how Kelly distinguishes traditional mindfulness from effortless mindfulness. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in another blog post. For now I'll just share this passage, which appeals to me even though I'm not completely confident that what he describes is attainable.

One simple way to distinguish the two types of mindfulness is to say that they are both being mindful but from different levels of mind. This is important because what you can be mindful of depends on what level of mind you're mindful from.

In effortless mindfulness, it is not as important to focus on what thoughts and emotions are arising but rather to ask, "Who or what level of mind are they arising to?" In effortless mindfulness, we shift from focusing on what we are aware of into focusing on awareness itself -- moving from a detached observer and into a view from interconnected awake awareness.

In deliberate mindfulness, we are aware, from our mindful witness, of things arising and passing. Effortless mindfulness invites us to be more intimately connected with our experience and all that is happening. This begins when we shift out of both our conceptual mind and our mindful witness and into awake awareness.

Deliberate mindfulness focuses on the contents of consciousness, while effortless mindfulness turns back to be aware of the context -- awareness itself. With deliberate mindfulness, we discover who we are not. With effortless mindfulness, we discover who we essentially are.

Effortless mindfulness does not lead to being detached from emotions but rather to both feeling more vulnerable and to having more capacity to be tender and welcoming of all feelings. The radical reports from my students are that our essential nature is loving, joyous, and free of worry, and we just need to untie the knots of conditioning to reveal these natural qualities. 

I'm giving "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness" another read

This morning I felt like brushing up on mindfulness, one of my favorite subjects, since mindfulness has become my meditation. 

Looking through my books about mindfulness, I decided to pick up Loch Kelly's The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. As I noted in a 2019 post, "Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness," I liked the idea of putting in no effort.

A book by Loch Kelly, "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness," came to my attention via an interview Sam Harris conducted with Kelly and shared on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I'm a fan of. 

Any book about meditation that has effortless in the title is going to get my attention.

For thirty-five years I practiced a mystical meditative practice that involved considerable effort via repeating a mantra, sitting in a particular posture, and adhering to various other rules (such as ideally meditating for 2 1/2 hours a day, which I did for many years).

By comparison, mindfulness involves much less effort, since the focus is on attending to what is right before us, notably the breath.

In his interview with Harris, Loch Kelly talked about how his mindfulness approach derives from Tibetan Buddhism, which differs in some regards from other forms of Buddhism. Basically Kelly (along with Harris) considers that awareness itself is key to mindfulness, with the contents of awareness, though important, being secondary. 

OK, in a way this is obvious, especially if awareness is viewed as closely akin to consciousness, if not exactly the same thing. For we can't be mindful of anything unless we're able to be aware or conscious of that thing.

But even given this obviousness, re-reading the first few chapters of Kelly's book this morning was pleasurable, in part because so far I haven't come across anything that goes against the principles I listed in my first blog post about the book as being essential for me to resonate with a book of this sort.

Though I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probable that these premises are true.

(1) The mind is the brain in action
(2) There is no enduring, unchanging self or soul
(3) Free will is an illusion
(4) We humans see reality through a species-specific lens
(5) Consciousness is created by the brain
(6) All living beings exist in a web of interconnections

So my favorite books about mindfulness and meditation recognize that those six statements most likely are how us Homo sapiens relate to reality. The six truths are grounded in modern science and neuroscience, though naturally there's room for quibbling about the exact nature of what I've summarized above in a half dozen pithy sentences. 

I'm not saying that every author who writes about mindfulness/meditation needs to explicitly agree with each of the principles above to get my stamp of approval. However, at least what they say shouldn't conflict with those principles, or my highlighter is quick to insert question marks in the margin of their book's pages.

Often the sort of mindfulness Kelly espouses is described as being akin to the familiar sky/clouds metaphor. 

Mostly our attention is captured by clouds. Rarely do we view a clear blue sky as being worthy of special notice, though after a long rainy spell, it might be. Likewise, not surprisingly the contents of consciousness are what we're mostly mindful of -- thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such.

Consciousness itself is like clear air. We need it to exist, but generally we aren't aware of air unless there's a breeze blowing. Inside as I am at the moment, air is an invisible entity that fills our house, yet isn't the sort of thing that draws anybody's attention.

(We've never had a visitor to our home say, "You have such beautiful air.")

Of course, a big difference between the sky/clouds analogy and consciousness/contents analogy is that we look at the sky as an object, while consciousness is the subjectivity that we are. Kelly uses "awake awareness" as a term for what effortless mindfulness is all about. He writes:

"So close that you can't see it" means that awake awareness is hidden in plain sight. It is closer than our own breath. We can't find aware awareness because awake awareness is not an "it." Awake awareness is neither an object nor thing that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.

It isn't a thought, emotion, image, belief, feeling, or even energy. Awake awareness is invisibly inherent within us and is where we're looking from.

We need to learn how to have awake awareness look within, turn around, or rest back, so that awake awareness can discover itself. Then, awake awareness is the source of mind from which we are able to perceive. 

Well, if awake awareness is the same as consciousness, just under a different name, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. After all, consciousness discovering itself sounds more than a little crazy, since consciousness is how we know everything. 

Our ability to know isn't an object. Kelly has told us that. So how can awake awareness discover itself? Guess I need to re-read more of his book to find out.

Or maybe I should switch to a different mindfulness book.