Church of the Churchless

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.