Week 22: Be Mindful

Mindfulness is a core skill that has multiple benefits: increased ability to pay attention, more self-awareness and empathy for others, fewer negative emotions, a stronger immune system, less pain and improved recovery from surgery. Becoming more mindful of your inner and outer world involves being aware without being attached. This means that you notice more and react less. A good resource for learning how to be more mindful is Steven Hayes book, Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life.

In the Chapter on Letting Go, Dr. Hayes makes the point that a barrier to mindfulness is an unwillingness to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and emotions. Willingness is reflected in the ability to tolerate the silence, the pause, the inactivity, the stillness. It means not squirming and fussing or jumping up at the next available opportunity. It means greeting, even welcoming, uncomfortable thoughts and feelings rather than trying to avoid them. Trying to avoid painful feelings inevitably leads to more pain and ultimately to a sense of victimhood and suffering.

In my own meditation practice recently, I recalled the scary "what now?" apprehension between each breathe as I sat at the bedside of my father and then my mother-in-law who died in quick succession. With each of them, their final breathing was labored and often paused for "long" intervals (20 seconds perhaps). The silence between breaths was terrifying. "What now? Is this the end? Is s/he in pain? How will I react?" The thoughts came up without effort. It would have been so easy to attach to one of those thoughts and gotten carried away on the "mind train" of worry: "I won't be able to stand it. It will be horrible. I can't stay here a moment longer. I'm a terrible person to think of leaving at a time like this." How did their dying become about me?

Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying wrote: "Just as the ocean has waves, or the sun has rays, so the mind's own radiance is its thoughts and emotions. The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by them. The waves are the very nature of the ocean." My first meditation teacher would gently remind us that thoughts and feelings would inevitably come up because it is "the nature of mind."

It is not our thoughts and feelings themselves but our reaction and attachment to those thoughts and feelings that creates suffering. In becoming more mindful, we learn to bob on the waves of thought and feeling, and simply observe. As we observe mindfully, we can more readily calibrate the necessary response and then catch the wave when the time is right.