Mindfulness is now everywhere. As an adjective the popular media talks and writes about mindful this and mindful that. Early in the development of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program's curriculum, Jon Kabat-Zinn cautioned not to make mindfulness "a dime store remedy." While ideas about mindfulness are interesting and stimulating, mindfulness properly understood through direct experience is not about ideas or states of relaxation or about being a synonym for remembering. Mindfulness is the process of awareness itself or awarenessing. It's more a participle/gerund rather than an adjective. Mindfulnessing is a process rather than something rigid and fixed. It is not a given.  It is about being aware of the present moment, the right now, in a very active way. Seemingly simple, mindfulness is a skill that needs to be acquired and practiced. Taken out this context "mindful" and "mindfulness" become just fancy words. It is at heart, an inclusive loving attention that moves both toward the object and toward oneself.

 

     The implication of using the word "mindful" in a dime store way as an adjective or the word "mindfulness" as a noun in this way is that all the benefits and the scientific validation of those benefits of the active practicing of mindfulnessing are automatically being attached to whatever product or self-improvement program is being advertised. This is one characteristic of "dime store remedy." As the ancient Romans would say, Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware). Mindful "this" and mindful "that" is gradually becoming cliché, as if mindfulness too can be put on automatic, on autopilot. The new myth that our contemporary culture fosters is the myth of the efficacy of multitasking and its benefits. 

 

     So how does someone begin practicing mindfulnessing? Jon Kabat-Zinn is fond of saying that when we are born, we are not given a user's manual that can enable full human potential. We are on our own, subject to our cultural conditioning and that usually means we are on automatic, on autopilot. To come off that we need training to counter our personal and cultural entrainment. Jon Kabat-Zinn designed MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) for this purpose, and it has been the "gold standard" that is used in the majority of the scientific research studies that have validated the benefits of regular mindfulness practice including numerous positive health effects such as lowering blood pressure and helping to relieve both physical and emotional stress. ( Although the summary of all the research on the health benefits of MBSR is beyond the scope of this newsletter the research on the positive effects of MBSR on health and the neuroplasticity of the brain has been  well-documented. Finally, more recently, the ability of MBSR to reduce the use of opioids for people in pain and to reduce inflammation has been documented, as well as exciting research on MBSR's potential for lengthening life through its impact on telomeres at the end of chromosomes.)

 

    Specifically and on purpose, the very first mindful practice in the very first class' curriculum of the eight week MBSR course is not a formal meditation practice, but an eating experience. What better place to start. Food is ubiquitous in our culture to the point of creating an obesity crisis. "Fast food" has become a new noun. "Throwing things down" (while working or texting), "wolfing down", "gulping down", "inhaling", etc. are the new verbs in a culture where the rhythm of life is becoming faster and faster. We educate for fast. So why not begin with what mindfulnessing is right here. Begin with the "full catastrophe" (the name of Jon Kabat-Zinn's first book is Full Catastrophe Living) of contemporary eating.

 

     Those of you who have heard me speak know that I have told the story of how a number of years ago I found a journal I had kept as a child which I had entitled, "Things I've noticed about Diane." In it I carefully documented such things as, "When I pick up a grapefruit, I experience its shape before I experience its texture," and, "When I put soft, cooked peas in my mouth, I experience salt on a certain part of my tongue and sweet on another." I like to quip that this all came in very handy years later when taking a wine tasting course. Interestingly, when similarly as part of our eight week MBSR course students and alumni come to the course's half day retreat, they often comment on how richly satisfying the experience of eating the simplest lunch can be, when we are all practicing eating it together mindfully. 

 

     When we bring mindfulnessing to eating, we start by slowing things down-by approaching the food in front of us as if for the first time: By smelling the food, tasting the food, really seeing the food, experiencing its color and texture...while all the while becoming more and more aware of how the body is reacting to the food and how the mind and feelings are interacting with it, perhaps even making up a story about it or recalling a memory associated with it. (As I write this I realize this sounds like it might be a lot of work since many of us have become habituated to workaholism, texting, tweets and soundbites as if they were an inevitable fact of life. Ironically, the experience of eating something mindfully is quite the opposite.) What I am trying to say is that as we begin to really attend to what we are eating, we become somehow aware of how our feelings and emotions are engaging with it, how we might actually be liking, disliking or even indifferent to the experience, and this actually takes no time at all and perhaps seemingly, paradoxically, can be truly renewing.

 

     Paying attention, acknowledging, and becoming aware, with affection, of anything else that might be spontaneously arising while eating such as: why am I eating this, does my body need this, how pleasurable is this, what am I actually tasting, what associations am I having, etc. (all of this occurring in the flash of an eye without "work" as we ordinarily understand it) can be accompanied by much bigger insights such as: "Am I mostly unconscious when I eat?" "Where do I go?" "Can I practice experiencing myself eating both 'mindfully' and 'mindlessly' and recognize that as mindfulnessing practice?" If so, something truly new and fresh (and difficult to put into words) is seen and experienced. And this seeing is a moment of true nourishment. It is the antidote to the insight a manager for AT&T shared in a workshop led by David Whyte, when she said in effect, "Ten years ago ...I turned my face for a moment... and ten years had gone by."  Living mindfully has actually been described by some of our students as being akin to going on an easily accessible "vacate"-ion, or, "visiting my life in a new way, with fresh eyes."

 

     William Faulkner, the great American novelist, in one of his letters writes that there are only two plots in all of literature. One is the story of the self and the other is the story of the world. Mindfulnessing is a way of being with oneself and the world. It's a practice one keeps working toward. It is a tool for self-discovery and world discovery. It is attempting to sincerely and nonjudgmentally see what is. And this, like any skill, needs practice, practice, practice. It's not about trying to fix anything, but about being more fully with whatever is, just as it is. It's as simple and as difficult as knowing what we are doing, when we are actually doing it. Or put another way, it is about learning to actually re-cultivate the too often forgotten skill of bringing a more visceral awareness of what we are doing (or not doing) to what we are doing.