I know, I know, mindfulness has been overdone, but I've been writing and advocating on this powerful practice since back in the days when it was underdone. From a book I'm working on about bipolar recovery ...
At the same time Socrates was challenging his students to think for themselves, over in India the Buddha was urging his followers to tame their runaway brains by using the mind to watch the mind. “Mind precedes its objects,” reads the first line of the Dhammapada, the best-known of the Buddhist scriptures. “They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a defiled mind is to draw pain after oneself, like a wheel behind the feet of the animal drawing it.”
This is another way of saying if you are contemplating that shrimp dip in the fridge, it will be in your stomach faster than a two-year-old can dash out onto the street. We simply can’t help ourselves.
It also helps illuminate that perplexing passage in Matthew where Jesus proclaims that lusting in your heart equates to the sin of adultery. Immediately after, Jesus preaches that if your right eye is causing you to sin, then pluck it out. That troublesome right hand, too. In striking parallel, in the Fire Sermon, the Buddha tells a thousand monks that every part of us, including the mind, is raging out of control. Accordingly, he advises, the noble disciple develops an aversion for the eye, the ear, the tongue, the mind, on and on.
In so many words, 500 years and a continent apart, the two Wise Ones are reminding us how notoriously unreliable our brains are. We default to our fears and desires. Together, these thoughts obstruct our path to salvation and enlightenment, not to mention our basic happiness. Thus, if we think of lust as a version of obsession, the brain is fully locked and loaded - if the opportunity is there, night is sure to follow day. You’re best off not even thinking about it, but that’s far easier said than done. Is switching off our thoughts, or at least reining them in, even possible? Enter mindfulness.
Mindfulness, says Jon Kabat-Zinn, “is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to things as they are,” rather than as we want them to be. Paying attention on purpose is what we do when driving along an unfamiliar thoroughfare at night or being on your best behavior in a room full of strangers. You need to be on top of everything going on around you. Your mind cannot afford to wander. Maybe you call it concentrating on the task at hand. But in this heightened state of awareness, you are also practicing mindfulness.
Now take that same level of concentration and direct it inward. Try this simple experiment: Settle yourself in a comfortable position, take a few relaxing breaths, close your eyes, and focus your attention on the breath going in and out of your nose. See if you can keep it going for a couple of minutes. Congratulations! You have just observed, perhaps for the first time in your life, your mind in action. Not an encouraging sight, was it? There it was, your precious mind, wandering in a zillion different directions at once, all over the place, like Esmeralda Marcos in a shoe store. Every time you tried to bring it back to the task at hand, there it would go again, your thoughts scattering like feathers in a high wind - into the past, into the future, into different locations and dimensions.
Perhaps you were thinking about what you should have said to your co-worker two weeks ago (still bugging you, isn’t it?). Meanwhile, as that doobee-doobee-doobee-do passage in the Monkees’ tune, Last Train to Clarksville, keeps playing over and over in your head, your mind fast-forwarded to a week from now (”Maybe I should give him a call”), and into a different time zone (“I wonder what the Gobi Desert is like this time of year”), and into fantasy worlds (“Dragons are cool”), everywhere, in fact, but where it was supposed to be - in the here and now, breathing through your nose.
My God! It’s a three-ring circus in there! Not surprisingly, this is the first major realization most of us come to when we meditate for the first time. Various meditation and yoga and breathing exercises can help slow down the brain and bring a little peace and quiet into our lives. But here, we will focus on using our awareness to avoid becoming captive to the first random thought that enters our head.
It all comes down to our ability to recognize our erroneous thinking as it happens and make timely interventions, using every hack at our disposal. We catch ourselves, say, being overconfident or over-optimistic and act before those thoughts have a chance to gather momentum. Depending on the situation, we can simply allow the thought to float away or we can contest that thought with a good healthy dose of pessimism. (Or, if you insist, to replace that dreary pessimistic thought with a cheery optimistic one.)
In this context, think of mindfulness as that engineer’s app we’ve implanted in our brain, the one that goes off when we’re we’re about to screw up. Buddhist teachers compare this sense of heightened awareness - what they call guardian alertness - to the mahout, the driver on the elephant, ever ready, at the slightest indication, to apply a steel hook to the animal’s head or face. The mind watching and guiding the mind, this is the essence of mindfulness. Sorry about the poor elephant.
To be continued ...
John McManamy is the author of Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder and is the publisher of the Bipolar Expert Series, available on Amazon.
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