Mindfulness or “The Totally Bearable Lightness of Being”

It’s January again, which means it’s time to try New Things™. If there’s one thing that I would pitch to help immensely with anyone’s mental health, it’s a practice called mindfulness.

Guh, no, Dr. Ying, not that hippie-dippy meditation stuff…

Listen. Yes I understand this has been a hot topic in corporate wellness since before COVID. And yes I understand many people have tried it and have it “not work.” But having led a mindfulness practice group for four years, I found that mindfulness is poorly taught. When done correctly, functional MRI studies have found increased neuronal activity and connectivity in the brains of mindfulness practitioners which correlate with stress reduction. As a personal anecdote, mindfulness does have a positive effect on stress and anxiety for me as well. It’s free, low-tech, and family friendly. What else do you want out of an activity? In this first of a three-part series, I will enlighten you as to what mindfulness is truly about.

Mindfulness is the simple state of noticing your own existence: no more, no less.

Because we are inhabiting human bodies, our experience of life is a bombardment of all sorts of stimuli - physical and mental, external and internal - to which we are biologically wired to have a strong inclination to react. Besides the obvious stimulus/response patterns like turning to see the person shouting your name or withdrawing your hand from burning pain, we humans have a rich internal world full of subtle stimuli and responses that are intangible and often happen faster than we can register they have happened.

For instance, imagine receiving a phone call (in this day and age) from a loved one. There may be tens of thoughts, feelings, and impulses that run through your mind before your phone’s second pulse of vibration ends: Are they okay? I’m feeling stressed. Maybe I should ignore the call… etc. Ultimately, the sum of these forces compel us to make a decision, which is a mental reaction, to either pick up or ignore the call. In any case, you are probably not 100% aware of these myriad of experiences. They scamper across your mind’s eye like bugs flitting outside your field of vision. Their presence is known, their forms a mystery.

In the mindful stance, we try to observe the entire experience without reacting. This is not equal to ignoring the stimuli. That would be mind-less-ness, I would call it, such as sleeping or otherwise dissociated from reality. Mindfulness derives from the Zen tradition of Buddhism. From a young age, Buddhist monks practice awareness of mundane tasks: eating, falling asleep, walking, breathing, etc. So for the non-monks of the world, I break the mindful stance down into four dimensions to help guide the practice.

Mindfulness is the 1.) intentional 2.) awareness of the 3.) present moment 4.) without judgment.

Intentionality refers to the time and space we set aside to be mindful. This may include a five-minute time block between meetings or a nook in the apartment that you like. Intentionally setting a mindfulness block in the middle of rush hour traffic or on the subway may be doable but is ill-advised for starting the practice, as distractions abound in those instances.This dimension exists because we are not Buddhist monks who live every day in the state of Zen; we are capitalists in a Western-influenced society where our livelihood is based on judgment, action, and future-oriented thought.

Awareness is the core “action” of the mindful stance. You can do it right now. Become aware of your five senses. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are you smelling and tasting? Touch is a particularly rich sense that we miss out on most of the day as we often focus on the virtual world of the screen. Touch includes the sensation of your breathing, the texture of clothing, local atmospheric conditions, and any other somatic stimuli like heart rate, hunger, and muscle aches. Our thoughts comprise a sixth sense. The metaphor of a “stream” of consciousness is particularly apt because the water carrying our thoughts moves without our effort much of the time. We can sit back and watch our thoughts without interfering with them like subtitles to a movie.

When we do anything more involved than being aware, such as willing the body to move physically, we shift out of the mindful stance. In our mental space, if we initiate an internal dialogue of any sort, that also constitutes leaving the mindful stance. On the other end, if we conk out for a nap or dissociate into a fantasy, that is also shifting out of the mindful stance, but in the other direction of losing awareness.

This kind of awareness in mindfulness is the application of a paradoxical concept from a foundational text of Zen Buddhism, the Daodejing. There are multiple lines in the mystical treatise, when translated from its original Chinese, which call for “effortless action” or “intentionless action” in order to experience the world with utmost clarity. For our clinical purposes though, fMRI studies have also shown that one a person is observing their current body’s state, the neuronal activity associated with relaxation states (medial prefrontal cortex) and “self-”states (anterior cingulate gyrus) increases.

This seems intuitive but I tack this on because practically speaking, this is often a distraction point for people starting off on their mindfulness journey. I have heard of beginners losing their awareness and instead start going through a to-do list in their heads. Or their mind wanders to a time when they were feeling distressed in the past and replay it over and over. Distraction is natural, but the ability to not react to the distraction is the key skill of mindfulness. Using the minimal amount of mental exertion, we have to bring our awareness back to the present.

Of note, parallel realities like fantasies also constitute a leaving the mindful stance (e.g. daydreams about worlds that are not or what-if scenarios). This leads me to the most common and most insidious of ways that we get distracted. If someone during their mindfulness practice is wishing for improvement of their mental state, then that is not considered mindfulness of the present, but instead is an investment of our mental energies into the future. One may have spontaneous thoughts that arise with such wishes, but to engage further would mean they are trending away from “intentionless action” and into a more intentioned stance.

Judgment is the annotation of our raw experience. When we judge, we leave the mindful stance to inject our intentions on how to change our experience by assigning a positive or negative quality. The one I hear about the most is how beginners constantly question whether they are doing it “right.” In the mindful stance, right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negative do not exist. We are either being mindful or not being mindful, and inherently there is no reason for either state to be good or bad.

This last dimension is what makes mindfulness difficult for people who are suffering from mental illnesses. The nature of their experiences is that of suffering. So understandably, I have seen beginners avoid mindfulness because they become so aware of the pain. In the next part of this series, I’ll write about some other nuanced takes as to why mindfulness is so difficult and how to reframe your thinking if you want to improve your practice.

To summarize mindfulness in two words: simply be. When we are taking in the moment without responding to the urge to do things, we are fully present. To preview some of my next post, mindfulness is technically not a coping skill. A skill implies it is difficult to do and practice is toward honing an expertise. Mindfulness is a return to a primordial existence, meaning it is actually just getting in touch with your innate ability to self-soothe.