Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash
In 2022 I spoke at an international (virtual) conference for cancer clinicians - the Tripartite Colorectal Meeting to be wildly specific. I gave a keynote on gratitude, and two other talks/workshops, one of which being an Introduction to Mindfulness. This piece is an edited version of that talk.
I am forever waiting for proof I’ve become the type of person who is mindful enough to write about mindfulness. Who pauses deeply and often. Who breathes with such spaciousness that small animals sense my peace and want to curl up at my feet. Yet I also know that when I view mindfulness in this way, I am missing the point entirely: with my neuroses and flaws, I am over here; mindfulness, with its confounded equanimity, is way over there.
Bottom line: we all have nervous systems and primitive brain regions riddled with safety features - alarm bells and escape plans - ready to galvanise and activate in less than a heartbeat. Paradoxically, it is the speed and strength of these circuits that get us in such a pickle and form the basis of our suffering. This is a universal predicament.
So too is mindfulness universal. It is not granted to some and withheld from others. When practised regularly and over time, mindfulness can help all of us navigate and soothe these gnarly little loops in our hard-wiring that keep us primed to continually escape the present moment, and grasp at (or contract away from) our experience.
Which brings me back to: What the hell even is it?
Appearing as a mind training technique in India more than 2.5 thousand years ago, mindfulness was part of Buddhism’s broader philosophical education. The teachings were delivered as a way to help these early students find release from the trappings of a reactive mind and its subsequent cycles of suffering. It was essentially understood, even then, that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, to borrow the name of a famous Harvard study of 2010.
Contemporary science is happy to rattle off its many benefits. In hundreds of evidence-based studies (am gonna let you google this one it’s all there, trust me), mindfulness has been shown to improve immune function, heart health, emotion regulation, working memory, resilience, mood, sleep, relationships, chronic pain and inflammation. It also has been shown to decrease stress, heart rate and blood pressure.
At its essence, mindfulness is a neural capacity we have that allows us to track in real time whatever is arising within our experience, in the present moment. This corresponds to the relatively recent brain function (somewhere in the last few million years) of metacognition - i.e. we can be aware that we are aware. “I know that breathing in is happening right now”, for example, or “I notice sensations of agitation in my belly”.
The practice of mindfulness is, simply, choosing to do the tracking: it’s like consciously turning on a light switch to help us see our experience clearly. Mindfulness lets us point this light like a torch, so we can notice, with curiosity, what’s happening with our breath, in our body, or with what we’re thinking, feeling, or doing, exactly at the time that it’s happening. It is the conscious, intentional directing and sustaining of our attention in the manner of a kind and friendly scientist.
When we choose to return to the present moment with mindful awareness, we are enlisting that most recently evolved, higher functioning part of the brain, namely, the prefrontal cortex, seat of our executive function, strategic thinking, wisdom, compassion, creativity, humour, perspective and, yes, metacognition. (Not a bad place to hang out.) When this region is activated, we experience respite from the incessant babble of the mind; our amygdala (the brain’s alarm button) is down-regulated; the secretion of stress hormones into our body is temporarily halted; our heart rate and blood pressure are lowered, and our parasympathetic nervous system is activated as the body and brain register feelings of safety.
Mindfulness is like a muscle, and it can be strengthened. We can consciously grow our capacity to stay in the present moment. Meditation is simply when we take this muscle to the gym: we give it a practice, a training, in order that it grows stronger.
(*Quick disclaimer: meditation is an umbrella term. There are so many forms that it seems impossible to speak of it generally. For this piece, I will focus on meditation of the breath. My reference points are classical Buddhist mindfulness teachings, contemporary neuroscience and psychology, and the rich interface where they all meet.)
The instruction for meditation is simple: sitting still, (or lying down, walking or standing), we gently place our attention on an object, frequently the breath. We stay with this object of our attention, noticing the ever changing sensations in our field of awareness - the body, the breath, the mind, the heart. The process of breathing acts as a useful anchor for our attention for two reasons: firstly, it is always and continuously occurring in the present moment; secondly, the very act of focussing the attention on the breath often has the effect of slowing the rate of respiration, thereby activating our parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system, and lowering heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels.
Our minds will wander, because this is what minds do: our default mode of self-obsessed thinking/planning/ruminating will always have the stronger internet and will happily bump us from our signal at any time. This is a fundamental part of the practice, and not proof that we are terrible at meditating.
The word mindfulness comes from the Pali word ‘sati’, and is perhaps more accurately translated as ‘remembering’. Implied in this is the fact that we forget - in other words, we lose our signal, all the time. ‘Sati’ acknowledges that this bumping and distraction is universal, natural, and to be expected. It is what we work with: we get lost, we remember, we come back, we get lost, we remember, we come back.
Mindfulness training is an in situ field practicum where we meet our minds in the wild. On the cushion, it is fairly guaranteed that we will get bored, tired, restless, and distracted. We will be afflicted with pains, itches, aches, obsessions, sorrow, rage, and the sudden realisation we need a haircut. We will rehearse, plot, dread, crave, regret, yearn, mourn. And this might all happen in just the first five minutes.
Over time, we may start to notice and track the feral trains of thought that charge through us, without needing to rifle through all their contents and clutch them to our fragile egos. We might meet them instead with curiosity, labelling them “Thinking, thinking…”, and then kindly invite our attention back to the breath. We might begin to notice the pull and push of the mind, the churning or contraction in the belly, the tenderness of the heart.
And as we practise remembering, we learn to stay with the discomfort without necessarily reacting to it all. The stronger our mindfulness muscle grows, the less we are subjected to the dominant knee jerk habits of our survival brains. We begin to see that we are in a constant state of flux, that nothing is fixed; that feelings, thoughts and their ripples simply arise and then fall away, in continual motion.
We can bring mindfulness into other areas of the day, off the cushion. This is sometimes referred to as ‘informal mindfulness practice’, and is where we hold common actions or activities, say, of drinking coffee/washing hands/eating lunch/waiting in a queue/sitting in a meeting in our conscious awareness: staying present, noticing when the mind wanders, then inviting it back.
These gross experiences are powerful sensory hotlinks back to the ever-changing present moment. Rather than skimming over the precise richness of our lives on automatic pilot, we can instead choose to enter the alive, pulsing stream of sensation that is our daily life, and provide some respite to our default setting of incessant, ego-driven commentary while we’re at it.
Practising in this way - on and off the cushion - mindfulness becomes our moderator and our equanimity trainer. It asks that we don’t clutch at or reject our experience, that we are more spacious, and that please can we put down our score cards. It asks us to be curious. It reminds us gently that - just as with every other phenomenon - our sensory experiences are transitory, ephemeral. They simply have a beginning, a middle and an end, rather than an innate charge or valence that requires our opinion.
Many people come to a meditation practice because they want to change something about themselves that they don’t like. I know I did. I wanted to be less angry, more patient, less afraid, more disciplined, a better parent. However when we are in this type of relationship with ourselves, where we see our flaws and wish to fix or exile them, the reverse can happen. We can find ourselves in a state of resistance to our deepest vulnerabilities, and stay identified with our survival mode behaviours - paradoxically, breathing more life into them. We mistake the practice for its desired outcomes.
And this is where mindfulness pulls the rug out from under us: in a boss and seemingly counterintuitive move, mindfulness tells us it just doesn’t mind about all our crap. It invites us to turn lovingly and with genuine curiosity towards these ragged parts of our most primitive selves, and invite them back home; to let them know they may be included in the wider constellation of who we are. It teaches us to offer ourselves compassion for the suffering we have endured as humans living this flawed, wonderful, tricky life. It teaches us that we are larger than the wiring of our survival brains and our tightly wound nervous systems. And over time, through practice, we might realise the vastness of the space through which all our experience flows. We might enter a more alive, electric sense of presence, a spaciousness where the heart is central, and where we inhabit our bodies, and their wisdom, fully.
I think Rumi says it best:
Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul
And now, in this ocean of pearling currents,
I’ve lost track of which was mine.