What Exactly is Mindfulness? A No-Nonsense Explanation

There’s too much talk about mindfulness. Thousands of studies and hundreds of popular books are published on the topic annually. I’ve had students who have read dozens of them, yet their meditation practice wasn’t exactly flourishing and their understanding of what mindfulness is, wasn’t all that clear either.

So let’s take a few moments to clarify the basics. You will agree with me that if you want to start meditating, it’s good to have the basics, if nothing else, then just to know what is it that you’re supposed to be doing. I already wrote about starting a practice, so let’s take one step back in this text and consider: what is it that you are practicing when you’re practicing mindfulness?

What is it?

Mindfulness is an innate ability of the mind. If you think mindfulness isn’t for you, you’re wrong. If you think you can’t do it. You’re wrong. If you think it takes some special set of spiritual beliefs to practice it. Guess what? You’re wrong again.

Let me say it again: mindfulness is an innate ability of the mind. It’s our ability to be present, to be aware of what’s happening (in and around us). One way to define that innate ability is the following: awareness of how our experience unfolds in the here and now.

From this definition, we can deduce a few things:

1.      Our experience never stands still: it’s constantly unfolding and changing.

2.      Our awareness exists only in the present moment.

3.      Our experience is how we structure our interaction with the world.

If the third one isn’t self-evident, consider the following. Something happens around you, you become aware of it. Once you become aware of it, you think about it or feel a certain way. Your thoughts and feelings are different ways to make sense of what you became aware of and then you act based on that. So your cognition and how you make sense of the outside world are in constant dialogue, effectively making you a part of the world you perceive, since the inside and the outside constantly interact and shape each other.

Mindfulness as a practice

Mindfulness as a practice involves using and finetuning this innate ability we all have. My favorite definition comes from Jon Kabat – Zinn:

Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally.

According to Kabat-Zinn, therefore, there are 3 components to mindfulness practice (once again, that number):

1.      Paying attention

2.      Intentionality

3.      Non-judgmental approach/ Acceptance

In reality, that means that when we are practicing mindfulness we  choose (intention) what we’re going to be mindful of (awareness) and we do so in a way that we don’t judge ourselves as bad or good based on what arises.

What does it mean to be non-judgemental?

It’s quite easy to make the case that we can’t not judge. You see something beautiful and you think “oh, this is so beautiful”. You taste overcooked pasta and you think “how dare you commit such an atrocious crime?” You remember something nasty you did in high school and you think: “Oh, I was such a jerk back then!”

There’s judging and then there’s judging.

Our psyche works through classification. So by virtue of that fundamental fact, whatever we experience we will put in a box. When we don’t have a box for something, we feel anxious. That kind of judging is a normal activity of the mind and there’s no way of stopping it.

The judging that we try to suspend (and fail over and over – more on that in a second) is calling ourselves names. You may judge an experience as “thoughts about work”. That’s a judgement. You can judge an experience as “a painful memory”. Once again, it’s just a classification of a mental event. That’s fine. We don’t need to suspend that and, moreover, we can’t.

“Non-judgemental” means that you refrain from labeling your experience morally. You don’t call yourself an idiot, a horrible person, you don’t call your mom an overbearing jerk, etc. In order to get ahead of our judgmental minds, we might introduce a classification of experience as: pleasant, neutral, unpleasant. Then whatever you become aware of, you label as one of the three.

Two types of mindfulness practice

 We can practice mindfulness in two ways: formally or non-formally.

Formal mindfulness practice involves dedicating some time every day and meditating. This can be done in four basic ways: sitting down, walking, standing or lying down. Lying down often leads to falling asleep so until your practice reaches a certain stability, I suggest you do it sitting down.

The simplest form od mindfulness meditation is to sit, focus on your breathing without trying to control it and coming back to the breath every time you get distracted. In fact, what I just described is something that might lead a Buddhist all the way to enlightenment. So simple, so powerful and yet quite difficult to practice.

I encourage my students to learn the basic techniques, practice regularly to stabilize their attention enough and then, by all means, expand to other techniques and try different approaches. There’s nothing wrong with learning new techniques, so long as you have an established practice with a tried and true technique. For me, it’s focusing on the breath. It’s what I do daily no matter what other techniques I experiment with.

The second way of practicing mindfulness is called informal practice. This means bringing mindful awareness to your everyday experience. You can choose to be mindful of many routine tasks like washing the dishes, walking to work, drinking your morning coffee, etc. You may also want to make a list, choose a random task every week and do it mindfully.

Many people think of this as an easy way to achieve mindfulness and choose it over formal practice because they feel like they don’t have to make any accommodations in their lives to implement it. This eventually might get you anywhere, but the road will be much slower.

In my opinion (and it is just an opinion, I don’t own the truth), both formal and informal mindfulness are necessary, but together. If you have to choose only one type to start with, then make it the formal kind.

Mindfulness and spirituality

If you have a spiritual practice, it’s a good idea to merge it with your mindfulness practice at some point, although in the beginning it’s best if they are kept apart or close together. For example, if you pray and prayer is already a part of your daily routine, it’s quite useful to attach mindfulness before or after, because you will have an easier time making it a habit.

But to be clear: you don’t have to hold any spiritual beliefs whatsoever to practice mindfulness. Remember, it’s an innate ability of the mind. Innate abilities of the mind don’t have much to do with anyone’s specific religious beliefs or absence thereof.

Benefits

What do you get from practicing mindfulness? Here’s a list of some things we know from research:

·        Better attention

·        More awareness of your feelings

·        More conscious control over your actions

·        Increased capacity to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions

·        Less stress

·        Lower anxiety threshold (lower baseline anxiety)

·        Better insight into the workings of your own mind

·        Ability to make decisions based on your values vs being impulsive

·        Boosts creativity

·        Lower blood pressure

Not in the body and not in the mind

Mindfulness is not a cognitive thing, but it’s also not a physical thing. It’s both at once. It’s an activity that shows most clearly how embodied we are. We see our thoughts affecting our bodies and we see our bodies giving birth to sensations that then spark new thoughts. We see how both thoughts and sensations come from our interactions from the world. The “inside” and the “outside” start seeming like an arbitrary division. We fully embrace the interconnectedness of our awareness.

This may seem like an exotic or an esoteric insight but it’s really mundane, banal even. You’ll see as soon as your practice begins.

I hope this clears things up.

Good luck and don’t give up. Keep going.