Mindful or Mindless, That is the Question?

I think I didn’t realize how powerful mindfulness is until I began experiencing spontaneous bursts of rather acute awareness in my daily life. Seeing that I’ve been meditating since high school, I can’t quite say when this began appearing and I suspect that my timing won’t be the same as yours. But when it starts appearing, it’s quite striking.

Suddenly, I would find myself being sad watching a movie. But not just sad, but somehow really sad. Or, if I become angry, that anger would seem big, clear, powerful. However, this increased intensity wouldn’t overwhelm me. Instead, I could just feel it and somehow remain calm.

As this newly developed awareness became a regular part of my life, I realized how much I had yet to learn about myself – from myself!

What exactly happened?

Mindful vs mindless

If you are mindful, you are aware, you are experiencing present moments with acceptance. In order to fully cultivate mindfulness, you need to intertwine all three at the same time. It’s worth noting here that acceptance doesn’t mean that you are happy with what you’re mindful of, just that you’re able to accept it instead of running away from it. Acceptance is a prerequisite for change!

I am a firm believer that you don’t need to read one hundred books to practice mindfulness, but you do need to be clear about what you’re practicing. Remembering the definition is, therefore, conditio sine qua non of being mindful. The simplest definition that comes to my mind is: accepting awareness of present moment experience. Simple enough?

The opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness. This dichotomy together makes up a construct, one that allows us to map most of our activity.

In order to understand mindlessness, you have to understand that your typical mental state is normally, virtually mindless. You’re not an exception there in any way, this is, for better or worse, a part of our human condition. We don’t exactly live in a culture that encourages us to pause and smell the flowers!

What do I mean by that? 

I am not trying to say you are a mindless person. What I am saying is that you can spend most of your time lost in your past memories and fantasies of what you think your future should look like. Even though your life takes place in the present, your psychological apparatus isn’t always located there. Instead, it time travels to the past and creates (usually gloomy) predictions for the future.

We tend to let our minds operate on autopilot most of the time and the result of this is that we tend to let our bodies be in one place and our minds in another. Have you ever been distracted to the point where you don’t know how you got to where you are?  If you talk on the cell phone while you are driving, do you sometimes look around you and wonder: how did I get here? Your mind was concentrating on the conversation and your body was actually driving the car.  Scary, isn’t it?

You could really hurt yourself (or others) if you experience this too often. We can get so distracted by interpersonal events that we do things automatically without thinking (mindlessness).  Without guidance from the conscious mind, all sorts of things happen in our life.

We rush through life most of the time in a mindless state.  We hurry into a coffeeshop, order the same coffee without even thinking. And even though we get that coffee daily, if asked, we probably wouldn’t be able to describe its taste in detail. We go to eat at a restaurant and are so distracted by our conversation or others’ conversations that we don’t even taste what we have just put in our mouths.

We tend to rush through life skipping over all the most important events mindlessly trying to rush from one thing to the next.  We always want to “get to the next best thing” (or so we think) in our life. In the process, we forget to experience our life and enjoy it. One day, when we turn back, we might find that we were absent during some of the most important things that have ever happened to us even though we were physically present.

Time passes by so quickly and when we reflect back on our life we wonder where the time went. It is a vicious cycle: mindlessness makes it hard for us to be with more difficult parts of our everyday life and we become more easily overwhelmed. This only encourages more mindlessness.

When was the last time?

When was the last time you stopped and really experienced life?  Are you focusing on what you are reading right at this moment or are you wondering what you are going to do in an hour, this afternoon or tomorrow? Do you glance up at some of your fifty-five open or pinned tabs?

Stop what you are doing right now and think about what really matters in your life.  Think about a memory that you really treasure.  Was it with someone?  Was it a vacation moment?  Was it a life event?  Whatever it was just fully think about that moment. 

In thinking about that moment, were you thinking about the past or imagining the future? To fully appreciate moments in your life, you need to be fully present and notice what is happening in the here and now.

Choosing to be mindless

Take a good, honest look at your daily life and ask yourself: where am I mindful? Then, ask yourself a more difficult question: where do I choose to be mindless?

Being mindful and being mindless is, in a way, a choice. Not always a conscious choice, but a choice. When we chase after productivity, we sometimes switch into mindlessness, what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls the doing mode. By not attending to our present moment experience, we’re able to ignore our boundaries and check off more items from your checklist.

There is an implicit fear here. That fear is that you will somehow do a lot less if you were mindful of how tired or anxious or unhappy you are. And while that may or may not be true (I don’t know, I’m not psychic), one thing is certain. By choosing to be mindful you will allow the reality of your experience to confront the principles that guide your behavior. You will be able to see what genuinely works for you and what doesn’t. Being mindful opens you up to being changed by your day-to-day experience. That kind of letting go is an act of unprecedented bravery in the world we live.