UNDERSTANDING MINDFULLNESS

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The origins of mindfulness can be traced back to Hindu and Buddhist writings. The word itself is a translation of the ancient East Indian word sati, meaning “awareness,” and Buddha considered it to be an important factor on the path to enlightenment. The concept of awareness remains an important part of our understanding of how a mindful approach to life can help us manage our stress.

Defining mindfulness

Mindfulness isn’t the easiest concept to grasp or define. In part this reflects its long connection with Buddhism and other early spiritual traditions, as well as its association with the practice of meditation. Mindfulness can mean different things to different people.

Simply put, mindfulness is about being fully aware in the present moment. Being mindful means attending to your immediate experience; detaching from your thoughts and feelings; viewing them with a sense of openness, curiosity, and compassion; and accepting them without judgment.

The following components are necessary to become more mindful:

Maintaining awareness: This means you’re able to step out of your usual routines, worries, and fears and be conscious of what’s happening in your life. You become an impartial observer both to your inner world — your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations — and to what’s happening in the outside world.

 Paying attention: Attention involves focused awareness. To be mindful, it’s important that you pay attention. Mastering mindfulness means training yourself to sustain your focus on whatever becomes the object of your attention.

 Remembering: You have to remember to be mindful — to control your awareness and attention. In fact, the word “remember” comes from the Latin re meaning “again” and memorari meaning “be mindful of.”

Being in the moment: Being in the present is an important concept in practicing mindfulness. You need to be aware of specific aspects of your world just as it is right now.

Being non-judgmental: Our minds are hard-wired to make judgments. We make judgments all the time, both consciously and unconsciously. It certainly worked for humans in their cave days, when not making a judgment could result in becoming the entrée for a hungry stalker. But letting go of judgments frees you from your history, your expectations, and your distorted thinking. Rather than looking at your world with judgmental constructs, such as good-bad, right-wrong, like-dislike, and so on, you can begin looking at your world more openly and with more acceptance.

Being non-reactive: Reacting implies an immediacy of response that most often reflects pre-existing judgments, historical patterns, and emotional biases. Reactions are usually automatic. Responding, however, is a more deliberate and controlled action. It gives you more options.

Practicing compassion: When you practice compassion, not only are your mental processes changed but you also become more caring. Freed from negative judgments and biases, you can let go of your critical self, and you become kinder, gentler, and warmer.

Much of your stress comes from a lack of awareness. Your mind is constantly processing thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors that have happened in the past or may happen in the future. You can easily get overwhelmed by all the activity and become a prisoner of your worries, fears, angers, and upsets. While much of this processing is conscious, much of your thinking and feeling is automatic. If you can step back and gain more awareness of what your mind is doing, you can cope with your stress more effectively. Mindfulness is a valuable way of doing just that.

Dispelling myths about mindfulness

Mindfulness is hard to learn: Actually, cultivating mindfulness is like acquiring many of the other abilities you have learned, such as driving, operating your computer, learning a second language, or playing an instrument. It takes some time, effort, and practice. In the same way, time, effort, and practice are needed to make mindfulness an effective tool in your stress-management arsenal.

It’s just a New Age fad: In fact, an impressive and growing body of research supports mindfulness as an important approach to stress management.

Mindfulness is just about relaxation: Mindfulness can result in a relaxed state, but that isn’t its main goal.

Mindfulness is the same as meditation: While you can meditate mindfully, a major objective of mindfulness is being in the world and coping with others less stressfully.

Mindfulness is just distraction: Not really. True, you may be distracted by some of the mindfulness training exercises, but that definitely isn’t the goal. In fact, mindfulness gives you the ability to step back from your stressor but attend to it and experience your stress in a different way.

Mindfulness is just positive thinking: Mindfulness is more about giving up any kind of evaluative thinking, positive or negative.

It’s like a religion or cult: Nope. Mindfulness can be practiced without any connection to a religious group or sect, or any body of beliefs.

Figuring out whether mindfulness is right for you

You may be thinking, “I don’t know. This mindfulness stuff is a little too New Age for me. I’m not a sit-in-a-corner, cross-my-legs-and-stare-at-my-navel kinda person. I’m sure it works wonders for many people, but it’s not my style. I get bored pretty quickly. Maybe I’m less spiritual or not evolved enough, but it all sounds a little cultish to me. I’m not sure I have the patience to do the exercises you’re going to want me to do. What if I just skip all this?”

If you’re thinking that, you’re not alone. Many years ago, when I began exploring ways of reducing stress, I too was wary of the more meditative approaches that seemed to be anchored in early religious or philosophical teachings. They seemed a bit alien and mystical. But, as I eventually learned, a better way to look at mindfulness is to view it as a tool that can help you focus your attention and awareness — and eventually free you from being an unwilling victim of your negative and automatic thinking. Mindfulness gives you options. It isn’t just meditation. It’s a highly practical stress-reducing tool that can be integrated into other parts of a more complete stress-management program.

Yes, I will ask you to try some simple meditative exercises. I’ll ask you to sit in a chair and focus on your breathing, and I’ll ask you to eat something mindfully. These and other such exercises are valuable ways of training yourself to turn off the worries and concerns filling your mind. But mindfulness is much more than this. So, no, you don’t need to light up some incense, join a cult, or become more religious. You just need to put aside your misconceptions and give this approach a real try.

Copyright © Allen Elkin Phd – Originally appeared in Stress Management for Dummies 2^nd edition by Allen Elkin