Mindfulness as flexibility
As I start piloting a program called Finding Mindfulness, I’m reflecting on what I think mindfulness is really about. Once again, I’m drawing on my experience getting physical therapy and massage to find a helpful analogy.
One time, my friend and gifted massage therapist Ron Aur Hod told me that my problem wasn’t so much knots in my muscles as adhesions – places where my muscles were sticking to my fascia. Fascia is connective tissue that creates a casing around muscles and other structures in the body. It’s supposed to slide past your muscles as they move. When it adheres or sticks to your muscles, you lose some of that freedom of movement, and develop pain.
Just as massage can un-stick fascia from muscles, I think mindfulness can un-stick layers of thought that are supposed to be able to move independently. It’s not that one kind of thought is good and the other is bad, just like it’s not that muscles are good and fascia is bad. It’s just that we need flexibility.
Un-sticking Layers of Thought
When all your layers of thought are stuck together, you feel like things in the outside world are running your life. For instance, you might hear your boss say “we’re behind schedule,” interpret that to mean that she wants you to work late, and immediately text your partner that you can’t make it to dinner, feeling as though your boss made you write that text.
But if we un-stick those layers, you can see that your boss didn’t say she wanted you to work late, and furthermore, if she does want that, you have options for how to respond. Some of those options may come at a high cost, but they’re worth at least a moment’s consideration. Some describe mindfulness as giving you that extra moment to consider your options before acting.
You may find that your layers of thought aren’t all stuck together. You know that your boss’s offhand comment doesn’t reach into your pocket and text your partner. But you still may have some stuck-together layers.
Perception and Interpretation
A common one—for good reason—is the stickiness between perception and interpretation. For instance, as you read these words, you’re probably forgetting that they’re dark colored squiggles on a light background, made of different colors of light emanating from a screen. You’re probably thinking about each word as a unit of meaning. But in fact, you are looking at a bunch of squiggles. The meaning exists in your mind, not here on the screen.
You’d be a really slow reader if you had to bear that in mind all the time! The more life experience you have, the more concepts you learn and mental shortcuts you build up. That makes you really efficient and skilled.
But there’s a reason that mindfulness is called “beginner’s mind.” It’s healthy to come back to reality every now and then and recognize that the world is just sending you a bunch of raw data. Even things as basic as words and chairs and houses are interpretations that you impose on that data. If even the chair you’re sitting in is a constructed concept, how far away from the bare facts of reality is your interpretation of your boss’s comment?
The point isn’t to go around “playing dumb,” of course. It’s to increase flexibility. If you go back to the bare facts, how many different ways can you make sense of them? How many different perspectives can you bring to them?
You may also find that, like with massage, un-sticking decreases suffering. When you peel back interpretation and focus on the bare facts of the situation, it tends to feel less distressing. It’s kind of like the feeling you get when you look into the night sky and contemplate the idea of infinite space—it puts things in perspective. Some see this as a way to escape your thoughts and feelings by insisting that you’re just a bunch of molecules in space so nothing really matters, but I see the shift into that big-picture perspective as a step that enables you to tend to your thoughts and feelings without drowning in them.
Interpretation and Judgment
Another layer you may be able to un-stick is between the interpretations you form around what you perceive, and the judgments you make about those interpretations. Perhaps you took a moment to consider everything your boss might have meant and realized that it’s very likely she meant that your team just won’t meet its deadline. And perhaps you find that to be a A Bad Thing. Your team will miss its deadline and therefore it’s a Bad Team. Or, perhaps you feel anxious at the idea that your team will miss its deadline, and you consider that a Bad Feeling, a problem that must be solved.
Even social constructs like missed deadlines and mental experiences like emotions don’t have to be glued to judgment. Can you think of a reason to be understanding of a team that missed its deadline? Maybe you can even think of a reason to be proud of that team.
Can you think of a reason to be understanding of a part of you causing you anxiety? Maybe it’s just trying to get you into gear so you can work fast and avoid the pain of missing a deadline. Can you even think of a reason to be grateful to a part that’s causing you anxiety? Mindfulness is often described as noticing without judgment, but if you can go even further than neutrality and into compassion for parts of yourself, that’s where real transformation happens.
The Benefits of Space Between
When you can see the independence between what’s going on (inside or outside of you), and your reactions to what’s going on (whether they’re thoughts, feelings, or thoughts about feelings, or feelings about thoughts…), something else really special happens. You realize that you can accept what’s going on even though you have feelings about it and want it to be different in the future. This is how I understand the Buddhist concept of letting go of attachment and aversion. I don’t see it as meaning that you don’t care about anything, or can’t choose to act to change things in the very next moment. Instead I see it as meaning that you don’t mentally fight against reality as it already is in this moment. Realizing that you can accept this moment and act for change in the next moment makes it safe to accept what is. And accepting what is is crucial to happiness, because you will lose a fight against reality every time.
Seeing the space between what is and how you react also means that you get to live in that space between, not inside the interpretations and the judgments. When you inhabit that spaciousness as the observer of your thoughts and feelings, then acceptance and compassion actually start to come naturally. They’re not just other thoughts and feelings that you pump up until they’re stronger than judgmental thoughts and anxious feelings. They’re the natural qualities of that space.
I’ve designed a five-week package called Finding Mindfulness to spark recognition of these different layers of thought, help you step into the in-between space, and respond to your thoughts and feelings compassionately. If you’re interested, book a free consultation with me to talk about how Finding Mindfulness could help you get unstuck.
Photo by Oluremi Adebayo