Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is a frame of mind, rather than a technique. There are many forms and adherents swear by what works best for them. Deep breathing or the Hail Mary prayer for Catholics both focus attention. The New-Age consciousness-raising goal is to become aware of more than conscious brain activity which is only 5% of overall brain activity. The rest seems “hidden” from conscious control and includes our feelings, art, music, and many other non-verbal tasks – the hidden brain, so to speak. Even in college football, linemen are taught to expand their peripheral vision through exercises aimed at “sensing” movement in their blind spots. Many other people just want to become more sensitive and aware of their feelings, intuition, musical or artistic sides.

Mindlessness, on the other hand, is exemplified by an inability to stay focused. This means intrusive thoughts pop up while you’re trying to empty your mind in a meditative position in a quiet room. You flit from thought to thought, feel bored, get fidgety, pant when you are trying to breathe deeply, and think about all of the things you need to do. This “mindlessness” is called “monkey brain” in Buddhist teaching.

Deep Breathing

The underlying goal of deep breathing is to gain total control of your attention. You focus on breathing in-or-out, deep-or-shallow, fast-or-slow, labored-or-relaxed, because that is what you want to focus on. Eventually, you become aware of how you feel rather than what you think. Once you reach this stage, you begin to sense the non-verbal, out-of-awareness, brain activity that you couldn’t see before.

Breathing is just the most obvious natural repetitive behavior we do. It might take a few minutes to settle down, but that is the point. As an alternative, you can also focus on a chant or focus on movement like Yoga or Tai Chi. Some people find it necessary to start with an external stimulus like 432 Hz sounds or listening to chanting, but you must eventually focus on feelings and sensations within yourself. It is like “generating alpha waves.” You are not really thinking about anything except focusing your attention on one neutral thing for a long a time. Of course, you need to be physically comfortable in order to stay in one position for any length of time. 

It requires effort to maintain this type of attention for long. Buddhists feel breathing is a perfect example of being aware of impermanence – that things are always changing. As you do this, you seem to naturally feel better and even feel comfortable with things you had been stuck on.  

I consider it a success if you can sit like this for 10 minutes. It means you are beyond the beginner stage. You pay attention to your breathing and consider any random thought or feeling to be an intrusive thought.  It is important not to grade yourself. Get into the Zen frame of mind, “Nana korobi ya oki” (literally: seven falls, eight getting up) or “Fall down seven times and get up eight.”  Just correct yourself without criticism and keep going. Think of time as irrelevant.

Why is Mindfulness an Intervention?

For most people, this preliminary step of calming and focusing carries over to feeling better. The result of taking this short break allows you to live up to the saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff”, as the title of a book by Richard Carlson stated. Although it may sound trite, deep breathing might be your first glimpse into what is called living in the present.  Living in the past means you are dwelling on regrets, past memories, and what ifs, while living in the future means you are preoccupied with getting something or solving something that you don’t have yet. For many people, this preliminary step is enough. For others, the next step is meditating about something while in this frame of mind.

Mindfulness has been developed into a treatment for borderline patients (Marsha Linehan) and is now used with many other conditions. Her approach, called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), is a cognitive-behavioral treatment that helps improve emotion regulation, impulse control, interpersonal relationships and self-image. Personal use of DBT techniques is akin to Mindfulness Meditation. There is an advantage to improving your own mindfulness – it helps you stop overreacting, getting angry, or not empathizing with people. This helps you stay in the right frame of mind, so it is easier to handle difficult situations.

Meditation – A Preview

One definition of meditation is “having considered thoughts about something”. There are innumerable things to meditate on.  Buddhists might focus on impermanence, defilements, cravings, clinging, or other deep issues. Christians might focus on who God is and what he has done to provide or to shape thoughts and character. This is not at all like praying to God to give you something or to seek forgiveness. The experiential side is a feeling of insight – seeing something in a way you hadn’t seen before.

I personally believe you can consider anything you are doing “meditation” if you are maintaining total focus on your present positive experience.  For example, Tai Chi Chuan is often called “moving meditation,” and the Flow Experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) which both fit this mindful state of mind. Csikszentmihalyi summarized the common experience as a loss of self-conscious reflection, a merging of action and awareness, a sense that you are in total control over your actions, a distortion in time (i.e. time flies), and an intense rewarding experience. The experience is generally difficult to put into words and it feels more than rational thought. Although meditative states are usually not sustainable for long periods, the feeling is what motivates us to seek more of it.

Future posts may address more on Mindfulness Meditation.