What Does Mindfulness Actually Mean?
Let’s try to clear up the confusion and jargon around what it means to practice mindfulness.
By Now you’ve heard about mindfulness. Self-help books and podcasts are riddled with guidance to be more mindful and ambitious promises about how many problems it will solve for you. Perhaps, you’ve heard that you should try meditating more often. Or doing more breathing exercises. Or maybe you’ve tried to pick up yoga, sound bathing, chanting, prayer, or another mindfulness practice. These can be wonderful tools. But they aren’t mindfulness by themselves.
To be clear, I love mindfulness. I’ll die on the hill that it’s the single most important skill you can learn to improve your mental health. And that most therapy techniques are essentially strategies to help clients access a state of mindfulness. That said, I cringe a bit when I hear it haphazardly recommended.
My regrets around the way mindfulness is portrayed are two fold and a bit contradictory. On one hand, I fear the concept of mindfulness has been watered down as the result of the casualness which it’s suggested and the cliche examples used to describe it. At other times, I think mindfulness is explained with a sort of complex and nearly mystical language that feels complicated and unappealing.
I should pause and be mindful myself here. Particularly to ensure my own mind isn’t leading me down a path of being short sighted or arrogant about how mindfulness is explained. To be sure, many people have benefited from the ways mindfulness has been taught. If that has been your experience, great! I’m glad you have found an affinity for the values of mindfulness! This rest of this article may be not targeted for you but feel free to read on.
If, however, you have struggled to connect with mindfulness or have given multiple good faith efforts and find you, “just can’t do it right”, I’m writing this for you.
How the mind, body, and you work together
First let’s set the stage quickly for how your mind, body, and you work together.
From the moment we wake up each morning, our minds begin an incessant narration. It’s automatically and constantly reporting on things going on around us and inside us. It’s making notes of what is good and bad, what we should and shouldn’t do, about what’s coming up and about what’s happened yesterday. We begin experiencing urges, and hopes, and anxieties, and dreads. The whole process goes on and on and doesn’t require any specific direction from you. It just happens.
For the most part, this works out great. Our brains, the clever pattern recognizing machines they are, can almost help us navigate through entire days with hardly any oversight whatsoever.
Relying on the mind to operate and guide behaviors without supervision is what we should think of as being not mindful. We’re functioning, but we’re not keeping an active awareness of that functioning.
To be mindful, instead,l simply means that you are actively and neutrally aware of the experiences of our brain and body. I should clarify what I mean by each of those bolded terms
The You
Take a second and consider what the ‘you’ is in your mind. Most people can hear and internal dialogue of words when they ‘think’. And most would say that this voice is ‘you’. But this voice is largely an automatic function of the mind. It’s constantly processing and remarking on events. Most of which you ignore or pay little attention to. The real you that is. The voice is not you, it’s a function of your brain. Not much different than the breath your lungs take. Or the senses your skin communicates to your brain. The voice is simply another automatic and ultimately mechanical part of you.
You are something different. You are able to notice all these sensations associated with your mind and body. You are able to listen to some and ignore others. You are able to choose when and when not to respond to the signals of your body. Some communities call this ‘you’ a conscience, or soul, or spirit, or any number of other terms. Being able to understand that ‘you’ are not the experiences of your mind and body is imperative. You are not the pain your body feels. You are not the thoughts your brain thinks. You are something else; something that is able to use the data (thoughts/sensations/feelings) from your body to make decisions.
Actively
Actively means on purpose. To be mindful means purposefully switching our awareness from auto-pilot to active attention towards what our mind and body is experiencing in a given instant. Usually our brain wanders out to the future or jogs through old memories. Or it’s reacting habitually to the live stream of life without any supervisory oversight from ourselves.
Actively being mindful might sound in your head like, “Oh wow, I notice I’m getting some anxiety when I think about this evening and I notice it makes me want to think of ways to get out of going”. There’s a deliberate “awareness muscle” you can practice and strengthen.
Experiences
Now let’s clarify what an experience means. I said previously that being mindful means paying active attention to the experiences of your mind and body. That almost begins to sound mystical but stick with me. Experiences shouldn’t be over explained or thought. They are just the sensations that your body and mind have. For example, the body can sense temperature, cuts, hugs, itches, heachaches, nausea, fatigue, pleasure, etc.
For your mind, experiences include thoughts, urges, desires, and emotions. These are to your mind as physical sensations are to your bodies. They are experiences that you can notice, and name, and decide to either respond or not respond to. Think of your body as a machine. A machine that ‘you’ use to interact with the world. To help you make decisions, this machine has a number of devices it uses to send you data which might be helpful in making decisions. Some of this data is physical (touch, pain, pleasure). Other data is emotional (fear, joy, peace, anger, worry). Still more data is cognitive (thoughts, predictions, memories). These are all examples of experiences. They are not you and they are not even specific directions. They are simply data that ‘you’ get to look at and decide if it’s worth utilizing or letting go.
You probably naturally understand this in terms of the body. We’re actually decent at being mindful of body experiences. Probably because they are talked about often and with less shame than thoughts and emotions. From very early in your life you’ve heard people talk about what their bodies are feeling and you’ve likely been practicing describing your own sensations for as long.
That said, we’re generally pretty bad at describing the experiences of our mind. We haven’t been practicing with our mind experiences the same way we have with body experiences our entire life. Our thoughts and feelings are just treated as true and urgent in a way that body experiences are not.
For example, you are probably familiar with waking up and having a mild headache. When that happens, you quickly make note of the headache and do a quick assessment to determine how serious it is. Ultimately, you decide to take some medicine and move forward with your day while understanding that it’s probably going to keep hurting for some time until it naturally processes along. With the exception of some medical based anxieties, we rarely get caught up in wondering what the pain is or what we should do or how serious it is. We have naturally learned how to talk and think about the pain without becoming consumed by the discomfort. Conversely, when we wake up anxious we often find ourselves consumed by emotional distress. We spiral into a struggle with the feeling and completely lose access to the version of ourselves that can accurately assess and respond to the situation. We’re not very mindful in those moments.
Neutral
Finally, let me explain what I mean by staying neutral about experiences. I use the term neutral in place of ‘non-judgmental’ which you might hear recommended in the context of being mindful. I like neutral because it seems a little easier to understand. When practicing the skill of being mindful, we should strive to simply notice that our bodies are experiencing things without deciding whether we should or should not be feeling those things. You’ll notice that your brain loves to evaluate the experiences it has. You’ll hear your inner dialogue report on how stupid you are for feeling that way, or how embarrassing your thought might be, or how dumb you probably looked earlier, or some other non-neutral evaluation of your current experiences. Or perhaps instead, your inner dialogue immediately screams that you need to stop feeling a certain way. Or threatens that if you don’t find a way to stop, your whole day will be ruined.
To be neutral simply means to notice what you are experiencing (physically, cognitively, and emotionally) without trying to change it or belittle yourself for having it. In your head it might sound something like, “Oh interesting, I notice that my body is feeling pretty anxious when I have thoughts about work later. And I notice that it’s telling me that I have to get this figured out soon or something bad will happen. And I notice that when I think about that, I begin to feel more anxiety.” as opposed to “Crap, I can’t believe I’m feeling anxious about this again, I’ve got to get myself calmed down before this afternoon”.
Putting it all together
When you put all these things together, you are being mindful. Mindfulness is simply paying attention to what you are feeling inside and out without deciding whether you should or should not be feeling that. That’s it. Hard stop. It is a type of awareness rather than any one particular trick or skill. At its core, being mindful simply means being aware of the ever changing experiences of the mind and body as they are occurring. Being mindful is ‘you’ being a collector of the data your body is giving you and deciding what to do with that information.
When you think of meditation, breathing, yoga, prayer, chanting, etc you should consider these as examples of ways to practice mindfulness but are not mindfulness in and of themselves. Mindfulness is a type of awareness and can be practiced literally in any given moment.
The more you practice, the more you will find you can pull yourself out of your automatic mind and into a more mindful form of awareness. You may also find that within this awareness, you are more controlled, more content, less reactive, and likely more confident. You’ll discover that you have more emotional space within yourself and can thus manage your reactions well even in the midst of challenging events. Learning to access mindfulness purposefully may also lead you to consistently choosing reactions reflective of your true self. Mindfulness opens up just enough space in your mind to be able to resist the automatic urges and cravings of the emotional mind.
In summary, my hope is to clear up some misgiving regarding mindfulness. Of all the skills I teach my clients, I might argue that mindfulness is the singular most useful. And it’s free. And it can be practiced anytime. You don’t necessarily need to practice or be good at any formal mindfulness exercises (meditating, breathing, yoga, etc). It’s simply a state of being able to describe what your body and mind are doing/experiencing while it’s happening without desiring to change it.
Edit: I finished this article but felt I needed to add a final note. If you are new to learning to build your mindful muscle you’ll probably discover that you’re not very good at it. That’s completely normal. Like any other muscle, it’s going to be weak until it’s intentionally nurtured and challenged. It gets easier and it’s worth it but be gentle with yourself at first!
Ben Taylor, LPC-MSHP works with adults utilizing an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy modality. He specializes in working with clients experiencing OCD, anxiety, and phobias.