As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, we can’t control our thoughts and emotions.
Despite this fact, we often identify with the emotions or thoughts that we experience, labeling them as “ours” and letting them define us and drive our behaviors. As I’m writing this for example, the thought pops into my head to take a sip of the tea next to me. Sure enough, my right hand lifts off the keyboard, reaches out, clasps the mug’s handle, and brings the mug to my lips. This simple action (or series of actions) was a direct response to some variation of the thought “I would like some tea right now”. While the thought to drink tea is innocent enough and there seems to be little-to-no harm in acting on it, we often experience thoughts and emotions that, when repeatedly acted upon, do have the potential to cause harm, or at the very least to move us away from the fulfillment and happiness we ultimately wish for ourselves.
Developing an awareness of the patterns of our minds and how these patterns influence our behaviors is the job of mindfulness, a term that has become increasingly popular in recent years. The benefits of practicing mindfulness —reduced rumination, lower stress, increased working memory, improved focus, increased satisfaction in relationships, and cognitive flexibility to name a few — are well documented, and seem to position mindfulness as a tool with the potential to impact almost every area of our lives. Mindfulness, defined by Dr. John Kabat-Zinn as “The awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”, could not be simpler on the surface. Hidden in this simplicity however, is the depth we are exposed to when we move from describing what it means to be mindful into the arena of practicing. What we find when we stop to observe what is going on in our minds is often uncomfortable and eye-opening.
As a first-year graduate student I became curious to explore for myself what mindfulness meditation was really about. When I first began I had a lot of lofty ideas about “finding myself”, “transcendence”, and images in my mind of young, athletic yogis sitting on the edge of a canyon cross-legged, the setting sun’s golden rays washing their smiling faces. After a few months of following a daily guided meditation in my basement apartment, I enrolled in my first silent meditation retreat; a three-day weekend at a small retreat center in Loveland, Colorado.
When thinking back on the first day of this retreat, I am reminded of a study published in 2014 where participants were asked to sit in a room with their own thoughts for 15 minutes. The participants were told that pushing a button on the table in front of them would administer an electric shock, and despite all the participants previously stating that they would be willing to pay money to avoid experiencing an electric shock, 67% of men and 25% of women in the study chose to self-administer electric shocks in that 15-minute period. The article published in Science Magazine, provocatively titled “People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts”, was a sentiment I was deeply sympathetic to on the first day of the retreat. Although I can’t be certain, I am fairly confident that if I had an electric buzzer with me that day I would have pushed it at some point. I quickly saw just how much was going on in my mind, and began to grapple with what it meant to have so little control over these thoughts and emotions. I also realized how much of my life I had been spending “in my head”, and began to wonder what it would be like to be in my head less, and in the world more. The importance of developing a way to help me be less reactive to what I was experiencing in a given moment, and to understand myself as being more dynamic than just a combination of thoughts and emotions, quickly became apparent as well.
It is important to recognize mindfulness not as an exercise in relaxation, but as an exercise in developing awareness. Too often our minds are lost in thoughts about the past or planning the future, and mindfulness is the conscious act of bringing ourselves back to the present moment; to reconnect and become aware of what is happening right now. Because the act of living our lives only happens in the present moment, it makes sense that we can increase our sense of autonomy and well-being by increasing the number of moments in our lives where we are able to be fully present.
As our awareness of our present moment experience improves, a number of options present themselves regarding what to “do” with the information. There are a wide number of therapeutic approaches that are explicitly centered around mindfulness, and a number of others where the client undoubtedly benefits from this increased awareness as well. While I do not offer mindfulness as the silver bullet it may sometimes be described as in the media, and I never require that my clients practice mindfulness, the potential benefits of integrating mindfulness into every day life are significant enough that most of my clients are willing to give it a try. Making your mind your friend is the journey of a lifetime, and is something we can all aspire to.