Mindfulness - a perspective after ten years of practice

As I approach ten years of doing my best to live mindfully, I thought it might be useful for people thinking of dipping a toe in the 'mindfulness' water to hear a perspective from someone who's been doing it for a while.

I'm no paragon of mindfulness - but I have at least plugged away for long enough to have had sufficient successes to know that it's worth persisting.

Why I began

At the time (about 10 years ago), I'd managed to get an assignment remotely working exclusively with a remote team. It was a great job, and a wonderful team to work with. However, this meant I got zero personal contact other than a very occasional trip to visit them. After a while I began to realise that this wasn't doing anything good for my state of mind: I found myself getting more and more stressed, for no obvious reason. I guess that, during the last couple of years of the Covid Pandemic, self-isolation and working at home, problems like this have become rather normal - so perhaps I had a foretaste of what many have had to go through in recent years.

What I was looking for

I went looking for something that would help. One of the characteristics I was looking for was 'something that was always there' - some approach that could help anytime, all the time, and not just some 'self-help trick'. After a long search, that's what led me to mindfulness. I have found that it's something that I can reach for whenever there's a difficult moment.

How I began

I have read many books on mindfulness (I've listed a few of my favourites at the bottom), but the first still stands out as a masterpiece of simplicity and directness: Mindfulness for Dummies by Shamash Alidina. I can't recommend it enough: in case you're put off by the 'for Dummies' in the title, don't be: it's a surprisingly comprehensive coverage of mindfulness. Other books I've read flesh out more detail, but I've yet to read anything that contradicts what's in it.

What Mindfulness IS

The essence which, if you know anything at all about mindfulness, you'll have heard before is

Pay attention to what is happening in the moment

This is such a disarmingly simple instruction that it hardly sounds worth saying. Nothing to see here. In fact I think it's worth expanding this just a little bit; 

Pay attention to what is happening in your own, felt experience, in this moment right now

How it works for me

Here's a tiny example that starts to demonstrate the power of this approach in everyday life.

At my previous work location, we were lucky enough to have a coffee bar onsite. It was rather popular, which meant that there was often a lengthy queue. When I was in a hurry, I'd often find that I got annoyed (ok, not very annoyed) at the wait, and arrive at the head of the queue in a grumpy state. I was just 'there in the middle of the annoyance', without really consciously thinking 'I am annoyed'.

The habit of mindfulness changes that in a small but significant way: I consciously notice that I am annoyed. 

• That's a crucial moment; having done that - I pay attention to how it feels to be annoyed - not in some vague way, but literally - how does my body feel? The answer is that (for example) my chest feels tight.
• The idea is to treat this feeling with simple curiosity, and give yourself time to investigate the feeling more thoroughly.
• By a mechanism that I still don't entirely understand, continuing to pay attention to those physical feelings slowly causes them to dissipate and, even better, tends to cause the feeling of irritation to evaporate.

Here's what I think is going on. When we pay attention to how our body feels rather than the external circumstance, we effectively distract the mind from continually reinforcing our bad mood ("I'm still in this darned queue!"). Also, focussing on how it actually feels to be in that bad state pretty much of it own accord prompts our conscious and subconscious mind to 'drop' that feeling - it feels as natural as stepping into the shade on a blazingly hot sunny day.

My example is obviously rather mild - but the same approach can be used any time, for whatever arises. It's really about shining the light of our attention on whatever is happening, in the most simple way imaginable - and it can apply just as much to positive experiences as to difficult ones. As I've practiced mindfulness, I've become amazed at how much of the time it's possible to not really be consciously aware of what's happening.

Meditation as mindfulness training

Mediation forms the core of my mindfulness practice. Mindfulness meditation effectively sets aside some time to practice mindfulness in a distraction-free setting: I practice mindfulness of breathing almost every day. For me it helps to reinforce the habits that allow me to bring mindfulness to difficult emotions when they happen - the most important of which (for me) is to actually notice that I'm having a difficult emotion! I should confess that I am far from perfect in this regard - but it helps often enough that I will certainly keep practicing.

Whole books have been written on the topic of meditation, so I'll leave a deeper dive to others, or perhaps a later post.

Where next?

The ultimate goal is to be able to bring mindfulness to more and more moments of our lives - ie to be fully conscious of our experience for more and more of the time. This can be really quite challenging under certain circumstances: for example I am terrible at being mindful as I eat: so it's something I'm working on right now. I'd encourage you to give it a try!

Selected Reading

Mindfulness for Dummies, Shamash Alidina

The place I started - and an excellent, practical introduction to mindfulness.

How to Train a Wild Elephant, Jan Chozen Bays

The 'Wild Elephant' of the title is our untrained, non-mindful mind. This book takes a simple and very direct approach - with one specific and simple thing to try out each week - a chapter for each week of the year. Chapters I like include 'Leave no trace' (something I'm bad at, so well worth practicing!).