By Choden
Featured image by Luca on Unsplash
Mindfulness is being practiced everywhere these days from monasteries to businesses to schools, and even in the military. It has become part of mainstream life. Yet there is a danger of it becoming superficial – a quick fix to relieve stress and feeling low. What is so important is to practice mindfulness with heart – to bring kindness and compassion into the practice of mindfulness. Then it has the capacity for making a big difference and to transform our lives.
Mindfulness is a deceptively simple concept, but one not that easy to define – and even more difficult to practice correctly. The most well-known definition of mindfulness comes from a leading pioneer of secular mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn who defined it as, “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.”
The problem with many of the secular approaches to mindfulness is that it is viewed as a clinical intervention to deal with medically diagnosed conditions such as stress or depression. This approach is helpful when it comes to gathering evidence because research trials can be set up to test the efficacy of mindfulness in treating one of these conditions. Much of the widespread popularity of mindfulness has come from the fact that scientific testing has given it the seal of approval. But the problem is that mindfulness has been co-opted into the modern ‘treat it and fix it’ culture.
None of this is bad, but it limits the capacity of what mindfulness has to offer. It fails to appreciate that ever since the time of the Buddha mindfulness was the pathway to a unique form of happiness.
Everyone is looking for happiness, but in modern life the happiness that most of us are drawn to is hedonic happiness. This kind of happiness is all about getting and consuming – filling an inner sense of hunger and lack. Modern advertising culture knows this all too well and so we are fed with endless prompts for how to fill the inner void and feel better: ‘try this for headaches, try that for heartache and if you are feeling down try the new, clinically proved mindfulness!’
But there is another kind of happiness that is all but forgotten in modern life – it is what the ancient Greeks called eudemonia. This is the happiness that comes from following one’s inner moral compass and system of values. This kind of happiness is about recognizing that there is a pre-existing completeness and freedom within that we can tap into and savour. But first we need to learn to be still and patient. This is the kind of happiness that mindfulness can guide us to.
In Buddhist texts this is called sukkha. It is the opposite of the better-known term dukkha, which is commonly translated as suffering, but more accurately refers to the underlying feeling of dissatisfaction that afflicts us even when we have all the external conditions in life that we desire. The Rolling Stone’s hit the mark with their famous song, “I can’t get no satisfaction”. By contrast, sukkha is an inner wellspring of wellbeing and contentment that does not depend on external conditions but wells up from within when we recognize it and create the conditions to support it. And when we experience sukkha everything else in life is a bonus. We no longer desperately need people or things, but instead this energy of wellbeing joyfully flows into our relationships and life situations.
In modern life it is perhaps not surprising that we are hooked on hedonic happiness and are stranger to this other kind of happiness. Neuroscience tells us that we have a strong negativity bias because our brains are primed for protecting us from threats. Furthermore we are powerfully oriented to get those things we need in order to survive and procreate. This has led to the evolution of two well researched emotional regulation systems in the brain, described by evolutionary psychologist, Paul Gilbert, as the threat and drive systems.
Now the problem with modern life is that the many of the threats are internal. Our forefathers were rightly threatened by tigers jumping out of bushes and ran for their lives without thinking twice, but for many of us the tigers live in our very own minds! Just reflect for a moment on the inner self critic who criticizes your every thought, word and deed relentlessly day and night – and how much cortisol this releases into your system. And moreover, there is just so much on offer to ‘get’ in modern life, both real and virtual. Just reflect for a moment on how much your iPhone has to offer and how addicted we have become to these devices. So, it is no surprise that our approach to happiness is all about avoiding and getting too.
There is, however, another system in the brain that lies undeveloped in many of us. Paul Gilbert describes it as the ‘soothing-affiliation system’ – described by others as the rest and digest system. When we are not threatened and we have what we need, there is the chance to calm down, feel content and connect with others. I say ‘chance’ because many of us never give ourselves the chance. We are always in threat and drive. Yet we can access the soothing-affiliation system. Compassion focused mindfulness steers us in this direction and this emotional system gives us access to the inner abundance of sukkha.
A simple example that illustrates how these three emotional systems operate is that of driving your car. Imagine you were in high gear all the time, always revving up the engine and racing about, and you never changed down into a lower gear. The high gears are like the threat and drive systems, connected to the sympathetic nervous system and the lower gear is the soothing-affiliation system, connected to the parasympathetic nervous system. We need the full range of gears, both higher and lower, but the problem is that many of us cannot access the lower gear. We are living in high gear all the time – in threat and drive – and so it is no wonder we become stressed and unhappy. And it is no surprise that our approach to happiness is of the high gear variety – hedonic happiness.
How do we learn to change down into low gear? Let’s try doing the following practice in two stages:
Stage 1: Straighten your back and feel the weight of your body on your seat. Now close your eyes and bring your attention to the full movement of your breathing. See if you can deepen the in-breath slightly, noticing how the abdomen rises when you breathe in, and lengthen your out-breath slightly, noticing how your abdomen falls as you breathe out. Every time your attention gets lost in thinking, perhaps dwelling on something in the past or worrying about something in the future, gently bring your attention back to the present: to your breathing and the awareness of your body resting on the seat.
Stage 2: As you breathe in and out notice the variety of sensations felt in your body. You might notice a physical ache or a pain, feelings of tension or stress, or a background feeling tone of sadness or listlessness. See if you can simply say ‘Yes’ to whatever you are feeling internally, rather than reacting to the feelings or pushing them away. Allow yourself to feel what you are feeling. Now see if you can bring some kindness to yourself. One way of doing this is to place both hands on your heart and feel the warmth of the touch. This might be accompanied by a reassuring phrase you say to yourself silently in a gentle voice tone, like ‘this feels tough right now, can I give myself some support and kindness’. See if you can receive some simple feelings of kindness from yourself. Then just rest loosely in the midst of your experience and continue with mindfulness of breathing as in Stage 1.
The first stage is a mindfulness practice and the second stage incorporates self-compassion into this practice. Try doing this practice for 5 – 10 minutes a day at home if you can. First get used to stage one and then when you are ready include stage two. This builds the capacity for bringing mindfulness and self-compassion into your daily life. And then when you are out and about, see if you can pause every now and again and do this practice. You might need to find a private place for a few minutes. If you find the hand on the heart gesture is too exposing, you can experiment with holding your hands gently in your lap or holding a symbol of compassion like a special stone or emblem in your pocket.
Practicing like this creates the space for experiencing sukkha – touching the stillness and fullness that is already present in our experience, not something we have to seek or grasp hold of. We can learn to access sukkha just after meditating by savouring simple things like the breeze blowing through a tree, the feeling of sunshine on our face, the song of a bird or the smile of a child walking by. It lies hidden in the simple, everyday things we so often miss.
Choden is a Buddhist monk who teaches for the Mindfulness Association which specializes in the purest form of secular compassion-based mindfulness practice. It offers face-to-face and online trainings in Mindfulness, Compassion and Insight, as well as teacher training and post graduate studies. For more details visit: www.mindfulnessassociation.net
If you interested in learning more about mindfulness and a different approach to happiness there will be monthly mindfulness sessions at Heather Lodge in Brodick. These will begin with a session on Wednesday 18th September at 7pm, linking mindfulness to the three circle model introduced in the article.
In September there will also be two mindfulness taster sessions at the Eco Savvy Zero Waste Cafes, in Kildonan on Tuesday 10th and Lochranza on Tuesday 24th, which will introduce mindfulness at a simple beginners level. For more information see Eco Savvy’s September news here, and for information on upcoming mindfulness events see the Arran Mindfulness Facebook page.