What is mindfulness? And why should we weaponize it? Just what the heck are you talking about?
Without looking up a proper *definitive* definition, mindfulness is presence. It’s being aware of the here and now. It’s owning your actions. It’s thoughtfulness. It’s paying attention.
Let’s back up a minute. Consider how we go about making judgments in life, in making our decisions about what to do and how to act. The brain is a mysterious organ. You know that old saying that we only use 10% of our brain? Or is it 15%? 20%? I don’t remember. It’s not really important because the expression isn’t accurate anyway. But there is some truth behind it.
You see, the brain is constantly seeking shortcuts. It gathers information, synthesizes it, and figures out a way to make conclusions as quickly and efficiently as possible. I recently read about this in Michael Pollan’s book “How to Change Your Mind,” which discusses how psychedelics can help a person, well, change their mind. I’ll talk about that more in a different blog post, but for the purposes of this entry, I want to use his example of how our mind creates these shortcuts.
Pollan explains how the brain has the impossible task of dealing with just incredible amounts of new information all the time. No surprises there. In order to do this efficiently, the brain must constantly create shortcuts, enabling us to draw conclusions without exerting much if any mental effort. In many ways, this is a good thing. It allows us to do more in life. If we had to go through a huge process every time we wanted to go for a jog or ride a bike, for example, we’d be tasked with analyzing how to balance our bodies in conjunction with our movements, how to put one foot in front of the other, how to adjust for wind and temperature, for environmental stimuli like cars or bumps in the ground or whatever. We’d come back exhausted. We need those shortcuts to allow us to go on autopilot for most of those things so that we can do more throughout the day. Shortcuts make sense.
But these shortcuts can also be detrimental to our assessment of our surroundings. An easy and culturally relevant example might be racial profiling by law enforcement officers. There may be a disproportionate amount of black people in jail for say, smoking marijuana, as compared to white people. The simple shortcuts the brain might develop is that black people are more likely to smoke pot, and therefore the brain might profile black people to that effect, making judgments in the absence of any evidence of that sort of activity. It would fail to recognize that black people actually smoke pot at the same rates as white people, but are just unfairly targeted for legal enforcement (as a matter of fact, you’re five times more likely to be arrested for smoking pot based on the color of your skin, despite the similar rates of actually smoking). So, profiling black people in that way is one obvious way that mental shortcuts can have significant drawbacks.
Of course, there are many such examples. We draw all sorts of conclusions about the people we meet, about the places we visit, about the animals we observe, based on prior experiences. These mental shortcuts save us cognitive effort, but can lead us to make repeated bad judgments based on a small number of anecdotal experiences. What’s worse, the more we make these judgments, the more they are reinforced in the brain, and the more likely we are to make the same mistakes again at a later time.
OK. So we’ve established that our brains are efficiency machines, and that we like to reduce our cognitive load as much as we can, and that doing so leads to some positive benefits as well as some grievous errors. What’s this got to do with mindfulness?
Think of mindfulness like taking a step back, like taking a minute to reconsider those rash judgments that the brain forms. Many of us engage in countless examples of autonomic reactions. We do it all the time, every hour of every day. Remember that time that driver cut you off in traffic and you cursed them? You did it then. Remember when see a snake hissing and you feel fear, or when you see a bunch of rats in a street and feel disgust? It doesn’t always have to be bad—remember when you see a puppy and you unconsciously find a smile creep up on your face?
These reactions occur all the time, basically making it so we see the world through a veil of associations. Remember when the cashier at the grocery store took her sweet time with every customer when you were in a rush? Considering the previous examples, we might automatically react in anger and frustration. We might give that clerk the *look of death,* trying to pierce her skin with our insistence that she hurry the hell up. We might get equally angry at the customer who is enjoying a joke with her, wishing they would just shut the hell up. Here’s where mindfulness can intervene.
Mindfulness is taking a step back, and asking yourself, why are you getting mad? Asking yourself, why are these people having fun when they are obviously slowing down the line? Mindfulness is considering the possibility that hey, these folks have their own lives, and their own problems. Maybe the clerk is at the end of a 12 hour shift where she had to cover for someone else. Maybe the customer just lost his job, and needed a smile. Maybe he works alone at a thankless job and just needed some form of positive connection with another human being. Mindfulness is stepping back, asking yourself what do I have to gain by getting angry? Will that anger make the line move faster? Mindfulness is realizing that that anger will only make you upset, make you suffer even more than you are already suffering due to the slow line. That suffering will probably continue with you as you storm out of the store, or refuse to make eye contact with the clerk when she checks you out. Mindfulness is taking that step back and seeing the situation for what it is and adjusting your reaction accordingly. Mindfulness is choosing to be happy because you want to be happy, to find something beautiful in the interaction in front of you. Mindfulness is returning to a state of being present in the here and now.
Now you might have read some of that paragraph and shook your head at the audacity of it all. Sure, Jon, you say, I’ll just put on a fucking smile and laugh all the way home as I skip down the yellow brick road. Merrily merrily merrily…Jon, that’s just not how the world works.
Look, it’s not an easy endeavor, to make the choice to be mindful, to make the choice to be happy. The odds are stacked against you; your mind is made up of ingrained patterns and it’s hard to imagine always ditching those, to just choose not to be angry. Especially when there is so much to be angry about! Maybe you can avoid getting angry at the grocery store clerk, but think about all the shit that’s going on in the world! All the hatred, the vile filth being spewed by Trump and his band of misfits, how can you not get angry at all of that? Jon, it seems like you’re asking me to ignore it all and just live in some sort of bubble, when people and animals and our mother planet are all suffering in countless ways. What the hell!!!
First, it’s not about being perfect. You’re going to get angry at times, there’s no getting around that. And that’s ok. You’re going to fail, repeatedly, at making the “be happy and mindful” choice. And you’re going to find that some things defy that possibility altogether, that some things are so harmful and so hateful that you simply can’t avoid being angry at them. That’s ok. But we have a choice with how to react to that anger. We can let it consume us, in which case we’re not being mindful. Or, we can take that anger and use it as a tool to propel us forward, toward creating the change that we want to see in the world. And by being mindful, we can step back and view that anger as that tool, and not let it consume us, not let it corrupt our own good intentions. We see that the anger is just a simple emotion, that it does not define us. Awareness is the key. We can choose how we react to that anger, we can use it to motivate our actions, or use it to motivate our compassion even, but we must recognize it for what it is in order to make good come out of it. We must not let it overtake us, lest we fall prey to it. The process of being mindful is not that different than cognitive-behavioral therapy, really. Just a much less fancy sounding term.
I’m pretty into Buddhism these days. Any readers who are also into it probably already figured that out. There’s a fantastic story in Buddhism called The Second Arrow, which I’ll post at the end of this blog entry. The long and short of it is that if you’re hit with one arrow, you have a choice: you can accept the pain and suffering that came with that arrow and move on, or you can allow yourself to be hit with a second metaphorical arrow of mental anguish, as you beat yourself up for being hit with the first arrow, filling your mind with regrets and sorrows and grief. Mindfulness is realizing that you’ve only truly been hit with the first arrow, and that the second arrow is one we wound ourselves with by choice. Mindfulness is making the choice.
So why did I suggest “weaponizing” mindfulness? It sounds like mindfulness is pretty much the opposite of using a weapon. I think mindfulness is something different to each of us. And for me, I know that I’ve developed some truly nasty habits through a lifetime of negativity and anger. So for me, I like to think of “weaponizing” mindfulness to defeat that negativity and anger in the battle of my mind. And framing it as a “battle” seems most appropriate in my situation, because it truly is a long-standing grind to win over my brain. But, I feel lately like for the first time in my life, the tide is turning, and I’m advancing forward, thanks to a focus on mindfulness. So that’s what it is, to me—a weapon. A weapon to defend against the creeping cravings and negativity that otherwise seek to define me. And with the power of mindfulness, we can overcome and view the world with a positive eye.
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“The Second Arrow”
“The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” The student replied, “It is.” The Buddha then asked, “If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “It is.” The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”
As long as we are alive, we can expect painful experiences- the first arrow. To condemn, judge, criticize, hate, or deny the first arrow is like being struck by a second arrow. Many times the first arrow is out of our control, but the arrow of reactivity is not.
Often the significant suffering associated with an emotion is not the emotion itself but the way we relate to it. Do we feel it to be unacceptable? Justified? Do we hate it? Feel pride in it? Are we ashamed of it? Do we tense around it? Are we ashamed of how we are feeling?
Mindfulness itself does not condemn our emotions. Rather it is honestly aware of what happens to us and how we react to it. The more cognizant and familiar we are with our reactivity the more easily we can feel, for example, uncomplicated grief or straightforward joy not mixed up with guilt, anger, remorse, embarrassment, judgment, or other reactions. Freedom in practice is not freedom from emotions, it is freedom from complicating them.”
–Gil Fronsdal, “The Matter at Hand”