‘Mindful’ is our natural state.
But I have to start this article pointing out the irony that we can’t actually be mindful and be what the popular definition of mindful is – which is essentially self-aware.
I have issues with the belief in a ‘mind’ – I can’t find one anywhere in me and I haven’t ever come across anyone else who has found one in them, either. So I remain unconvinced. I definitely have thoughts, I just don’t believe they come from a ‘mind’.
In my experience, my thoughts come from sensations and can start anywhere in my body – my big toe, my nose, my tricep, literally anywhere. I know that’s a bit out there so for now, let’s just swap out ‘mind’ for the activity of thinking, or just plain thinking.
So, ‘mindful’ becomes ‘thinkingful’. It’s the same thing.
All we do with and in our supposed minds is think.
So to be mindful we must be thinking otherwise we would be nothingful or empty-ful. Blank. Quiet.
So then to be mindful, we have to be thinking. But if I am thinking, I’m not ‘present’.
Try it for yourself right now – wherever you are, however you are reading this article. Stop reading (once you know the next steps) and just BE.
So if you’re sitting, just sit – feel the contact of your skin with the chair. Feel yourself holding your torso upright or your head up. Feel where your feet are and what they’re making contact with. Same as if you’re standing. Feel yourself standing – the weight in your feet and up through your legs to your hips, shoulders and head. Just feel – for several seconds, maybe 10 or so.
Now start thinking about how you are sitting, think about the texture of seat underneath you, think about your feet and what they’re resting on. Same thing if you’re standing. Think about how you are standing.
What happens?
For me, and I’ll be surprised if it’s not the same for you, as soon as you start thinking two things happen (maybe more) – first, you can’t feel as much. It’s like somewhere or somehow you’ve taken a step back, a slight distance, from the raw and pure sensation you felt before you started thinking. Then second, you instantly also assessed how you were sitting or standing and felt the urge to change or correct it some way. You may have even done that.
Right?! Bizarre, isn’t it. Such a small and invisible thing as thinking exactly about the thing you are doing actually subtly disconnects you from the experience of it. You can imagine how much further the disconnection goes if you’re thinking about something else entirely – that’s when we can go through minutes, hours or even days at a time depending on how intense our thinking is, without really stopping the momentum and simply feeling.
Mindfulness implies a way of being. But I would argue it’s our natural state.
Before we had so much to think about, and learned to rely on our thoughts and intellect so much, we were much more – I would even say constantly – aware of how we felt, of the sensations going on in our bodies. It would have been our default state.
But now we are all so tied up in knots with all the things we’ve been through along the way that we didn’t know how to resolve, all the things that are expected of us and that we expect of ourselves, our need to anticipate and plan, and our attempts to manipulate and control the outcome of everything yet to come that we never stop thinking. It’s got its own momentum.
So for me, to expect yourself (or for someone else to expect you) to be able to be mindful or stop thinking or stop the momentum of your thinking is completely unrealistic. Let alone without firstly understanding why and how that thinking is occurring in the first place.
It’s no wonder people find it hard to meditate or feel like failures trying to, when their thinking keeps going. It’s inevitable! It’s nature and it can’t be stopped, not by trying, anyway.
So please, hear me!
You are NOT a failure if you can’t meditate because you can’t stop thinking, and I guarantee that you CAN meditate and get the full benefits of meditation regardless of what happens with your thinking!
Mindfulness is an unsolvable conundrum, a contradiction.
You can’t be self-aware and thinking at the same time, you can only be self-aware while you are feeling because it’s while you are feeling that you are connected with all of you and everything around you. We all know from experience how far away from reality our thinking can be – there doesn’t need to be any connection at all between how I feel or where I am and my thinking!
So you can drop all the pressure to stop thinking. You wont be able to by trying to.
In my experience, what happens is that when I’m feeling – feeling the physical sensations in my body – my thinking usually quietens right down and drifts into the background. It’s as though the foghorn that it was can stop blowing once my attention is where it needs to be, which is in the sensation.
Sometimes if a sensation is really intense, the thinking that comes along with it can be intense too. Sometimes it can take half an hour of sitting (meditation) in super-loud white-noisy thinking, just letting it all go on while I just stay fully feeling all the sensations in my body, before it’s burned itself out and things inside of me quieten down.
So is that half hour of thinking-while-meditating a failure or a waste of time? No way! The fact it was there proves to me that it was an effect of something – I didn’t put it there. So if I was affected by something, and in half an hour of sitting quietly that effect burned out to the point that I was quiet inside again, to me that’s the best half hour I spent that day!
Because what would have happened if I hadn’t had that time to process, digest and purge that effect?
It would have been compounded by whatever else happened that day, it would very likely have driven over-reactions to situations or people that wouldn’t normally have happened, it would have burned up energy that I might have otherwise used in the gym after work… you see? Whatever happens while we are sitting – meditating – is our bodies processing and cleansing the effects of our daily lives!
The key though is to feel.
As long as you are feeling the physical sensations in your body while just letting whatever thinking is happening go on, you are purging and healing and resolving. If you’re completely disconnected from how it feels in your body and just imagining stuff then yeah, you will just be going ‘round in circles and that thinking wont end.
But this is something you can try and find out for yourself.
Meditate one day and just do what you normally would – daydream, use a mantra or technique, try to stop thinking. Then meditate for a while just feeling, not worrying about what your thinking is doing. Just feel. You don’t need to scan or do anything intentional – you are you so you don’t need to use a technique to be able to feel you. That’s just weird.
