Mindfulness: understanding and application
Contents
Introduction
Attention
Mindfulness application
Suffering
Emotions, attention and suffering
Emotions, beliefs and not paying attention
The present moment and contentment
Summary
Introduction
Mindfulness is paying attention in the present moment
without judgement or evaluation.
Attention is what we focus on. You might think of it like a beam of light
that we use to play on a certain part of the world to light it up and experience
it. So, of the many sounds, sights, physical feelings, smells, tastes and
thoughts that we could focus on, our attention is what we choose out of these
to get our attention.
So, when we are mindful we are paying attention to what is
happening in the present moment. That might be a sensation of something, how it
feels, smells, sounds, tastes, and looks.
Alternatively, it might be noticing that we are having a thought. Noticing that I am thinking happens in the present,
when you think the contents of the thought it takes us away from the present as
we think about what might happen in the future, or has happened or should be happening.
Mindfulness is a practice of paying attention to the present
moment without judgement or evaluation.
The practice of mindfulness might be either something you do that you
make time for e.g. a breathing meditation or something you incorporate into
your day, e.g. eating mindfully.
However, you practice, you can never find that you can
always be mindful rather you will be distracted through your attention
wandering. Whilst practice can reduce your attention wandering but you will
never stop it. Mindfulness is like sleep, you can’t make it happen naturally
but rather you can set up the best circumstances for it to arise in.
Attention
We have the ability to pay attention to different things, we
can pay attention to our current experiences, e.g. how our body feels or what someone else is
doing. We can also think about the past, the future, or judge how the present
is or should be.
When we pay attention to things it has an effect. If I pay
attention to my sensations, it can allow me to experience more of them: e.g. when
eating I might notice more taste sensations, or as I watch the sky I might
notice more things I can see. If I pay attention to my thoughts, then I will
experience what I’m thinking about. So, if I think about my holidays, where I
went and what I did, I will imagine the holiday again and have some of the
feelings I had when I was on holiday.
What we pay attention to therefore creates our experience of
the world and will also determine what we learn about the world. Two people in the same space can be having
completely different experience due to where they are putting their attention.
We can both influence where we have attention on the world
and it can work automatically. As I sit in my study, I can think that I want to
find my glasses, so I then use my attention to focus on different parts of the
room to find them. Alternatively, I can
passively experience the room and my attention goes where it wants.
The automatic pilotness of our attention, seems to be directed
by what’s important to us at any one time. If you are very hungry and you walk
through a town your attention will be drawn to food, or if you have a powerful
emotion, say anxiety, then your attention will be drawn to scary things. It
would seem that this is helpful to us as your attention is in some ways
pointing out things that it thinks might help us, food when hungry, scary
things when we feel we need to protect ourselves from when we are feeling
anxious.
Summary
So, to summarise attention is our focussing on parts of the
world. It can be operated by choice or automatically, and the automatic seems
to be in service of what is currently important to us. What we focus on
produces effects in that it can increase the quality of our experience of where
we put our attention on.
Mindfulness application
Mindfulness enhances our ability to pay attention to the
present moment which can be incredibly handy in a number of ways.
Suffering
Let me firstly distinguish between pain and suffering. Pain
we can understand as when something happens, and it causes an unpleasant
feeling, something hurts, or we feel momentarily an unpleasant emotion. We
could liken pain to what animals feel. Suffering then is the unpleasant feelings
we can feel about pain. Imagine then if you stub your toe, you initially feel
pain, then you tell yourself how stupid you were to stub your toe, and you feel
bad about that, you then tell yourself how bad this pain is and how you can
stand it, and you feel bad about that. These secondary unpleasant feelings we
can describe as suffering, which can be thought of the distress we have about
having pain. This can be pain we currently have, have had or could have.
Suffering comes then from thinking about the past or the
future or how the present should be different. So, we might think about how bad
the things are that have happened to us, or we might think about how things
might go wrong in the future. As we pay attention to these thoughts, we have an
experience of these things happening, so we don’t feel so good.
Emotions, attention and suffering
When we experience powerful emotions, they affect how we think,
perceive, remember and imagine. When we are very sad we think about sad things
that are happening, have happened and could happen. Powerful emotions then will
control where we put our attention. As our attention focuses on sad things then
the effect is to create more sad feelings as we re-experience sad things that have
happened, experience sad things that could happen. By practicing mindfulness,
we increase our paying attention to the present which can reduce our suffering
by not focussing on distressing things that could but may not happen, or have
happened but are no longer happening.
Emotions, beliefs and not paying attention
As much as paying attention to things has effects not paying
attention to things has effects too. We can very consciously try to not pay
attention to things we don’t like. This forms part of our avoiding it or
escaping from it. The things we might actively
not pay attention to might be things we find unpleasant in the world or indeed
in ourselves like some emotions and physical feelings.
So, we might be scared of spiders, we might avoid looking at
them, being near them and at the first opportunity escape from them so they are
no longer something that we might think about, or might touch us. We might not pay attention to something
unpleasant we need to do like pay a bill. Alternatively, we might want to avoid
a feeling like say anxiety. If we feel anxious we may really want to get rid of
the feeling, so we try to avoid putting our attention on it, by say distracting
ourselves. Likewise we might do the same for physical feelings such as pain.
There is an effect out of not paying attention to unpleasant
things in that it can maintain the unpleasantness of the thing. Taking the
pain\suffering distinction, suffering being the extra distress we have about
have pain. As we try to avoid engagement
with an unpleasant thing and to turn our attention away from it then it would seem
that we can maintain our beliefs about the awfulness of the unpleasant thing.
How mindfulness then can help with this is that through
staying in the present moment you can find out what the unpleasant thing is
actually like as opposed to what you fear it is like. So you can sit with a
spider and as you look at it and describe it, it can lose the awfulness that it
has had, you can see an insect going about its life in a body that helps it do
that. As you sit with anxiety, you can notice the physical feelings of an alarm
system going off in your body and whilst it may not be pleasant, in just
sitting with them rather than struggling and failing to get rid of it will make
it more tolerable.
The present moment and contentment
Paul Gilbert understood there to be 3 emotional regulation
systems which is both a simplification and useful in the same measure.
1.
A drive\resource seeking system
2.
A fear\threat system
3.
A soothing\contentment system
The drive system is where we seek to achieve things, get
things that are important to us. When we do we receive dopamine in our body and
feel happy.
The fear system deals with threats to our well-being, here
adrenaline\cortisol is used to activate our fight and flight system to protect
ourselves.
The soothing\contentment system deals with our feelings of
safety, belonging and contentment. It’s uses oxytocin to activate our rest and
digest system.
Distress seems to be caused when there is an imbalance
between these systems. If the drive system is too dominant, then nothing will ever
be good enough, there will be low enjoyment and there will be a continual
pressured chasing of your tail. Life will be stressful without joy, as soon as
you succeed in getting something you want something more. It will be quite
similar to the life of a drug addict where you continually seek the next high, as
you chase the next dopamine hit of achievement.
If the threat system is too dominant, then this might impact
on your drive system, as you will fear what will happen and spend significant energy
trying to protect yourself but getting no pleasure from achievement, or joy
from enjoying what you have.
Whilst the soothing\contentment system could be dominant it
is rare that this is the case.
Mindfulness activates the soothing\contentment system as it
pays attention to how things currently are.
The drive system wants to get things so focuses on the future and how to
get three. The threat system generally focuses on possible threat from the
future and how to prevent them. So, with mindfulness then we can enhance the
rest and digest system and the enjoyment and contentment of how things are at
present.
Summary
Mindfulness can
·
reduce suffering by returning our attention to
the present and therefore away from styles of thinking that can cause suffering
·
reduce suffering by paying more attention to unpleasant
things that are happening in the present
·
increase contentment and enjoyment by activating
the soothing\contentment system
·
increase our ability to choose where to put our
attention: sometimes in can be helpful to pay attention to the past, the
future, or how the present should be. Being mindful allows us to choose as
opposed to doing this automatically
