Mindfulness: understanding and application

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