MINDFULNESS
What exactly is mindfulness? A lot of people teach mindfulness mostly because we have learned over the last 2-3 decades how important this skill is for improving our mental health and wellbeing. There are many ways that people define mindfulness but for our purposes, we are going to be using the terms "mindfulness" and "observing" interchangeably. At its simplest form, that’s really what mindfulness is, it is learning how to be more observant, more aware, and to notice without judgment.
The “without judgment” part is probably the biggest challenge to being mindful because humans are prone to being very judgmental. And for good reason. Judging is evolutionarily adaptive, because judging a situation keeps us safe. If I judge this place, or this food or this person to be dangerous to me, then I’m more likely to avoid it or at least be extra careful when engaging with it. When we practice mindfulness we are practicing our skills of observation and making an effort to notice exactly what is, without the added label of good or bad or any judgement associated with it at all.
Mindfulness is noticing what is, exactly as it is. Trying to take away our assumptions, our preconceived beliefs, our notions of something and just looking at it as it presents itself.
We can be mindful of anything. When I’m teaching mindfulness to my patients, I usually start with the easiest things to notice which are the objects around you. Take a pause from reading this and take a moment to just notice all of the red objects around you. Even if you do this for just for 5 seconds. Notice any red objects and see if you can observe them without a judgment associated with the object such as “that’s pretty” or “I love that thing.” Just notice.
What many people say when they are new to this is something like “I was able to do that for a few seconds but then my mind started to wander. I started thinking about where I got that object or what it means to me and then I forgot what I was doing.” Or some people say, “i started to count the number of objects and got a little competitive with myself trying to find as many as I could.”
Our minds do all sorts of things when we first learn to practice mindfulness. The goal in this initial exercise is to just be aware without searching, which has a sort of energy to it. Mindfulness is just noticing without searching or grasping but just letting the mind become aware.
Another push back I get is something like “omg this is so stupid” why on earth is she making me do this? How is me noticing my red Kleenex box going to help my life.” And if that was your thought, I totally get it, just see if you hang with me for a little bit, I promise it will make sense soon.
The reason I start with objects is because this is what our brains are used to. I like to practice here and then move up to skills like observation of the breath, observation of your body sensations, observation of your feelings and observation of your thoughts. Notice how each of those areas are more challenging because they are inside of ourselves; they are not concrete, they are more vague and hidden. If you are new to practicing mindfulness then I encourage you to start with concrete objects and then over time, move up to more abstract concept like your thoughts and feelings.
A few more key points: Learning to be more mindful is a skill, just like any other skill. Like learning to drive or riding a bike .. it takes time. And its important that you start out in very small increments or else you will get frustrated and bored and will be more likely to give up. I suggest small increments of just a few minutes at a time.
Another key point is to expect that your mind is going to wander. This is what minds do. Think of your mind just like a puppy. If you have ever had a puppy and tried to train them to sit, you know that puppies need patience and to be shown how to sit repeatedly. When training a puppy to sit, you might push their butt down and say "sit", and they might stay seated for 3 seconds before they are up and wanting to do something else. We gently scoop up the puppy, push it’s butt down again and say sit. We don‘t get mad at the puppy, we don’t scold the puppy. This is what puppies do. And we don’t have hour long training sessions with puppies either. We just do a few minutes a day and then over time, the puppy learns to sit and stay.
This is exactly how our minds work. When your mind wanders, as of course it will, we just gently “scoop up” our mind and bring it back to task, focusing on our breath or our body or whatever our goal is. We don’t get mad at ourselves or tell ourselves, “ i just can’t do mindfulness” Anyone can do mindfulness, even those of you with severe ADHD. Anyone can learn to be a little more mindful. It just takes practice and time.
We can also fit mindfulness in to any day, no matter how hectic it is. So for 15 seconds at lunch, we can pause everything we are doing, and just notice our lunch. We can notice the smells, the colors, the textures. We can notice how our body reacts as we are looking at our lunch. We can notice our body sensations as we begin to eat our lunch. The opposite of mindfulness is scarfing down our lunch so fast we don’t even remember eating it. Or scrolling through Instagram or tik tok while eating, and then realizing our lunch is just gone. Mindful eating is a whole thing that you can really dive into and there is a lot of research that learning and practicing mindful eating can help reduce binge eating and stress eating.
Bringing this all back to our inner healing intelligence: Our inner wisdom, especially in the beginning, can be deeply hidden from us. How our inner wisdom communicates or speaks to us can vary. Some people share with me that they notice phrases like “rest” or “eat”, while some people share that they see images or memories and some people just feel it but have a hard time articulating how they know it to be true, it’s just a feeling. Regardless, we have to learn how to be mindful of our inner space in order to really hear our inner wisdom. If we are constantly on the move, rushing from activity to activity, never pausing to reflect and listen within, we will never hear it.
Also, if we don’t learn to practice how to observe without judgment, it will also make it harder to hear. Our judgments are the biggest barriers to hearing our inner wisdom. If we have an internal dialogue that is filled with “I shouldn't think this way or I shouldn’t feel this way” then we won’t hear our inner wisdom. Learning to notice what is, just as it is, is a key step to giving your inner wisdom permission to speak louder to you.
For now, I'd encourage you to practice noticing without judgment this week. See if you can take a couple of minutes each day to just notice without judgment. If you’d like a list of mindfulness activities to try, you can go click on free resources, they are under the DBT section.
The benefits of creating a daily mindfulness practice or just being more mindful in general are numerous. Being mindful is like having the remote control on a tv with a thousand stations. Without mindfulness, your mind can go to the scary movie channel or the bad childhood memory channel when you don’t want it to. Mindfulness is picking up the remote and saying, Hey I'd rather be on the “gratitude” channel right now or whatever channel helps you feel better.
Without mindfulness we are at the mercy of our wandering minds. And if you are anything like me, a wandering mind can go to some unpleasant places. I'd much rather be in charge of that trip.
