What is mindfulness—and how to use it

By David W. McMillan Ph.D. 

There are four parts to my mindfulness definition.

Person/Environment Fit
The first part has to do with our place in the world. Are we mindful of how we fit with others? Are we mindful of how others perceive us? Are we mindful of what others expect of us?

As you can see the first part of mindfulness has to do with what might be called person environment fit.

It is an awareness of what others experience when they are with us, yes, and more importantly, it is an awareness of what our minds are doing with our perceptions of others. Are we judging them, looking for their faults? Are we praising them to curry favor? Are we noticing and describing who they are as a reporter of the present moment without us having an opinion an agenda or a judgment? Are we aware of our connection to others and all life or are we only aware of what others can do for us or how we how they are in our way? Do we see the interconnectedness as a blessing or a curse? Have we found a way to release ourselves from the center of our perception and see ourselves as part of a grander fabric of existence?

Emotional Balance
The second part has to do with a emotional balance. Children are caught bounding between extremes with no mental balance. For children it's either/ or, good/ bad, friend/ enemy. Their minds only consider reality in dualities or binaries. There are two prominent binaries. One has to do with shame versus pride.

Adler contended that we were born into a state of helplessness and that our life’s journey is about building a personal narrative that supports mastery and a sense of confidence.

While I respect Adler's discovery of our birth into a state of powerlessness, I don't think he gave proper respect to the power of infants. They rule their world. Adults scurry about them trying to please and comfort them constantly.

Their internal sense of self moves back and forth between inferiority to superiority. Their survival brain has only two categories. As a child, we are often caught between good/ bad polarities. For a child, there is no middle. Children cannot tolerate the ambiguity of awkward emotional moments. They can't hold in place the confidence that they will somehow take a moment of failure and shame and process that experience into learning and mastery. Nor, when they have mastered a challenging emotional episode, can they remember that soon they will find themselves in an overwhelming, painful emotional space. Nor, when they are in such a painful state, can the child remember that they have the capacity to use their tragedies to their benefit.

Children have no fulcrum for balance, no third position in the middle between the two extremes. It's either the confidence of the hero/ champion or shame of the inadequate goat/villain.

Mindfulness is being aware of how emotions work inside us, how they flow from one emotion to the next. It is knowing which emotional shifts are authentic self-expressions and which ones are artifice and pretense. That's mindfulness.

The second binary has to do with thinking in either or terms about future or past. Once children develop a sense of object constancy, that there is a future and that adults who leave, will return and once they understand that narratives of the past can be reinterpreted to either shame or honor them, they begin to focus their thinking onto worries about either the past or the future without a middle present focus, to balance between fear thoughts of the horrors of the past or projections of future disasters . This is part of what we call the monkey mind. Our brains can be trapped in an obsessive cycle between past and future. Again, no third position centered in the middle for balance. That center would be a present focus and observing ego without judgment.

Mindfulness is finding the strength and courage to remain still in traumatic moments feeling the fear or awkward embarrassment or sadness or shame without acting out or covering these emotions with anger or dissembling. Such strength doesn't come to us by accident. It needs to be nurtured with practice.

This is where the trance becomes part of mindfulness. Most people think of mindfulness as a synonym for meditation. And, as you can see, it is much more than that. However, meditation can build a foundation for mindfulness.

For some “trance” is an intimidating word. It is what happens to our minds when we are intensely focused. We are in a trance when we watch a movie or read a novel. We are in a relaxing trance when we listen intently to calming music.

The third part of mindfulness has to do with the trance. When Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson studied tribal cultures in Bali, they found few signs of mental illness. They attributed this to the Balinese culture’s common practice of people suddenly, for no apparent reason, falling into a trance state. They speculated that this practice served as a prophylactic for mental illness. Such daily practice might help to develop this middle area, this third position between the self-centered space of pride and grandiosity and the second form of self-centeredness which involves self-hate and a sense of inferiority. And also meditation may help us develop a present focus and quiet our fearful obsessions about the past and the future.

For meditation to work, one needs to know how to enter the trance, how to breathe and how to use a mantra. Relaxed diaphragmatic breathing is where you start. Breathe so that your chest remains still, and your belly button moves in and out with your breath. Focus on your sphincter muscle and if you're breathing correctly, you can feel a slight opening and closing of this muscle.

The mantra is much simpler than people imagine. Choose any sound or word. Place it in your imagination and repeat slowly, silently.

Some people mistakenly tell you that the point is to empty the brain. And maybe for them it is. But for me the point is to find the gray between black and white, or the good enough between perfect and horrible or the place in the middle between faiths/ confidence and fear/ shame, between the past and the future centered in the present. The mantra represents faith, stillness oneness. Your intrusive thoughts represent fear anxiety and striving. The mantra has no past or future. It is just here with you in the now.

The mind will naturally work for you if you let it. If you give yourself the instruction to return to the mantra when you are aware of a thought, meditation will work.

You aren't failing when your mantra drops from consciousness. That is inevitable. The task, if there is a task, is to return to the mantra and repeat. This and the breathing will relax you. The mantra will fall away. A thought will intrude, and you will return your focus to the mantra.

Our brains are made for thinking and feeling. They cannot be emptied. We will always be thinking. Or feeling. We can't stop. We can, however, shift our focus. We can focus on the sensations in our bodies, particularly our breath. The purpose of a mindful trance or a meditative space is to quiet the mind, not to empty it.

Faith and fear are battling inside your unconscious. You are giving faith a boost every time you return to the mantra. Faith defeats fear over and over. With each of faith victories, fear loses a bit of its power. At first these exchanges are frequent. With practice, the exchanges slow.

Mindfulness Practice and Focus Builds a New Skill Set

The point of daily practice is to build a skill set. Once we become skilled at meditation, we know how to shift our focus with our new skill. We can know how to bring our minds out of our fears and arrogant moments into the peace of a present focus, a focus that describes, observes without having to know., control or prejudge. When we nurture faith, we can release anger, resentment, fear, and replace those feelings with compassion and an awareness of positive vibrations that surround us. We can receive the universal kindness and peace. We can practice channeling it to others.

This may eventually become a habit, a lifestyle of living in the peaceful kind present. This, for most of us requires commitment to practice.

With practice, you become more aware that you have control over your emotions with each faith victory over fear. The gray space, the third position, the space where you can tolerate emotional ambivalence and awkwardness increases. You gain patience with yourself. You become able to give yourself time to deliberate, to remember that this too shall pass. The next emotional wave will replace this one.

This practice of meditation is the lungs inside the body of mindfulness. It will give intentionality and strength to your self-awareness. You will become clearer and clearer about who you are, how you're perceived, what others expect, where the boundaries are and what you want to do about your place. Your thoughts will become more descriptive and less judgmental. Meditation will bring you to yourself and your place in the world overtime with practice.

That’s mindfulness.

Mindfulness and Change
As you may recall, I suggested that children's brains are confined to dualistic thinking with the extremes of either/or’s, no center, little emotion emotional balance. Some of us never find a third position, a center. Mindfulness practice teaches us how to observe our body's response to our emotions. Each of our emotions has a purpose. Each emotion is an asset to our survival, a tool in our relationship toolbox. And each emotion can become a liability if we remain in any one emotion too long. This is why a emotions flow through us like waves.

When we meditate, we observe these emotions come and go without our judgment. In this neutral state, we put no value on one emotion above the other. Consequently, we can see the trap that happiness, for example, creates, the trap of denial of profound meaningful experiences, the arrogance of believing we can master situations that are beyond our capacity, the cruelty when we enjoy the pain of another person.

As we meditate, we can see the hurt below our anger. When we have the courage to express our hurt and vulnerabilities, we watch as our anger dissolves. We watch as we become bored with sadness, and we catch a glimpse of a wave of desire. We see shame as essential to love and we allow shame to become our teacher for how to better care for the object of our concern.

As we focus on our breath and watch our thought and feelings swim with our mantra, we discover how the constant shifting and flowing of emotions brings us wholeness. As meditation teaches us to accept what fate brings us, as we wonder what will come next, we begin to have a faith in our strength to adapt.

All living creatures participate in Nature’s cybernetic feedback loop. We all have a way to express what we need. We make our bid for air, water, light, food, shelter, companionship, etc. We receive feedback from our bid for what we want or need. The universe answers our bid. If the feedback from the universe is that we can't have that thing we ask for, we adapt. We either look for something else or we make a new proposal to the universe for another way to get what we need. We look again at what's available. We rummage about not knowing what we will find, and we discover things we can use that we didn't know existed. This is creativity.

When we have little emotional balance, when we are stuck in one emotion trying to deny it or avoid expressing it and letting it flow through us, our brains cannot be creative.

When we are stuck in grief or fear or shame, or even happiness or other emotions like wonder/surprise, disgust, desire, anger, or even the trance, we can't find access to our inner creativity.

Mindfulness helps us let go of our emotions and watch for the next using with the gift each emotion brings and then letting go when the next one comes. To access the cybernetic feedback loop, we need our balance, our centered place, our third position between extremes. The practice of mindfulness brings this to us and we adapt, grow, change. We can find that good enough place in between perfection/ innocence and inadequacy/ guilt. We are free to dance with what Fate brings. This happens without effort. It is a gift that we always have available, one we can better access through practice.