Chapter 18

Ten Mindfulness Myths to Expose

In This Chapter

Recognising common misconceptions about mindfulness

Discovering practical ways to overcome unhelpful ideas

Exploring fundamental aspects of mindfulness

When I told a friend of mine that I teach mindfulness, he said: ‘I don’t think that’s for me – my mind’s full enough already, buddy!’ Mindfulness isn’t about filling up the mind, of course. Mindfulness isn’t just meditation either. If you want to ensure that you’ve got the right idea about mindfulness, check out this chapter and do some ‘mind emptying’ – take this opportunity to root out any wrong ideas you may have about the ancient and modern science and art of mindfulness.

Mindfulness Is All about the Mind

You may have heard this quip: ‘What is mind? Doesn’t matter. What is matter? Never mind!’

As a human being you have the capacity to think. In fact, you can’t help but think. Thinking seems to happen whether you like it or not. Thinking is almost like breathing, and probably happens more frequently. Some experts estimate humans think up to 60,000 thoughts a day! Mindfulness isn’t all about the mind; it takes a step back from thinking rather than stops thinking.

Mindfulness can more appropriately be called heartfulness. In ancient Eastern languages like Sanskrit or Pali, the words for mind and heart are the same, so perhaps the word ‘mindfulness’ is a little misleading. What does heartfulness mean? If you have an open, warm heart you may be: kind, gentle, caring, accepting, understanding, patient, trusting, joyful, honest, grateful, light-hearted, loving and humble. Perhaps you’re not all of those things, but I share those words to express the spirit of mindfulness with you. The idea is to bring one or more heart qualities to your mindful awareness. Naturally, you can’t bring all of them in at the same time, but you can get a sense of the kind of attitude to bring to your awareness.

Mindfulness isn’t a cold, harsh awareness. A thief needs to be attentive when planning to steal something, but that isn’t mindfulness. Mindfulness has a sense of kindness as well as curiosity about it.

If, when you’re being mindful, you sense you’re being critical, struggling a lot and being unkind to yourself, or you think that your attention doesn’t have a warmth about it, don’t beat yourself up. You’ll end up frustrated. Simply be aware of whatever you’re being mindful of, and in its own time some kindness will naturally grow. You don’t need to force things too much – the less you force things, the better.

Some people think that mindfulness means you need to think about whatever you’re focusing on. This isn’t quite right. If you’re being mindful of your breathing, this means you’re feeling the sensation of the breathing in your body – you’re not trying to think about the breathing.

Mindfulness Isn’t for Restless People

Are you a busy, active and perhaps restless person? Always on the go? If so, mindfulness may sound as if it’s too passive for you. But actually, mindfulness is great way to uproot restlessness and replace it with an inner joy.

Many of the mindfulness exercises and meditations are about slowing down. But that’s not the aim. The purpose is to cultivate a greater level of awareness and warm-heartedness towards yourself and what’s happening around you. It’s possible to achieve this whether you’re sitting still or moving your body.

Restlessness isn’t a fixed part of your personality that’ll never change. Mindfulness rewires your brain. If you practise mindfulness regularly, beginning with just a few minutes a day, you learn to be with the feeling of restlessness without reacting to it. You discover that the feeling of restlessness arises and eventually passes away. But there’s more to discover. You may find that your life was being driven by the feeling of restlessness. It doesn’t have to be. With time and effort, the feeling of restlessness is replaced with a greater sense of inner peace and satisfaction.

As always, I don’t promise it’ll be an easy or quick fix, but the journey can begin with just a five-minute daily mindfulness of breath meditation. So do have a go if you’d like to overcome restlessness.

If you find it difficult to sit still for even a few minutes, try mindful movement. Be aware of your bodily sensations as you stretch up, try to touch your toes or as you go for a run in your local park.

Mindfulness Is Positive Thinking

You can interpret all situations in a positive or negative way, but it’s helpful to regard situations optimistically rather than always expecting the worst. Through your regular practice of mindfulness you become more aware of your own thought patterns, both negative and positive. When negative thoughts arise, mindfulness helps you to recognise your own habitual reactions. You may try seeing the situation differently, whether positively or more realistically, and see what effect that has. Mindfulness doesn’t tie you into any positive thinking rules – you just bring a sense of curiosity to the experience.

I don’t recommend fighting with negative thoughts. Battling with your own mind creates a struggle, and you can end up increasing the level of negativity in yourself. The more you fight a thought, the stronger the thought becomes.

Ultimately, mindfulness takes a step back from all thoughts, both negative and positive. Thoughts are thoughts, not facts. You can’t control thoughts completely – all you can do is watch, take a step back, and stop reacting to your thoughts. The more you can do that, the more you feel in control and the less you feel helpless and stressed. Chapter 5 has more about detaching yourself from thoughts.

Mindfulness Is Only for Buddhists

Buddhists don’t have the exclusive rights to mindfulness. Mindfulness, or a mindful awareness, is a universal human attribute and skill, a fundamental quality of being alive, just like eyes, ears and a stomach are part of a human body. To be mindful is to be aware, and awareness is not and cannot be attributed to any one religion.

However, mindfulness was investigated and developed by Buddha and followers of Buddha. Therefore, if you want, you can read and study more about mindfulness in Buddhist texts, no matter what your religious beliefs. You can also find out about mindfulness in several other religions and philosophies such as Hinduism, Taoism, Advaita, Sufism and many more. However, you find out far more by just being mindful yourself and exploring and learning through your own experience.

As one modern sage, Nisargadatta, said: ‘The greatest Guru is your inner self.’ Even the Buddha often said: ‘Don’t simply believe what I am saying – find out for yourself in your own experience.’

Mindfulness isn’t a religion or belief system. If anything, mindfulness points towards an approach to living. The mission of the Center for Mindfulness in Massachusetts is simply ‘an awakened and compassionate world’. If you really want a goal for your mindfulness practice, I think that to become more awakened and compassionate is a good one.

If you’re religious and look deeply into your own faith, you’re likely to find some way or system to strengthen the capacity to let go of conceptual thinking and train your quality of attention. So, you don’t need to change your religion to find mindfulness a meaningful discipline. To be mindful is to develop the innate human capacity to be aware – you can be of any faith or no faith at all and be mindful.

Mindfulness Is Only for Tough Times

Mindfulness is used to alleviate depression, chronic pain, anxiety, addiction relapse, stress, and high blood pressure, and even to manage the stress and treatment of cancer. Initial results in these areas are very encouraging, and the application of mindfulness is sure to develop along with all the other treatments.

However, mindfulness isn’t only for the hard times. Consider this: you can’t just start saving money in a recession. You need to save money in the good times too, so when things are really difficult you have some cash to help you out. In fact, saving money is much easier and more effective when times are good. In the same way, you can benefit by developing your mindfulness discipline when things are going relatively well. When the going gets tough, you can naturally bring your mindfulness skills to the challenge, and dip into your inner resources to help you cope.

When I first began practising mindfulness, partly for managing stress, I never understood the far-reaching effect of the practice. For example, I used to struggle if I had to speak to more than a small group of people; now I’m lucky enough to feel able to deliver lectures to hundreds of people. This isn’t so much due to my own courage, but to the power of mindfulness. Although your mindfulness practice may be used to fix a problem to start with, if you persevere, mindfulness goes on to nurture all sorts of different areas of your life.

As you begin to understand and practise mindfulness, you notice benefits. At this stage, some people stop practising. Life seems to be going well, you’ve resolved the issues, and you kind of forget about the mindfulness and meditation … until the next disaster strikes! And then you reach out for help again. Coming and going to and from mindfulness meditation is part of the natural process, but in the end you come to realise that without a daily discipline, your life is a bit of a rollercoaster. The meditation makes the ride that little bit smoother.

Mindfulness Is a Set of Techniques

A technique is usually a quick method of achieving a certain outcome, like counting to ten to help calm yourself down when you feel angry. You may have a certain technique for hitting a golf ball, or a technique for reducing conflict in a conversation. Techniques are great for achieving certain results, but they have their limitations too. If you get too stuck on one technique, you can’t branch out to new ways of doing things. Sometimes you may get defensive about your particular technique and become actively unwilling to try something different – in this way, techniques can stifle development.

Mindfulness isn’t a technique, because fundamentally mindfulness isn’t goal-orientated. This is quite a difficult concept to grasp, because you’re probably used to doing things to achieve something. Why would you bother doing something to achieve, ultimately, nothing? Mindfulness has benefits, but if you practise to achieve a particular outcome, you limit its potency. A good scientist does an experiment without forcing a certain outcome – all the scientist wants to do is find the truth of the situation by observing the outcome. If the scientist is looking for a particular outcome, perhaps if the experiment is sponsored by a drug company, you’re wary of the results because they may be biased. In the same way, if you look for a certain outcome with mindfulness, you’re being biased and not really trying the mindfulness wholeheartedly.

Mindful awareness is about being aware of your inner and outer experience, whatever that experience is.

Paradoxically, mindfulness underlies and enhances the quality of all other techniques. Without awareness you can’t use a technique. The less aware you are, the less likely it is that whatever technique you’re using will work. For example, if you use a technique to reduce stress by letting go of negative thinking, but you’re not really aware of your thoughts, how do you hope to succeed?

This book does contain lots of tips and techniques to encourage mindfulness, but ultimately mindfulness itself isn’t a technique.

Mindfulness is about letting go of doing. It is about simply being as you are. Being yourself, whatever you think of yourself. Being yourself isn’t a technique. You can’t do non-doing. Non-doing means letting go of all techniques with their desired outcomes and just being.

Mindfulness Isn’t for Me

Some people may not be keen on mindfulness, perhaps due to misconceptions and stereotypical views about the practice. Mindfulness doesn’t even have to be connected with the typical picture of a meditator: someone sitting cross-legged, perhaps burning incense, aimlessly navel-gazing for some future spiritual high. But mindfulness is for anyone interested in becoming more aware, more awake, more alive, more connected. Although meditation is an extremely helpful way of developing greater mindfulness, you can also simply pay a bit more attention every time you go for a walk, have a chat with your colleagues or play sport. You may spend a few minutes feeling your breathing as you rest on the sofa before switching on the television. These are simple ways of waking up to your life and letting go of automatic pilot. I don’t know anyone who can’t do with a greater dose of awareness.

You may think that you can’t do mindfulness because you’re too impatient, too stressy or too anxious. But mindfulness develops your capacity to be patient, kind, attentive, calm and happy, so you may be the perfect person to try mindfulness! To say you’re not patient enough to do mindfulness is like saying you’re too unfit to exercise. If you don’t exercise at all, you’ll never be fit. However, take things easy to begin with – try a short, five-minute meditation every day and build from there. Or try some mindful walking for a few minutes. Go to Chapter 6 for ways to practise walking meditations.

Some people think that mindfulness is something weird to do with religion, or some cultish idea. Mindfulness is feeling your own breathing, or listening to the sounds around you, or really tasting the food in front of you. Mindfulness is another word for kindly awareness – nothing mysterious in that sense. You can make mindfulness whatever you want – there are no rules in this game. Some people practise mindfulness for spiritual or religious reasons, just as some people burn incense for religious reasons – that doesn’t mean incense is for religious people only!

Mindfulness Meditation Is Relaxation

Relaxation exercises are often designed to loosen the muscles in your body, and the aim of relaxation is to become less tense. So relaxation has a clear goal, and you have various methods for achieving it.

Mindfulness is ultimately goalless. You can’t really say you had a ‘good’ meditation or a ‘bad’ meditation, because that would presuppose the kind of experiences you’re supposed to have. Meditation is about experiencing whatever the content of experience is, from moment to moment. Your intention and attitudes behind the meditation are key. Meditation is about understanding and growing in wisdom by looking within.

Relaxation is often, but certainly not always, a very welcome side effect of meditation. However, when you first practise meditation, you may feel more tense by the end. When I first began to meditate, I was trying to do it well and my attention was overly intense. My body became tense trying to focus, as I tried in vain to force thoughts out. This led to more tension, but was part of the learning process.

Meditation can sometimes release deep-seated trapped emotions that your subconscious mind has hidden away and works hard at keeping out. The process can create more tension temporarily as you face your demons. However, the sooner you release the emotion, the better. As the emotion rises into your conscious mind, the feeling can dissolve, sometimes relaxing a part of the body that has been tense for years. (Chapter 10 has more about dealing with mindfulness bringing up painful emotions.)

Mindfulness Can Be Used Instead of Therapy or Medicine

Mindfulness certainly can’t be used instead of therapy or medicine. If you suffer from a clinical condition, you need to follow your doctor’s recommendations. However, in addition to medical advice, you can normally develop a mindfulness practice to support your healing process. Mindfulness helps to manage your stress levels, and can reduce your blood pressure and boost your body’s immune function.

Doctors can refer patients to a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course, empowering patients to take a more proactive part in looking after their own health and wellbeing though the application of mindfulness. This way of developing inner resources and enhancing resilience to stress has been found to be profoundly wholesome. Chapter 9 goes into more detail about MBSR.

Mindfulness Is Complicated and Boring

How you view mindfulness depends on the rules you create in your head about the process: mindfulness should be relaxing and enlightening; my mind should be blank; I should feel comfortable; I shouldn’t feel emotional; if I don’t do it every day I’ve failed; if it feels difficult I must be doing it incorrectly.

You need to be aware of the kind of rules you’ve created in your head about mindfulness. Any ‘must’, ‘should’ or ‘ought’ is the sign of a rigid rule laid down in your mind. Life has the tendency to flow wherever it wants to go, therefore you find, time and again, your inner rules being broken and frustration and boredom arising.

Mindfulness is simple but not easy. The simple bit is that mindfulness is about being aware and paying attention. The not-so-easy bit is having the discipline to practise regularly and the ability to trust in the process, no matter how wild your mind appears to be.

Mindfulness has a sense of simple flow about it: doing less rather than more; thinking less rather than more; going with the flow of life rather than spending life wrestling with complications created by the mind.

I’ll give you an example of the simplicity yet difficulty of mindfulness. Right now, if you’re aware of the weight of this book in your hand, you’re being mindful. If you walk out of the room you’re in and feel your feet on the ground, you’re being mindful. So mindfulness is simple. However, the difficult bit is overcoming your current habitual thought patterns, which have been strengthening for however long you’ve been on this planet, and are naturally very powerful. When you put this book down and walk off, notice how long it takes before you’re lost in an ocean of thoughts, feelings, stories, frustrations and desires.

If you find meditating boring, you have a few choices:

• Reduce the length of time for which you meditate.
• Become curious about boredom.
• Let the feeling of boredom go, and re-focus on the present moment again and again.
• Accept the boredom as part and parcel of life and keep meditating – the boredom will soon pass.

Ultimately, no matter how much trouble you have being mindful, and no matter how confused or bored you may be occasionally, you have a deep and powerful aspect of yourself that nothing can ever touch. Awareness is a mysterious aspect of being human that remains beyond the understanding of science. Awareness is always there, at the root of your being – ever shining, ever knowing. Even when you’re lost in thought or caught up in the darkest, most frightening emotion or situation, you’re aware, at some level, of what’s going on, both inside and outside yourself.