What happens when you take the mind out of mindfulness
The concept of “mindfulness” is one that caused a little itch in me that never seemed to go away. I didn’t quite know why at first. What could be “wrong” or even uncomfortable about being “mindful,” right?
But now I get it.
Just think about it.
Mindful =
Mind + Full (your mind is full) =
Full of the Mind (your head is full of thoughts) =
In Your Head
Which basically means, not in your heart.
I mean, the whole idea of meditation is that we “get out of our heads—our minds, our thoughts—to go somewhere else. Somewhere where our thoughts don’t rule the day, the hour, the moment, and every waking second. Where we have a chance to simply BE without thinking about it, stressing about it, needing to figure it out, needing to be right about it, needing to succeed, and so on.
This is how most of us spend our lives. In a place that feels extraordinarily normal because we’ve been there so long. Not only is it a place of comfort just by virtue of how long we’ve lived there, but because we actually convince ourselves that we don’t have to think about it anymore. We’re so used to it, to living the way we do, that even while we’re thinking, thinking, thinking, we believe we are gliding along without all that heavy thinking and heavy lifting we have decided we don’t want to do.
The trouble is . . .
The trouble is that all that Mind+Full-ness doesn’t help. It doesn’t help us meditate, that’s for sure. Because being all up in your head is more like living in that witch’s caldron. You know the one.
As Shakespeare once said:
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Thoughtless Awareness
Lately I have turned to the phrase “thoughtless awareness” to describe a state in which I somehow continue, on some level of my being, to feel aware or sense I’m aware, but experience no recognizable thought patterns. No mind chatter. No disturbing “what ifs” and “what if nots.”
But the truly fascinating thing about all of this is that, ultimately, even the idea of “thoughtless awareness” takes thought. Call it a paradox or a conundrum or a dichotomy or a Catch 22, in the end if I don’t think about not thinking—if I don’t spend some time deliberating the process of becoming thoughtless, then I’m probably still thinking before and during my meditation.
However—and this is where I get excited—I seem to have developed a step-by-step method of thinking that leads me to not thinking every single time, which then leads me into a meditative place that I only know I’ve been once I come out of it.
Those who meditate probably know what I mean. All that really matters, though, is that feeling it feels so darn good that when you come out of it you wish you were back in it—even if you can’t say where you were, how you got there, or what happened when you were there.
There are always the times, like this morning, on the other hand, when the message of this writing appeared. Did I hear it? See it? Sense it? I’m not at all sure. All I know is that it came to me and I felt inspired and full of renewed passion for the day and whatever was to come.
I was sure only about 10 or 15 minutes had gone by, but it was 30. I didn’t know where I’d been, but I knew I felt better, more expansive. I was feeling joy at the prospect of writing about something that “came to me,” as if by magic.
The best part, in my estimation, is that the proof is in the pudding.
All my life I’ve been told to USE YOUR HEAD and USE YOUR COMMON SENSE and EMOTIONS ONLY FOG UP YOUR THINKING.
Well, guess what?
The proof is in the pudding. The less I think, the more I feel my way into and out of things, sense my way through things, with my mind in the passenger seat rather than the driver’s seat, the more my life is filled with ease.
The more time I spend feeling my experience during meditation instead of thinking about it—or thinking about not thinking about it—the more deeply my meditations invite me to go. All of which leads to a clearer state of being (not only thinking or doing) that guides me through the days.
I hold the concept of thoughtless awareness dear because I love that I can be aware on so many levels other than the mental level, or even the emotional level. It’s what Eckhart Tolle would probably agree is “being in the now.” I’d like to call it “being” because even thinking about how to be in the now can take me to places I’d rather not go—places of self-judgment or unworthiness or anxiety.
My colleague and friend Dana Stovern of the Somatic Money Podcast would likely agree with me when I say that sensing the way you feel—not emotionally but somatically—provides the insight you need into what you really need to know, whether it’s money and finances or love and relationships. If I feel something in my body, there’s always, without fail, a thought that preceded it and brought it into corporeal form. So, once again, the true paradoxical enigma is that nothing really means anything if we don’t think about it. Yet, in order to get to the truth of the matter, we have to stop thinking about it.
It’s about now that I wonder if what I’m writing makes as much sense to my readers as it does to me.
Which just might be overthinking it.
