The mindfulness movement has gained significant momentum in recent decades. There is now widespread interest in mindfulness techniques and practices in the promotion of mental health. Many educators and health-care professionals see mindfulness—a suite of techniques that harness attention and awareness—as a way to manage stress and anxiety. The utilization of this technique as a method of regulating afflictive emotions can be attributed to Jon Kabat Zin, who saw mindfulness as a form of therapy, a means of reducing stress and pain in a clinical contest. Many published studies on mindfulness certainly corroborate the benefits of meditative practices.
However, the effectiveness of a technique is often shaped by the premises under which we undertake its practice. If afflictive emotions compel us to seek relief, the terms of our search will render mindfulness the clinical balm that sooths the pain. Thus, the practice bears the burden of expectation. The documented benefits of mindfulness become something we await, and its effectiveness is judged by the relief that ensues. The mind is a tricky thing. If mental suffering arises from an inability to abide our inner experience, expecting a practice to alleviate the affliction is merely another gambit that denies our inner reality. We want to feel something else and we expect mindfulness to deliver. This conception of mindfulness practice diminishes its transformative effects and limits its scope of relevance. While breathing exercises and grounding practices can indeed moderate the excitation of the sympathetic nervous system and activate the regulatory functions of the parasympathetic nervous system, mindfulness practice is better conceived as a fundamental re-orientation of self in relation to self, rather than as an intervention following an afflictive antecedent.
I propose the following analogies in an effort to reconceptualize mindfulness practice. In so doing, I hope to situate the practice in another context, not as a clinical intervention to acute conditions, but as the fundamental orientation for a healthier inner life.
Analogy 1: Climate of the inner landscape
A determined gardener is trying to grow grapes in the desert. Despite the abundance of sunshine, the gardener struggles grow the crop. The harsh, dry conditions and drastic temperature variations militate against a successful harvest. After many years of futile effort, the gardener capitulates and takes his project to a more moderate climate.
Many years pass. The abandoned vineyard sees a shift in prevailing weather patterns. With more rain, the land now hosts more grasses, shrubs, and trees. A variety of animals now inhabit the landscape. The emergence of a micro-climate moderates the variations in temperature and precipitation. Changes in climate coincides with a change in ecosystems. In a milder climate, the seeds that lie dormant now germinate in the light of a renewed landscape.
Mindfulness does not dispatch life’s difficulties; it reorients our relationship to stress.
This analogy illustrates overarching conditions that facilitate a set of outcomes. The vine thrives under certain climatic conditions, without which every laborious attempt at cultivation is likely to fail. Similarly, an integrated, resilient, and fulfilling life cannot be coaxed through ad hoc interventions that do not alter the fundamental conditions that shape the inner landscape. In preferring certain moods and emotions over others, we may work hard to fend off one suite of valences while coaxing another. Such labour may be futile if the basic conditions of interiority are inhospitable to affirming emotions such as gratitude and joy. Mindfulness is not the fertilizer that makes the seed sprout, but the shift in climate over time that makes germination inevitable, the constitutive work that deepens one’s inner world, churning of the loam of awareness that is the ground for growth and maturity.
Analogy 2: Physical Conditioning
A friend asks you to help him move into a new apartment. The promise of free beer and pizza is enough for you to oblige. After all, everyone is in their twenties and nobody has money to hire movers. You suddenly remember how you strained your back last year helping your sister move out of her dorm. “Better make sure I’m in proper shape,” you advise yourself. The evening before the move, you hit the gym, trot a few steps on the treadmill, push some dumbbells around the mat. On the day of the move, your friend puts you to work. Straining next to a wall, wedging the sofa through a corner, you feel a pop in your lower back. White pain shoots up your spine and neck. The last-minute trip to the gym did not prepare you for the day’s labour. You spend the next week on the couch, barely able to move.
Physical conditioning is a feature of lifestyle rather than a treatment for acute health conditions. To the extent that we are each physically able, exercise improves cardio-vascular health, bolsters strength and flexibility, maintains bone density and assists in the removal of toxins through perspiration. A baseline of physical fitness helps us meet the labours of daily life: carrying groceries, walking up the stairs, cleaning the house. This physical fitness is the result of regular exercise rather than sporadic visits to the gym.
Mindfulness deepens our capacity to face life’s vicissitudes with compassion and poise. This capacity is developed over time, through consistent and unwavering practice. In honing our awareness and learning to work skillfully with inner experience, we develop an equanimity that is apt to face life’s storms. Without daily practice, desperate resort to mindfulness in the face of afflictive emotions will not yield the placidity that we pine for. In working with the little swirls of thought, the sprouts of anxiety that arise day to day, we train ourselves to navigate the stormy swells of emotion, the squalls that rock the heart.
Analogy 3: Meeting your best friend
You exit the building where you work and step into a cold, wet street. After a full day at the desk, you are eager to get home to a warm meal and a hot bath. At the bus stop, you notice a figure on the street corner. Clothed in black, a hood over the face, the figure looks ominous and threatening. Alarmed, you walk down the street and wave down a taxi.
The next day, just as you round a corner to meet a colleague for coffee, you see the stranger again. Face hidden, sullen and forlorn, the figure looms large on the street. You quicken your pace and escape the figure’s dark presence. Yet, the stranger appears again on the edge of the dog park. While your pooch wrestles with a terrier, the hooded figure gazes into the distance. You leash the dog and hurry home. But the figure is ubiquitous. A shadowy blur in the grocery store, a stranger seated at the far end of the bus, a pair of eyes on the other side of the library shelves. Leaving work one night, you are startled by the hooded figure standing by the door, hot breath brushing your face. You scream and stumble to the ground, petrified. The figure draws close and enters a pool of streetlight. Here, you finally discern the stranger’s face: the stranger is you, but with a visage radiant and warm, eyes brimming with light. The stranger takes you by the hand and helps you up. You rise and peer into those eyes, both foreign and familiar.
We spend our lives running from ourselves, terrified of the emanations of the heart, tormented by the fulminations of the mind. We devise strategies to avoid our inner experience through distraction and consumption. Meditative practice instills the ability to face what life brings our way. We train in working with each moment’s unique challenges, with a deep faith in the wisdom inherent in each day. In so doing, we begin to see that our difficult emotions are not monsters to chase away, but rather guardians that usher us to maturity. We become acquainted with the unconditioned part of us that holds anger and heartbreak under a spacious sky of compassionate understanding.
In a life of meditation, we become a friend to ourselves. In my experience, this friend is the most loving and tender drill sergeant anyone will meet, a friend who whispers: I know you are hurting. I know you are frightened. It’ okay. Even as you are hurting, let’s keep moving. Place one foot here, then put your next step here. In other words, the space held for inner experience is not a wallowing indulgence that feeds moroseness; it is a loving presence that affirms both vulnerability and strength. In befriending ourselves, we access the deeper sources of wisdom that remain hidden when we avoid the stranger in the distance.
These three analogies illustrate the aspects of mindfulness practice not easily transmuted into a mainstream culture disposed to quick solutions and easy answers. The work of becoming human is the work of a lifetime. Mindfulness is less a tool of predetermined utility than a reorientation of the self. Meditation is not an easy remedy for life’s malaise, nor the instant dispatch to difficulties large and small; it is a tectonic restructuring of our inner world, a reformation that brings us closer to mystery and sacredness amid the stresses of life.