Tag Archives: mindfulness

The Mindfulness Solution

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Awakening In the Star Trek universe, Vulcans routinely practice The Disciplines, mental exercises that allow them to live their lives according to cthia, the philosophy of seeing the world dispassionately as it really is. Not surprisingly, there’s a real-life analogue of this fictional concept: mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness is getting more and more mainstream attention in the West these days, and with good reason. In a world where our default mode of operation is racing from one thing to another, where we strive to keep up with our social media lest we be (and be perceived to be) out of the loop, stopping to actually savor where we are is simple yet surprisingly hard recipe for appreciating our life while we’re living it. In the process, by learning to put our egos on hold, we can approach problems more objectively and empathize more easily with our fellow beings.

I’ve been interested in mindfulness for a while now, though it’s only recently that I’ve been “sitting” formally on a regular basis. Part of what made it hard was figuring out exactly what the nuts and bolts of the practice entail, without the mystical trappings that are extraneous and distracting in my secular, rationalist world view. Most of the books I’ve consulted include these metaphysical elements to some degree or another. Two that don’t (and which I’ve mentioned before) are Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go There You Are and Henepola Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English. Nonetheless, the first one I found a bit too vague for what I needed, and the second spent a bit too much time for my taste on Buddhist philosophy and terminology.

I now have a new favorite meditation manual, Ronald D. Siegel’s The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems. The first two chapters motivate and introduce mindfulness straightforwardly, noting its historical roots but not unduly burdening the reader with extraneous information. The real value of the book, however, lies in the third and fourth chapters, which contain directions on how to do various concentration and mindfulness meditations. These are the clearest instructions I’ve found yet, presented in a very approachable way. I particularly like the metaphor of the restless mind that will not focus for any length of time as an untrained puppy that you just expect you’ll have to repeatedly and lovingly tug back.

The following two-hundred-plus pages go into details of how particular meditations on certain topics and sensations can be used for rather specific life issues, such as fear, depression, pain, and relationships. These were interesting enough to read through and are a useful reference, complete with worksheets to identify problem areas and write down meditation intentions. They boil down to a common theme: using mindfulness and awareness of the present to ride and observe our unpleasant sensations, noting how they ebb and flow by themselves and in response to external circumstances.

For those serious about exploring meditation, this is the one book I would recommend to get started. I also recommend using a meditation timer to remove the concern of spending more or less time than intended; there are many phone apps that can fill this role, like the one I currently use.

Learning to eat

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Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is the action-item, CliffsNotes version of his In Defense of Food. A very quick read, it contains 64 rules of thumbs for eating more healthily. These rules emerged from his own research as well as from soliciting reader comments on the New York Times’ Well blog. To get a flavor (ha-ha) for these rules, you can see Pollan’s twenty favorites here, though they did not all make it to the book.

More detailed reviews of the book can be found at The Huffington Post and at The Moderate Voice

The Power of Now

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One of my pursuits these days is the cultivation of mindfulness. Life is rich and helter-skelter. Only by living in each fleeting now, it seems, is there hope of appreciating a journey that is already accelerating to its eventual conclusion. Existential crisis? Perhaps, but fairly benign as those go.

It was with some anticipation, then, that I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s acclaimed The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment. I tried to slog through it, really I did, but there was too little psychological wheat to be salvaged from all the pseudo-scientific chaff that pervades the book.

What am I talking about? Vague references to “vibrational frequencies” that, when elevated by mindfulness, allow one to not be affected by “negativity.” Ok, I can bend over backwards and internally translate this as a metaphor of psychological states one can reach and imagery that can take one there. But then he also rails against “thought” and “mind” trapping us and being the obstacles from which we must seek liberation. I don’t buy it; it is ego and anxiety and fixation on the past and future that bind us, and careful thought can often be a liberating tool. We probably do need to take a break from being analytical all the time—but the blanket statment that rationality is an obstacle to enlightenment hardly follows from that in my book, and that is a distinctinion Tolle makes hapharzadly at best. Sloppy language, in fact, pervades the book: Tolle’s statements that past and present don’t really exist certainly are phrased to explicitly mean that physical time is illusory, but then he inconsistently backtracks from this solipsism by occasionally making reasonable distinctions between “wall” and “psychological” time.

What else? The kicker is his use of pseudoscientific jargon in ways that are clearly not meant to be taken metaphorically (or if they are, they constitute a reckless indulgence in the fallacy of equivocation): “As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular structure actually becomes less dense.” As a scientist, engineer, and humanist, I cannot just let that slide.

What is left after ignoring, sighing, or eye-rolling through the pseudo-science is nothing that I haven’t encountered elsewhere: One must get beyond ego. While there’s no need to be passive, one must accept what is. Wherever you are, be there. I was hoping perhaps there would be some concrete practical guides to mindfulness practice, but no. It’s just your standard breathing practice and everyday presence, and more description of what mindfulness is rather than how to get it.

I’ve found better mindfulness books that are practical, focused, and secular. Jon Kabat Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are is one; Mindfulness in Plain English is another. They seem mostly (but certainly not exclusively) focused on sitting practice, for which I struggle and fail to set aside time. I seem to be leaning more towards “everyday mindfulness,” re-focusing on the wide-eyed wonder and joy that I felt not that long ago when everyday life was (or just seemed) less hectic.