Living intentionally is much simpler and more complex than we think. On the one hand, living intentionally seems easy. We just have to choose where we spend our time and money, how we treat people, what we put in our minds and bodies, and what we focus on in our thoughts. We all know we should do these things with purpose and intention, and a majority of us (especially if you are bothering to read a blog like this) intend to do it.
But then there’s the complicated part. Food has an emotional
component that shifts how we eat. Unexpected expenses arise and mess with our
budget, we don’t like how other people act, so we respond in kind. We get drunk
and other people don’t like then we act, and they respond to us in kind. We come
home tired at the end of the day and just want to watch reality TV or videos of
little kids running into things on YouTube instead of reading our book or going
for a walk.
It’s easier to sit and browse Reddit than it is to do the
dishes or have an intentional conversation with our partner. Meditation takes
time and energy, exercise takes time and energy, everything good for us takes time and energy.
This blog is not only about why living intentionally matters, but also about how to do this. The catch always seems to be what happens when we aren’t focused on what we are doing. Our mind wanders from time to time, we lose our focus, we say and do things that are less than intentional and ideal. This is just how life works, but we can always work to do better.
We will start with three things:
Proper expectations: Diligence versus Perfection
Staying Steady: Learning to Concentrate the Mind
Being Aware: Cultivating Mindfulness
Setting the Right
Intention: Diligence versus Expectations
This is important.
Perfection is a non-concept and it will derail us every time
we try to do anything if we allow it
to be present. Think about it.
What would a perfect day look like?
A day off of work, hanging out with our loved ones, going to
Disneyworld?
These are fun and maybe even ideal days, but are they perfect? Does absolutely nothing go
wrong? You don’t have to use the bathroom, you don’t get tired, the temperature
is exactly where you want it, your car doesn’t burn any gas? No bugs, no bad
smells, no annoying noises?
What does a perfect relationship look like? Do you never
fight, never disagree, always know what the other one wants and are ready to
provide it? Do they do that for you? Do you like the same food, same music,
same movies, and the same hobbies? Always want sex at the exact same time?
Does a perfect job pay you an infinite amount of money to do
nothing? Does a perfect home have a lot of rooms you have to clean or a few
rooms that limit your space? Does perfect weather mean warm and dry so we can
all sit outside or sunlight and rain so that plants can grow?
Where does snow fit in? What if you want to ski?
Perfection isn’t Real
These are absurd
questions because perfection is an absurd idea, but one that many of us are
stuck on. It is something we strive for. The recovery community aims for it
in the form of telling us we’ve fallen all the way down some fictitious
mountain if we slip up. We think we’ve blown our health if we eat a cheeseburger.
Our minds are wired to notice imperfections and things that aren’t working, so
they dominate our consciousness if we aren’t careful.
Everything works in a certain way in our world. Things like
time and energy are used up, things move toward states of disorder– glasses
fall off of tables and break, they never jump onto tables and put themselves
together.
This is reality.
So, with this in
mind, set an intention to practice living intentionally with diligence, not perfection. Diligence
to notice where you make mistakes, and correct them. No beating yourself up. No
analyzing and debating things endlessly. No berating yourself for ruining some
nonexistent record.
Diligence, not perfection.
Meditation and
Mindfulness
Why would I put these two things at the very beginning of a discussion about living intentionally?
It’s simple: we cannot be truly intentional until we can keep our mind in one place. If we can’t focus, we cannot sustain intentionality (my friend Meredith writes about thoughts and their effect on us all the time).
Meditation does a few things for us. It helps builds
concentration and mindfulness, and it can also serve as the first step into a more
intentional life. By having a practice that we do each day, for s specific
length of time, we begin to bring intentionality into our lives in a real way
from the very beginning.
So how do we do this?
We start with the breath, and nothing more:
Find a
quiet place.
Sit securely and with good posture. Let your
hands rest comfortably. Let your eyes close naturally.
Begin by
being aware.
What do you hear?
What is your body experiencing?
Be aware of these things without claiming them
as “yours”.
Be aware
of what is going on in your body.
Make note of sensations associated with your
body without claiming them as “yours”.
Turn your
attention to the breath.
Breathe deeply into the body, letting the belly
expand and contract with each breath.
Consciously slow the breath, letting the
out-breath be a little longer than the in-breath.
What does it feel like to breathe?
Turn your
attention to the breath in the nose.
Find the place in your nose that is slightly
cooler than the rest on the in-breath and slightly warmer than the rest on the
out-breath. Let this place anchor your awareness, and return here anytime you
realize you have become distracted.
Distractions are neutral, no matter what their
content may be. Do not judge, criticize or evaluate them, simply return to your
breath. Do not judge or criticize yourself for becoming distracted, simply
return to your breath.
Return to your breath as many times needed – becoming
distracted a thousand times simply means you have a thousand opportunities to
train your attention by returning to your breath.
Judge nothing, criticize nothing.
When you are ready to finish, move your fingers
and your toes before slowly opening your eyes, maintaining a downward gaze for
a moment. Take a final deep breath. Embrace everything that is around you.
Do this every day,
even if only for 5 or 10 minutes. You’ll find that it helps cultivate the
idea of the breath as a place of calm, a place where intention can thrive
because we aren’t always caught up in the rush of tumultuous thoughts and
emotions. It helps us see the difference between the situations we face and our
opinions on the situations we face. We can get underneath the stories our mind
tells us, and we start to learn that the stories themselves are what bring us
suffering.
Once concentration is more of a norm for us, we can begin
investing in mindfulness, something we’ll spend the next few months digging
into.
Why Bother Living Intentionally?
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Marcus Aurelius
Our lives are short.
I know it seems like you’re not going to die. It seems like that
is something that only happens to everyone else. The thing is, we’re all going
to die, and it probably won’t seem like the logical conclusion of some huge
storyline. It will be mundane and unexpected.
I hear stories all the time that bring home how close death
is at every turn.
A young man goes to bar and has a few drinks. They find him
in the river the next day.
A woman runs to the store to grab brown sugar for a desert,
not thinking about the student that will run the red light and T-bone her car.
A man in his 30’s goes to sleep and never knows that his
house catches fire in the middle of the night.
A man goes out to confront his neighbor for banging on his
fence, a source of long-standing acrimony between them. He doesn’t see the gun.
A young grandfather goes to sleep, excited about his
grandson’s first birthday the next day, and never wakes up.
Take a moment and put yourself in the shoes of the people
you see who die every day on the news or that you know (or know by
association). It’s very rare that
someone knows they are walking into the moment of their death – this isn’t a
movie, there’s no somber or inspiring ambient music playing, the light doesn’t
start to shimmer. It’s all very ordinary until it’s over.
This is why living intentionally matters – this all ends, so we need to be wise in how we spend it.
What’s Next
We’ll spend the next few weeks and months exploring mindfulness as a deep, intentional practice with the goal of bringing it into our lives as a foundation for being more intentional in everything we do. This will include blogs like this one, mini-blogs on Instagram, podcast episodes, and the occasional video (here’s a post about many of the things we get wrong about mindfulness practice if you want to get a headstart).
I am also hard at work building courses, eBooks, and
journals for a subscription library, which I am hoping to launch in the next
few months. My goal is to create in-depth, specific, and concrete resources to
help people on this path of intentionality. I wanted a way people could have
access to everything for a single price, rather than having to buy something
new every time they found a new area of intentionality to address or I created
something. I’m excited about it.
I’m also excited about walking this out with everyone who is
reading this. If there is a specific topic I could cover, a resource I could
create, or something I’m missing, don’t hesitate to let me know. This is a
collaborative process – I do all of this because helping other people walk this
path helps me walk this path. It’s a good deal.
Mindfulness and other people has long been a topic of conversation. Even emperors offered thoughts on the topic:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We are born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
Marcus Aurelius
When we get right down to it, mindfulness is about trying to see the world as it really is, without the screen of our thoughts and emotions and prejudices and conditioned understandings. I am not sure how possible this is, but we can at least try to see and accept things as they are. Other people are one of the biggest challenges in this regard.
Mindfulness and Other People
If I had to boil down most of what I see people identify as the main problem in their life, it would be other people.
My husband doesn’t listen to me.
My wife only thinks about herself.
My boyfriend won’t grow up.
My girlfriend doesn’t understand that the world doesn’t revolve around her.
My kids won’t do what I tell them to do.
My boss is unreasonable.
That cop was on a power trip.
My dad doesn’t know how to let things go.
My roommate doesn’t know how to do the dishes.
Other drivers suck.
Everyone who didn’t vote the way I voted is a moron.
The poor only want free stuff.
The rich are corrupt and use their wealth to keep other people down.
Our president is a moron.
Our last president was a moron.
Every president we’ve ever had was a moron.
That other country’s president is a moron.
Everyone except me is a moron.
It goes on and on.
Other. People.
There is a reason Zen masters retreat to the mountains and Sadhus retreat to caves and monks retreat to monasteries where no one is allowed to talk. It seems like you can’t find enlightenment with other people around.
Of all the things we have to learn to be at peace with in life, other people pose the most serious difficulty.
They don’t listen, they complain, they get in the way of what we are working on. They are selfish and stupid and arrogant and just have to live their lives near us living ours.
There is a good chance the sorry bastards would even have the nerve to say these exact same things about us.
Other.
People.
While most of this essay will be about trying to find ways to work with other people, let’s get one thing out of the way at the very beginning: not everyone has the same degree of self-awareness and insight and mindfulness in how they go about their lives. This is an inescapable fact. The idea that everyone approaches life with the same amount of skillfulness and knowledge is nonsense. Some people are healthier than others, some people have a better sense of things than everyone else.
There is no way around the fact that many people out there don’t really pay attention to the things they do, don’t take the time to be introspective and see where they might improve. There are many people who honestly do not care how their actions might affect others. Mindfulness in how we live is not somehting that everyone cares about.
This is all true.
The mistake we make is in thinking we are one of the high functioning elite. Especially if we think we are in this rarefied class in every situation. This kind of thinking points toward a sort of narcissism or solipsism. No one is always right.
It might be useful to ask ourselves if we are really as mindful and considerate and enlightened as we think we are. Even if I am one of the more self-aware and honest people in the world (which I’m not), I will still fail to be consistent 100% of the time. I will still make mistakes and behave poorly. Often on a daily basis.
Or hourly.
I am lucky when I can go a few minutes without doing something foolish or unskillful.
I, of course, have a reason for this, and it’s never me. My reasons for being a turd are good and valid.
Mindfulness and Motives
We all like to think that we have a reason for doing what we do. Our decisions (for the most part), make sense to us. We can trace our way back to the precipitating cause and follow a chain of events from there to where we are. It all follows a logic.
The thing is, this is true for other people as well. People are not selfish and difficult without cause, and in their mind, they are not being selfish and difficult. They are standing up for themselves or drawing boundaries or simply doing what they do. It makes sense to them. A central aspect of living with mindfulness is recognizing the differnece between the situations we find ourselevs in and our stories about those situations.
And this is the crux of the problem we are dealing with here: everyone is doing the best they can with what they have. What they do makes sense to them. Nobody thinks they are really the villain.
Lex Luthor thinks he is saving the planet from an overpowered alien.
Magneto is fighting for an oppressed minority.
Agent Smith is fighting to bring balance and order to the Matrix.
Every good villain thinks they are the hero.
This is what makes them believable. We inherently mistrust a villain who is evil for the sake of evil, but we jump to the conclusion that the people around us are being jerks just to be jerks and ruin our life. It doesn’t even make sense.
They are living their lives, same as us. They may be selfish and stupid and self-absorbed and all those things we like to tell ourselves we are not, but they are, for the most part, oblivious rather than malicious. Sure, there are malicious people in the world, but they rarely see their malice as malice – they believe it to be justified.
Just. Like. Us.
When someone is malicious, they are malicious because they are suffering, this is how life works. I do not know that I ever see a situation where malice is present where suffering is not. They go hand in hand. This changes the nature of our relationship to others and their behavior. It takes it from the realm of resistance and opposition to that of compassion. Not without boundaries, but compassion for their suffering.
I did a whole podcast on this very topic. Check it out here.
There is tremendous power in trying to understand just why someone behaves the way they do. It takes us out of the me-versus-them mindset that causes us so much suffering (which we then vent on others in unhealthy ways).
Babies scream and cry and lash out when they are in pain, many adults never find a more constructive way to meet their needs. Complainers often feel like they have no control and seek to alter things through complaining. People who create drama may feel insecure so they cause trouble between you and other people so that the two of you can team up. Laziness is often depression related, but it can also be an expression of powerlessness or something they saw modeled growing up. Cruel and manipulative people are seeking to get their needs met in very unhealthy and unskillful ways. Those who tend toward self-absorption and a lack of insight were often not raised to have these things and, due to the very nature of self-absorption and no insight, probably don’t even know they are self-absorbed and lacking insight.
The Illusion of Control
When it comes down to it, we are talking about control. We want to control other people, we need them to do what we want them to do. I often ask people to make a list of the things they always have control over in life. They tend to list the same things.
Thoughts
Emotions
Their kids
Their life
Their body
Their pets
You’ll notice, even though none of the things on this list are under our control, other people do not appear on it. Even when we are listing things we think we can control (and getting it wrong) we don’t even consider putting other people on the list.
Yet we let so much of our happiness rest on controlling them.
We constantly outsource our emotional wellbeing to this thing we know we cannot control. We put our peace and contentment in the hands of something that is completely out of our control, and then wonder why we are anxious.
There are so many ways that we give others control.
We take offense to what others say, think, or believe.
We believe this offense means something.
We wish others would do something different.
We seek to manipulate or coerce others into doing what we want.
We think our unhappiness rests on what they do or do not do.
We think our happiness rests on what they do or do not do.
We think anything going on inside of us actually has something to do with them.
The fun part is that they are probably thinking the same things about us.
We are stuck in this web of interactions where everyone is blaming everyone else for how they feel, and then wondering why nothing is getting better.
This isn’t helpful.
There’s an easy exercise to expose and deal with this:
Today, whenever something related to another person makes you unhappy, ask yourself what it might be like if you took responsibility for your own emotional state.
There is the other person and their actions, and then there is your reaction.
You only have control over one of these things.
It isn’t them.
So many of our problems and difficulties stem, not from other people, but from our desire to control them.
The same way we deal with anything mindfully: by being aware of the difference between the situation, and our judgment or assessment of the situation.
You want to see a certain movie, they want to see a different one.
Is it really a matter of them being unreasonable and selfish, or simply wanting to see a different movie? Is this really a thing, or just someone wanting something different from you? Is it all that important that you get to see your movie? Strip away words like fair – these are just concepts. They muddy situations like this.
This is a really good opportunity to explore the emotions and thoughts you have related to the situation rather than judging their behavior.
Are you tying this to previous behavior you have seen from them, so it is about more than this one movie (They are always selfish!)?
Is this really about feeling like you never get your way?
Are you just unable to accept not getting your way?
Do you experience anxiety when you aren’t in control?
What does anxiety drive you to do?
None of these things are necessarily good or bad. Neither is seeing one movie or another, they are just movies. A few hours out of your life. You will waste 10 times that many hours playing on your phone in the coming week.
Someone wanting to see what they want to see is neutral, and no different than you wanting to see what you want to see.
There is no morality or ethics here, it’s just two people wanting what they want.
So, take a moment, address what is happening inside of you, and accept that it is neutral. Accept that your partner wanting what they want is neutral.
Let yourself sit with these thoughts and feelings, without judgment, without reaction. Observe them, allowing them to be exactly as they are.
Mindful Boundaries
But what do we do about the truly toxic people in our world?
We’ve talked about the suffering people and all the words that go along with them.
Complaining.
Self-absorbed.
Drama creating.
Lazy.
No insight.
Cruel.
Manipulative.
And it goes on and on and on.
What do you do about people like this when they continually bring true harm into your life and the lives of those you love? Is this blog post advocating just accepting abuse and mistreatment?
Definitely not.
There are times we have to address peoples’ behavior, we just have to do this without anger, and with compassion and an awareness of the limits of our control in the situation. These things will prevent it from creating suffering for us.
So how do we do this?
Confront them, kindly and with compassion. Without hurt or anger. Tell them how their behavior affects you. If this is a person who cares and deserves to be in your life, this should at least be able to be a conversation. If it cannot, you have to decide if they are someone that gets to keep a spot in your life. If they are, accept these things about them and move on. If they are a part of your work environment, then it may be time to look for a new job.
Draw boundaries. Not everyone has access to all parts of our life. This doesn’t change because they are family.
No matter what, keep a focus on the fact that you are choosing to have these people in your life. Not as a way of blaming yourself or assigning responsibility, but because there is a great deal of power in acknowledging our ability to choose.
Ready to set some boundaries? Start here.
A lot of this depends on who they are and what role they play in our life.
If they are an acquaintance or casual friend, you can simply choose if you want them around or not. No matter what anyone says, we are allowed to break up with our friends.
If the person carries a little more weight in your life (a spouse or family member) or you don’t have a lot of choice about them being there (a boss or co-worker), things are a little more complicated.
We have to choose our reaction to their behavior and decide how much is too much – when does their negative behavior outweigh the level of requirement they have in our lives? When they exceed this, we may need to step away.
No one gets a free pass to stay in our life. Who we spend our time with determines who we are. Who we are is all we have.
Trust
When it all comes down, I really like people.
People are cool, people do cool things.
I think the cool things outweigh the uncool things by a very wide margin.
I also really trust people.
As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, for every person who has done something shady to me, thousands and thousands have not. I constantly give people the opportunity to screw me over, and they don’t.
People tend to show up when they are supposed to show up and do the things they are supposed to do to fit into society and be a decent human. We all know people who don’t do these things, but we tend to remember them because they are the exception. We forget just how many people we see every day who take care of their shit.
People are generally trustworthy.
I also think you can trust toxic people more than you can trust anyone else.
They are very consistent in their behavior and their actions are predictable.
If you know someone always thinks the other person is wrong in a disagreement, you can trust them to do the same with you when you disagree.
If you know someone starts trouble to make themselves feel better, you can trust them to do just that if you tell them about an issue you are having with someone else.
If you know someone is lazy, you trust them to be lazy.
If you know someone has no insight, you can trust they will behave as they have always behaved.
It is absurd to have this hope that someone is suddenly going to change and then get mad when they don’t. Adjust your expectations to fit what you know of them, and make your decision based on that rather than some hopeful nonsense.
If you know you can trust someone to respond selfishly, don’t share something personal with them and expect yourself to be happy or satisfied with the results.
If you know you can trust someone to blame others when things go wrong, don’t work with them on something unless you are ready to shoulder the blame.
Complainers will complain.
Blamers will blame.
Manipulators will manipulate.
Why are we surprised by this?
So, yes, you can trust people. You can trust them to act according to the nature they have cultivated. Work from this understanding and you will rarely get betrayed or be harmed. Don’t get mad at them, remember that they are doing the best they can with what they have. Cultivate compassion in response. Love them and be kind. But have boundaries.
Besides, remember that their selfishness and difficulty harms them more than it does anyone else. They pay the price for their behavior, it is not our job to bring consequences or play the role of karmic enforcer. Being treated poorly is an opportunity to offer compassion if we can step outside our own wants and desires and sheer annoyance for a second.
The most important thing in all of this is understanding that you are really in trouble if your emotional wellbeing is in the hands of someone else. I don’t care who the other person is. I don’t care how much they love you, how much you love them or how good their intentions toward you may be. You cannot outsource the regulation of your internal state without creating anxiety because people will let you down whether they man to or not.
In seeing things as they are, simply accept that you are going to encounter all sorts of difficult people today, and every day for the rest of your life. There is no escaping this. Some will be strangers, some will be family, some will be the people closest to you. Try to stay in your own business and offer compassion instead of judgment. Don’t let someone else’s selfishness or unhappiness push you into your own selfishness or unhappiness. They are the way they are for a reason.
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Mindfulness is Natural Because We Are Nature
Mindfulness and nature are a natural pairing. I’ve written about this alot.
At its core, there is nothing more natural than being mindful – engagement with reality without the screen of admonitions and opinions from our thoughts is our natural state.
There is also something inherently calming about getting out into the world and realizing that there are things far beyond us that will continue no matter what happens to us.
I like to meditate on the fact that there are things that were here long before me and will be here long after me. I like that there are stars out there burning and planets out there spinning that never have and never will care about me at all. We are not as important as we like to think we are. There is a stability to the world and the universe whether we see it or not. A lot of the doomsday wailing and gnashing of teeth we hear so much of these days begins to seem silly when we consider things on a larger scale.
These tragedies and catastrophes are only such when we think we are the center of things or that we are needed for everything to work as it “should”. Nature always finds a way to survive and overcome, and I am not sure it cares if we are there to witness it or not. Nature is everywhere, all the time. It finds a way to survive and thrive no matter what is going on. The weeds in the sidewalk and the puddles on the ground are nature. Nature is with us everywhere we go because, no matter how technological and advanced we become as a species, we are nature.
This makes me happy.
These things being more significant than us and not caring about us are only a problem if we think we are above or separate from nature. One of the most significant sources of unhappiness and struggle for us as humans is the notion that we are above or apart from nature in the first place. Religion, the ego, and technology are the primary culprits in making us feel that we are somehow above or separate from the universe, though I am sure many things contribute to this idea.
Our PlayStations and iPhones and shoes and cars and air conditioning and pizza delivery all make it very easy for us to forget we are biological creatures, with actual biological needs.
We forget that a vast amount of human history was spent in very different conditions than what we live in now. Our technological and cultural evolution is outstripping our biological evolution (I for real don’t care how you want to define evolution here, we can just say that the world is moving way too fast if that is easier) and an epidemic of depression, anxiety, and alienation is the result.
Mindfulness and What We Can Learn from Nature
I grew up in the mountains, and I grew up outside. I think I learned from nature my whole life, apart from the years where drugs and alcohol and other assorted messes drug me into a different, less natural and less healthy, world.
One of the best times in the mountains is the spring when the snow is melting, and everything is muddy and rocky and soggy. There is a smell of dampness in the air, and you can see where trees rotted and fell over in the winter. A lot of things are dead, but this won’t last. It won’t be long before there is a layer of green everywhere, and flowers start to bloom, and new life takes root.
Because of this time, the idea of birth and death and rot and regeneration as being two sides of the same coin are lodged pretty firmly in my mind. The cycle of birth and death are intricately connected. They roll on and on and on, one leading to the other. It’s been this way for a very long time and will be this way for even longer. Way before us, way after us. Once again – much, much bigger than us.
We can see this in our lives as everything that ends is the beginning of something else.
Things that have reached the end of their time pass away if we let them, and something new moves in to take their place. We exist within and because of this cycle of birth and death, rot, and regeneration. It’s only a problem if we are trying to hang on to things that are cycling out, things whose time have passed.
Mindfulness of the Fact That We Will All Die Someday
One day it will be our turn. Keeping this in mind changes the way we see everything.
Nature stays rooted in much larger cycles than we can understand. We get caught up in a lot of stuff in life, and much of it can seem overwhelming and terrifying and eternal.
Issues with friends or partners, things at work, the news, our leaders, other countries. Don’t get me wrong, these are problematic, and they affect our lives, but I am not sure they are as big a deal as our minds make them out to be.
I like to think of the places I’ve been that are the farthest away from other people when these kinds of fundamental life issues arise. Alpine lakes, groves deep in the mountains, wind-driven plains out in the middle of nowhere. These places are as they are, and they have been this way for longer than any of us have been around. They change, but almost imperceptibly to us. Very little affects them in any real way.
These places help ground me, to root me in something bigger than myself and my problems.
I like the fact that they will be here long after me. I love that they will outlive Twitter and Facebook and job promotions and that thing someone said about me that one time.
They’re real.
A lot of the things we worry about are not.
Mindfulness is Natural, Animals Embody This
Animals are the embodiment of mindfulness. I like how animals just do what they do.
Dogs eat the same food every single day, and they are just happy to have it. Wolves kill baby deer, and ants eat butterflies. There’s no right or wrong to it, it’s just what they do.
I also like that, as humans, we do think about right and wrong and, for the most part, try to do the right thing.
No matter what the cynics and doomsayers proclaim, the vast, vast majority of people you meet do enough of the right thing that they don’t rob or kill you.
The problem with all of this is that our mind likes to generalize, and turns all sorts of things that are not matters of right and wrong into matters of right and wrong.
A lot more is neutral than we like to think.
The rain is just rain, seasons change and sometimes we are hungrier than we would like to be. It’s part of life. Complaining and focusing on how we wish things were does not help anything.
Both a mindful life and a life in nature are a constant reminder that much of what we center in on and sincerely believe are merely human constructions. There are a lot of things we put a lot of stock in that don’t exist anywhere outside of human social construction.
Think of things like fairness, beauty, niceness, charisma, manners, equality, justice, postmodernism, celebrity. These are not real in any sense apart from a human understanding of them. I am not saying they are not good things, or that they are good things, only that they are the result of human construction and nothing more.
I like to ask myself if something would keep a bear from eating me to decide if it is real or not.
Violence or speed or being better at hiding than the bear is at finding would save me, but concepts would not. Telling the bear that it is unfair to eat me because we are unequal in our ability to fight will get me eaten. Brad Pitt telling the bear not to eat him because he is too handsome and too famous to die will get him eaten. These are just concepts. They don’t mean anything beyond human agreement.
We are humans, living in a complex human world and human society, so these things are necessary, but we often get them confused as things that are inherently existent in the world when they are not.
This makes us think they are going to be more present than they are, or that they are inherently good things. Maybe some of them are, others maybe are not, but they are created by us, for us.
That’s it.
Mindfulness and Balance with Our Nature
We spent a great deal of our history as a species living in tribal groups and clans, but we do not have this anymore. Most of us spend our evenings in small boxes with our immediate families, if we are fortunate enough to have that. Many of us live alone, or with people we don’t really know. We spend our days surrounded by strangers in distinctly non-natural environments.
In the past, we had a much better chance of seeing how the work we did with our bodies actually fed and sustained our bodies. The work we do now has very little to do with actually maintaining our lives, it is rare to have a direct correlation between the hours you trade and what you receive in return. Everything goes through a layer or two of symbolic representation before translating into anything that helps keep us alive. In my job, every hour that I sit with someone brings X amount of dollars to my bank account, which then can be translated into cash or spent with a debit card. This is not a direct exchange for the things that keep my family and me alive. It is an exchange in which I receive a credit I can trade in for those things. I am always at least one step away from how my work feeds my people and me.
We spend very little or no time outside unless you count walking to our cars. We rarely see the stars. We are almost never in danger. Our food is waiting for us in the supermarket or the drive-thru, and it is often hard to actually even call it food. I am not onboard with the societal notions of beauty driving people to be unhealthily skinny or insanely defined and sculpted, but to say that we can eat whatever we want and still have our bodies operate as they were meant to operate is pure nonsense. We even apply fabricated ideas and ideologies to something as simple and basic as what we put into our bodies as fuel.
Our bodies are meant to move and work, but if we work our bodies at all, it is often in a building specifically designed for working our bodies. We earn symbolic representations that we exchange for being allowed into a building where there are manmade machines that simulate the motions and exertions of working as our ancestors did every day.
All this is to say that we are very, very far removed from nature. We have created layer upon layer of separation, some physical, others mental, and each layer alienates us from ourselves because we are nature. When we separate ourselves from the natural world and create structures to bypass and circumvent it, we are bypassing and circumventing ourselves. This can only lead to suffering.
Mindfulness and Modernity
This is not to say that the modern world is bad or that society is an adverse development. I am writing this in a house on a computer connected to the internet so that I can post it on my website later while listening to Brain.fm on my Bluetooth headphones. I’m not exactly an anarcho-primitivist. I am only saying that we have to remember that none of our progress and technological achievement can alter our essential and inherent needs and desires, and much of how we live now is difficult for us.
This stands whether you think we evolved or were created or some combination of the two. Does anyone really think we evolved or were designed to sit in front of a computer screen all day or to sit in a car for hours at a time? To eat microwave meals and Starburst and drink Kool-Aid? To spend 90% of our time indoors?
Of course we weren’t.
The healthiest (all-around healthy, not just physically) people I know push back against this creeping anti-nature. They ride bikes outside and pay attention to what they eat. They work on projects because they want to and remember that their jobs are there to provide a means to live, not as the reason they live. They still go out and do things and really love their partners and haven’t given up on life yet.
The happiest people I know are grateful. The least happy people I know are ungrateful. Gratitude takes a sad person and gives them joy. Ingratitude takes a happy person and makes them miserable.
Gratitude is what allows someone to endure all sorts of injustice and hardship and emerge stronger and more resilient instead of broken and cynical. It’s been important enough in my life that I did an entire month on it a few years back. I’ve done podcast episodes about it as well.
A lack of gratitude is what causes people who have everything to need more and more and more. This creates the cycle of suffering that is greed and self-absorption. A lack of gratitude is what allows people with more than enough to be miserable and angry and to seek to inflict their suffering on others.
I won’t say gratitude can fix everything, but it can certainly make everything a little better.
It is the root of everything good for us.
In many ways, gratitude is at the heart of mindfulness as it allows us to cultivate a deep appreciation and love for the very simple act of being in the moment, and for all the simple things the moment offers.
Let’s look at a few less-than-obvious places we can be grateful.
Gratitude for Existing
The most basic place for gratitude is in the very fact that we exist at all.
This gets weird when you think about it too much.
The only reason we can even think about being grateful for anything at all is because we exist. This is the first place for gratitude.
I often think that no matter what is happening around me, at least I am here to experience it. This is especially noticeable when death is near me. Either someone I love has passed away or I am helping someone walk through the death of someone they love. Those moments suck, but at least we are there to witness them at all.
The alternative to all of this is nothing.
I often hear people say they would rather experience nothing than what they are experiencing at the moment, but there is even an expression of awareness in this statement. I get it, nothingness seems nice sometimes. But when we say that we are, in some way envisioning ourselves experiencing that nothingness. We see ourselves existing in the nothingness, which makes no sense at all.
Whatever is happening, we have been gifted an awareness to experience it. At the very least, we have this wide beam of consciousness, experiencing this world.
That is ground for gratitude.
Gratitude for the Body
It is also a little weird that we have a body when you think about it.
I can make my hands and fingers move as I need them to and I can make my feet go where I want them to and all that, but I don’t really know how I do this.
I just do.
As a matter of fact, if I think about it too much I start to make mistakes. It’s better when we let things go without being too involved.
My heart that does its job with no help from me and my lungs. My brain and all these other systems and organs do their jobs with no input from me at all. I can’t even make them stop doing their job without some sort of radical external intervention. One that would really be harmful to my continued existence.
So some of this stuff happens with my control (sort of) and some without my control, and I call all of it my body and I think it is me, so I am rarely grateful for it.
It gets me up and moving every day. It performs this task reasonably well, but I don’t give it much regard. Because of this, I have done some pretty rough things to my body over the years. I have some difficult consequences as a result, but it keeps going. It not only keeps going since I have started treating it well by not drinking, exercising, cutting out sugar and getting sleep. It actually seems to be improving and healing.
On top of all that, it gives me a place to house this weird thing called consciousness in the first place. I can’t say whether or not having a body is always necessary to having consciousness, but I can say it is as far as my very limited experience goes.
It’s really amazing.
Gratitude for Pain
We need pain in life.
Pain is a universal experience for the most part, something we can all understand.
It helps us connect to other humans if we let it and it can give us a sense of resonance with all life. It is why we have empathy and understanding for suffering we may not even have a reference point for, and why we seek to move toward and help others.
Physical pain is a warning light, our body telling us something is wrong and that it needs care.
The pain of your hand on a hot stove is better than a life-endangering injury. Breaking your arm doing daredevil stunts causes enough pain that you are less likely to lose your whole life on something even more foolish.
There are people who do not feel pain, and many do not make it out of childhood due to the lack of lessons that pain teaches. Pain is there to keep us alive, to help us learn how to navigate through this world. A child crying with a busted nose is also a child learning about running through the house with a bucket on their head.
But what about pain that cannot be fixed, chronic pain that is not serving the function of warning or teaching us?
There is good here too, as it provides us an opportunity to lean into something unpleasant, to sit with things not being as we would prefer them to be. There can be a deep peace in accepting our experience as it is, in realizing that we are more than the experience of our body and thoughts.
It’s not always easy, but it’s there.
Gratitude for Responsibilities
I shirked and shied away from responsibility for a vast majority of my life.
I called it different things like laziness and I couched it behind different pale ideologies like resisting the capitalistic desire to control my life through work or not buying into the western concept that our lives should be regimented into a functional grind. I suppose I believed these things at the time, but my dodging responsibility really rooted in fear, which is often fueled by selfishness.
I prized what I wanted and how I wanted to spend my time above all else, thinking this would make me happy. I was unhappy, and no matter how much more time I shoveled into doing my own thing, the less happy I became.
Today, responsibilities seem to govern my life.
Between running an office, a blog, trying to get other projects off the ground, having a family and trying to live a healthy life and be a good dad and husband and continue to grow as a human being, I don’t have a lot of time for what I want.
And I have never been happier.
My life isn’t about me anymore, and I am doing my part for my family, my community and my society, and there is something inside of us that needs to live this way. I am grateful to responsibility for teaching me this.
Responsibility is a gift if we are grateful for it, a curse if we are not. It is there either way, we get to choose how we see it.
Gratitude for Everyone Who Came Before
We live pretty easy lives these days.
We drive where we need to go, we have safe food at our fingertips, we can talk to people all over the world. I don’t even have to physically walk into my bank anymore unless there’s a problem, like someone stealing my debit number and buying a bunch of Walmart gift cards and cigarettes in New Jersey. Even that was fixed in minutes.
We have all these luxuries and conveniences because of the nearly endless line of other human beings that came before us.
There is this chain of people, stretching back into the distant, distant past, and they endured untold hardship and suffering as they played their part in this great drama called history. A vast majority of them came and went without so much as a mention in our history books and no one remembers them.
Your chain created you through millions and millions of tiny iterations and nuances, and here you are. Some were helpful, some not so much, but they all contributed to you being alive at all, and they all did so in circumstances quite different from our own.
There is a beauty in this chain and in the history of all of us, a beauty in how, though we are one in billions, we are a necessary part in the chain for everyone who comes after us.
I find a deep gratitude for everyone who came before and paved the way for all of this, and try to do my part for everyone who comes after.
Can you see yourself in this great play?
Can you be grateful to the ancestors who allowed you to be here?
Gratitude for Toddler You
Being a human is hard, the process of becoming one seems to be even harder.
I look at babies and little kids, and I am amazed by everything they have to do on this path of becoming a full human being and doing all the full being things. Their hands don’t work correctly, their legs are all wobbly and clunky. They bite their own fingers when they eat too fast and their heads hit everything. If you are smart enough and coordinated enough to be reading this, it took a lot to get where you are.
Sometimes we need to stop and offer gratitude to our younger selves for navigating all the hardship and difficult learning required to get us where we are.
All the skinned knees and banged heads and bit fingers and smashed toes, not to mention the stress and struggle of learning how to talk and where to poop. It’s difficult to figure out how all these weird laws of physics work. It’s difficult to fit into this social world with all of its unstated rules and its irrational demands on our natural way of doing things. We owe our toddler selves a debt of gratitude for getting through it to become the people we are today.
You had to work hard to get where you are, and the youngest versions of you had to do a lot of the heaviest lifting.
Think about younger you, thank them.
Cut them some slack if you need to.
Cut the kids around you a little slack.
Help them learn to live on this planet.
Gratitude for Teenage You
Being a teenager sucks, and it was probably the worst time of my life.
I was miserable, there was something wrong with me, and I struggled. I was annoying and full of it, self-centered, difficult and emotional.
I have to work to have gratitude toward that kid for getting through that time, because I am often so ashamed of him and how he acted so much of the time.
I just dislike who I was.
But, I get it. I don’t think anyone knew how hard I struggled because I tried to mask it behind rebellion and being too cool for things. I was deeply depressed and trying to deal with some things that I had no frame of reference for.
I did the best I could with what I had, unfortunately, that best just wasn’t very good.
I was lucky, things got better over time. I found some good friends, I tried to make some changes, but I had already developed some habits and ways of existing that were difficult to break. I suppose I owe 20-something me some gratitude for fighting those battles.
It can be difficult to even forgive ourselves for how we behave during difficult times in our life, much less have gratitude to our younger selves for surviving and getting through them.
These days, I am grateful to teenage me for doing what he needed to do to get through those years. It wasn’t graceful or skillful or even competent, but I’m here right now so he must have done an okay job.
Where do you need to offer yourself gratitude?
Is there a part of yourself or your life that you are alienating out of resentment?
Is there room for gratitude instead of anger and hurt?
Gratitude for Unintentional Teachers
A majority of the best things that have happened to me have not been by my own doing.
I often say that we have no business getting what we want because we don’t know what is best for us. We really have no business classifying someone as an enemy because we really don’t know what will come out of the relationship with them.
Instead of calling people enemies, maybe we can see them as oppositional forces or unintentional teachers.
Enemies are useful because they help us learn things about ourselves and force us to develop new ideas and strategies for being alive and dealing with difficulties. Just because this is not their intent does not mean that we cannot be grateful to them for the help in growing.
I can see a great number of cool things in my life that only happened because someone else’s actions jarred me into making a change or trying something new.
Sometimes we need someone to betray us to help us see that we are accepting mediocrity from our relationships. Sometimes we need someone else’s unhealthiness to become so unbearable that we are willing to leave our comfort zone and do something new.
A story is really only as good as its antagonist because it is the antagonist that sparks everything.
Looking back, I can see where the people I identified as villains and enemies have been my greatest teachers and have forced me into many new things that turned out to be good. In this respect, I am indebted to them.
Who has sharpened you in your life?
Can you be grateful to them for what you learned whether they meant to help you or not?
Remember, gratitude is everything.
It shifts our attention away from the things we are not happy with, over to the things that are going right.
There are always more things going right than wrong, starting with the fact that we are alive to witness any of this in the first place. That is cool.
I am grateful for my life, for my wife, my family, and my body, even though it hurts most of the time. I am grateful for the sun, the wind, the rain and the amazing storms we have out this way. I am grateful that there is something instead of nothing.
Lastly, I am grateful to have people who read these things I write, thank you.
It’s a primary part of what I do for a living, how I live my life, and what I see as important.
I think it matters. I think it’s the antidote to this dream (nightmare for some) that we are all living in. I think it is a return to our true nature, and that this can’t help but help us.
I also think it has become a fad and that it has been co-opted by many institutions and hierarchies as a way to keep people happy in crappy situations. It can certainly be exploitative in the wrong hands, and it can become a way of suppressing difficult things when practiced incorrectly.
Let’s look at some misconceptions about mindfulness.
Misconception #1: Mindfulness and meditation are interchangeable words.
This is probably the most pervasive misconception, and it’s more than simple semantics. Mindfulness is a kind of meditation, an aspect of meditation, so it is not interchangeable. Mindfulness refers to a set of practices that encourage us to allow things to arise and fall as they are, to come and go as they please, without attachment, without clinging or rejecting. It is a nonjudgmental awareness and observation of what is happening.
This is different from many other practices that involve strong concentration and focus. It is much different than meditations involving visualization or creation of mental objects for the purpose of relaxation or refuge from difficult emotional states. And this is exactly why it’s more than semantic nitpicking.
I often have people come to me to learn mindfulness so they can relax, but mindfulness is often far from relaxing. It can, in fact, be anxiety-inducing and very difficult to practice, especially if a person has trauma in their past or deals with overwhelming emotions of some kind. Our minds, in an effort to protect us, often build walls and other ways of protecting us from things we may have a difficult time sitting with or accepting in their fullness. We all have ways of avoiding or stepping away from things when they get too intense. While there is good in slowly wearing away these defenses and protections so that we can fully engage the world and our lives as they truly are, this is very hard. It is a little uncaring to throw someone into this without helping them know how to retreat to safety first, and may actually be dangerous for people who are dealing with some kind of disorder or serious trauma.
This is all further complicated by the fact that a deep mindfulness practice is all but impossible without initial training in maintaining a steady awareness (keeping your focus on one thing) because of the mind’s inherent tendency to run amok and chase thoughts. To put it shortly, not only is mindfulness not synonymous with meditation, you need to develop other kinds of meditation to practice it in a truly useful way.
Misconception #2: Mindfulness is a magical cure-all
This is the second most prevalent misconception I see, and it is due largely to the recent and present fad around mindfulness. This happens with all fads, and is part of the reason they die out. People go into them with very unrealistic expectations, so they are inevitably disappointed by the results. This tends to sour them to the entire enterprise.
Mindfulness has not escaped this trap. I have people coming to me asking for training in mindfulness so that they won’t be sad anymore, so they will stop getting angry or so they can quit using drugs or drinking easily.
Don’t get me wrong: a mindful lifestyle can very much help with these things, but it requires discipline and patience – it’s a practice, and a lot of hard work goes into being able to observe your experience with equanimity. We’ll talk more about that in a minute, but for now, let’s look at the things mindfulness won’t do for you.
Mindfulness will not keep you from ever getting angry or anxious or sad or jealous. It won’t prevent disappointment and it won’t keep you from ever having bad dreams. Mindfulness will not end your addictions or fix your marriage or make you the perfect parent. It won’t get you to work on time, it won’t mow your lawn, it will not help you find something better to watch on TV.
Depressing, right?
But here’s the thing – everything I just listed is part of being a human being. It’s part of this grand experience called life, and we shouldn’t seek to be free of it or avoid any of it. All of these things are real and true and we need to embrace them because they aren’t going away. Mindfulness can help us do that.
Cultivating a nonjudgmental awareness of the present, of what is going on right here and right now, opens up so many possibilities for us. It really is amazing how our life changes when we learn to recognize the difference between a situation we are experiencing and our thoughts about a situation we are experiencing. It really is a whole different world when we learn to recognize that we are not our thoughts or our opinions, and that having thoughts or opinions about things beyond our control does not serve us.
So you will still get angry and anxious and sad and jealous and disappointed and this is good because you are a human being and these emotions are part of being a human being. But a mindfulness practice can help take the edge off of these things and allow us to see them as what they are – warning lights on life’s dashboard. Something to notice, something to address, but not something to be driven or controlled by.
You will still struggle with addictions and marital trouble and parenting decisions, but a mindfulness practice can help you address them all more intentionally and purposefully. It can help you recognize the impulses and drives that are feeding the addiction, or the leftover memories and struggles from your own childhood that are bringing you distress as a parent. It can help you see your own expectations and fears that are driving unhealthy behavior in your relationships. It can make mowing the lawn a time to calmly abide in the moment rather than a chore.
All of this is possible, and even guaranteed with practice, but that leads us to our next misconception.
Want to get started? Click here to learn to be present.
Misconception #3: Mindfulness is automatically easy and peaceful and freeing and fun
When I first started meditating I thought I would find some sort of peace right off the bat. I’d seen movies where people were calmer and happier – even smarter – almost instantly. They didn’t even need a cool montage to demonstrate rapid progression – it just happened.
It didn’t work that way for me.
The first few times I sat down to meditate, to simply observe my experience, were miserable. I’d spent years building up the walls and protections I mentioned a few paragraphs back, and suddenly sitting in the middle of myself was nauseating. It nearly made me panic, and I couldn’t sit for more than 30 or 40 seconds without getting up in frustration.
I tried all sorts of shortcuts.
I set up a super comfortable little area in the corner of my room – pretty much a blanket fort for grown-ups. Or twentysomethings who are pretending to be grown-ups at least.
I tried listening to classical music while I sat, and when that didn’t work I ordered these binaural beat CD’s off the internet. They promised to get me all Zen in the shortest amount of time, and I was able to sit longer when I listened to them, but I still wasn’t peaceful. I really hated it, in fact.
The idea that we are suddenly going to correct years of running amok in the mind in a few sessions on the cushion is crazy, this is obvious in hindsight. We spend a majority of our waking lives lost in thought, driven by thought and distracted by thought. To believe we are going to fix this immediately is delusional (and nothing more than an idea driven by thought).
I ended up signing up with a meditation center here in town. I would walk to the farthest side of the room before sitting down to ensure maximum disruption if I chickened out and left once the meditation started. I used my ego to conquer my fear.
And it worked. I was there for a year before venturing out to get certified in teaching meditation so I could share it with others. It worked, but it was a difficult process. I see people struggle to different degrees. People with overwhelming emotions or trauma have a longer road to walk much of the time. People who are deeply invested in thought or intellectualism may have a more difficult time, as may people who are deeply invested in the ego due to being very talented or being told they are.
Some things definitely make it more difficult while other things may make it easier, but it doesn’t matter. Mindfulness is a practice everyone can participate in, it just takes a little discipline at the beginning.
There are probably more misconceptions, but let’s move on to what mindfulness is.
At its heart, mindfulness is a simple awareness of what is happening right now. This entails many things.
The sounds you are hearing, what you are smelling and tasting, the temperature of the air on your skin, what you are seeing. Your thoughts and your emotions.
Here’s the deal though: all of this information is tainted by our memories and things we’ve learned and our experience in life. The sight of a rainbow is beautiful unless it reminds you of the day your mother died. The sound of a police siren brings a different response depending on your history with them. The smell of vanilla may remind you of a warm cozy house or that time you got food poisoning. All of this is conditioned and conditional.
This brings us to an important feature of mindfulness: being nonjudgmental of what we are experiencing. This is difficult in and of itself because we are so used to having an opinion on everything. Not just having an opinion, but believing that this opinion is objectively and externally valid in some way. It’s not that I dislike chocolate chip cookies, it is that they are gross. It’s not that the sound of a baby crying bothers me, it is that it is an objectively terrible sound. We do this with so many things, and this puts us in a constant state of tension and opposition with reality.
One of the amazing things mindfulness can do is to help us strip away the layers of conditioned opinions about things, and simply let them be exactly as they are. It can help us arrive at a place where we are meeting reality as it is instead of how we think it should be or what we want from it. These are radically different perspectives.
In short, mindfulness is about returning to a state of being in the world instead of thinking about the world. It’s about being present for our experience instead of allowing it to be mediated by our thoughts, expectations, desires and emotions. It’s about living our lives in a real way.
Once I understood this – really understood it and let go of the misconceptions, it was life-changing. I got certified to teach it and incorporated it into my counseling practice, and my life has never been the same.
Neither will yours.
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