by Jamesscotthenson | May 19, 2018 | Blog
Mindfulness and Nature
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
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.
In short, they live mindfully.
by Jamesscotthenson | Feb 11, 2018 | Blog
I talk about mindfulness a lot.
Every day type of a lot.
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.
Ready to give it a try? Click through for your free guide to finding mindfulness in 5 simple steps.
More of a one-on-one learner? Click here to set up mindfulness training, either in-person or online.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Take care.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jun 26, 2017 | Blog
I haven’t done a good job being consistent with Mindfulness
Monday in a while either. All those series threw things off.
I’ve said it often on this blog: you cannot do anything
worth doing without experiencing some kind of criticism.
It is just the way things work, it is inevitable. It will
not hurt you. It might even help you, if you can approach it mindfully.
I am not immune from criticism. I have this insane notion in
my head about needing to be perfect. This makes it easy for criticism to get me
down. I meet a lot of people who experience this. I also meet a lot of
people who have an insane notion that they are perfect they way they are and do
not need to listen to anything anyone else has to say. Neither of these
positions are mindful or useful.
If we watch our mind when have been criticized we will see
that it almost instantly goes into a sort of protective frenzy, trying to solve
the problem it perceives.
What do they know anyway?
How dare they say that about me?
They need to get their own house in order before criticizing
mine.
They were probably having a bad day.
They are just unhappy jerks.
And on and on.
None of these thoughts are helpful.
They are soothing, but that doesn’t mean they are useful.
These are all the same as telling a friend that there are plenty
of fish in the sea after a breakup or a parent that God needed another angel
when they lose a child. Simple phrases that help us avoid the pain of the
situation.
A mindful approach to dealing with criticism allows us to
take a moment and experience how we feel about it, and being criticized sucks.
It brings up all sorts of difficult emotions like anger and fear, maybe even
betrayal.
Approaching it mindfully instead of trying to explain it all
away allowed me to learn that I immediately experience guilt whether I agree
with the criticism or not. Even when I haven’t met the person, my mind jumps to
the thought that I must have done something wrong, and a cycle of emotions
starts. Instead of trying to explain this away, being mindful allows me to sit
with these things and work them out instead of going into protective mode.
It allows me to learn from the situation, and consider the
idea that the criticism may be valid, and see it as an opportunity for growth
in my life.
What happens when someone criticizes you?
Do you immediately agree or disagree?
Are you able to be objective about it?
What would it be like to simply experience everything
instead of letting the mind rationalize it away?
by Jamesscotthenson | May 25, 2017 | Blog
The second we say “mine” in relation to anything we are
distorting our perspective.
My house.
My job.
My wife.
My kids.
My beliefs.
Nothing is ours in any real sense.
Other people can come and go as they please, and they
will always have a private internal work we have no access to. Someone else
will live in your house eventually, you will retire from the work you do. Your
kids have their own worlds and lives. None of it is “yours”.
We get to share time with people and in roles, but that is
it.
This isn’t even really “my” blog, it’s a synthesis of things
I’ve learned from others, which was a synthesis when they shared them. There
has not been a single original or unique idea in 247 posts, and there will not
have been when I hit #365.
Our beliefs are no different.
They are handed to us, pre-packaged, and we form a profound
attachment to them. They determine how we treat people, how we treat ourselves
what we think about the basic nature of reality, but we never really examine
them because they are ours. We will fight people who seek to challenge them, or
even just because they don’t share them.
It’s weird.
Think about what you believe.
Why do you believe it?
Do your beliefs serve you, or do you serve them?
by Jamesscotthenson | May 23, 2017 | Blog
Gossip is a tough one.
It seems to be present in almost every conversation. It has
invaded every aspect of our lives, from work and home, to our political
coverage. There are entire shows and even stations dedicated to it.
Why are we so drawn to gossip?
Why do we get such a kick out of knowing bad things about
other people?
Does it make us feel better about ourselves to see others as
being lower than us?
When it comes down to it, gossip is never about things that
are our business. It is never constructive or helpful or useful.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not, once again, a high and
mighty thing. I get caught up in gossip. Sometimes I have a hard time determining
the line between speaking honestly about someone and gossiping.
Being mindful of what we are saying and why we are saying it
might be useful when it comes to avoiding gossip.
Am I enjoying saying something negative about someone else?
That’s gossip.
Am I enjoying hearing something negative about someone else?
That’s gossip.
What would life be like if we focused on things that
mattered?
On things that were good and helpful and kind?
What would rise up and take its place if stopped gossiping?
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