Chapters From a Life: Transcripts From an Interview, Part I, Mindfulness
You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!
Dear Reader: This is the first of three parts of a transcript of a far-ranging, lengthy interview I did a while back. For those curious about why I write what I do and why I chose adventure as a career at sixty, this might help. As I read this, I saw snippets and pieces of every single commenter who ever left a note on my work. For those curious, this might help you understand why I see you, and why I care so much about your perspectives and your journey. Every one of you, especially women of a Certain Age, likely can relate to some bit in these chapters from a life, a few lessons I’ve learned and how very far I have yet to go.
Everything in these chapters is pointed at me. Every fault, foible and failure. Part of our many chapters and essential to our becoming.
On mindfulness, and being in the moment
First and foremost, perhaps the only folks on earth who are mindful are Tibetan monks. Perhaps. It's our nature to be distracted. Given the advent of social media we have twin and warring factions: the bandying about of terms like "mindful," which people discuss without the slightest idea of what this means in practice, to sound up-to-date and with it. That is at war with our mindlessness, our ways of being in an uber-busy and distracting world, a parasitical world designed to prey on us via distractions.
Dear god, even the Veteran's Administration, that most staid of bureaucracies, talks about developing mindfulness.
It's an embarrassing joke to any student of Buddhism, which I am, and I am a very bad one at that. We talk about mindfulness out one side of our mouths while being off in a thousand directions in our minds, being anywhere but where we are right here, right now.
The state of mindfulness means being wholly, completely in the present, the here and now.
We may perhaps hold that thought for a fleeting second, only to be swept away by what we're having for dinner, the muffin top we're trying to lose, the war in Ukraine, the election, that idiot thing my husband said, blah blah blah. BLAH.
We are not mindful. Even those storied monks struggle to hold being in the present for any length of time. The very beginning of any kind of spiritual awareness is to be aware of what I am doing/thinking in that moment.
To actually consider it, such as, I'm feeling angry, or tired, or mad, or happy, that meta-consciousness of being aware that I am aware. Fully being in myself means being able to step outside this body, this consciousness and to consider this body, this consciousness from outside, to watch what I am doing, saying AS I am doing, saying it.
For example, how aware am I as I peruse the chocolate bars at REI before I check out, that I can watch myself peruse those bars, that I am able to assess the desires which course through me, and dispassionately consider all the ramifications of buying 600 calories of nothing but sugar?
Most of us register the want and only the want, for that want allows, at least in our overheated imaginations, a quick escape from all the noise. The urge to merge with someone we find sexy, damn the consequences, or to nap, or whatever the body/mind is asking of us, or negotiating for.
Wheedling, if you will, "just this once," it says, "I want that bar, I won't do it again." We negotiate with ourselves without being able to see that we’re doing it.
Mindfulness allows us to watch the desire rise, watch the negotiation begin, and to have a sense of humor about the process ("just this once," as with any toddler, turns into "every time we go through the checkout lane"), to ask the self how many times I've heard this before (a lot) and what was the cost of having succumbed.
All these thoughts happen at quicksilver speed.
Right here, right now. IF we are mindful, which is rare as a chambered Nautilus, we can hold a space as we are at the checkout lane, checking out the choices of milk or dark, almond or caramel. That space can also hold all those judgmental thoughts.
Those arise from the basement of our inner worlds, the carefully-constructed and perfectly-timed messages which authority figures and media in general have inserted into our ways of being. Those rise, swirl around as we look at the chocolate. The child in us wants the chocolate, but we don't see that part as the child it is. The child in us also wants to disobey the parent and demonstrate independence. "I'll have it anyway, the hell with you."
Which is why, in a world full of dietary admonitions about eating our vegetables, so many of us respond with a "screw you," and chow down on ultra-processed foods.
We hardly recognize that it's often a very immature response to the perceived authority figure (parents, doctors, government). By eating that third piece of pie we’re stating our freedom. Rather, we believe we are. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Freedom is freedom from self-imposed suffering. That takes developing an awareness of where we cause ourselves suffering. That takes mindfulness. Mindfulness is hard damned work and not something you add to your daily to-do list. It's what we ARE, not what we do.
The immature parts of us which are driven by immediate gratification all too often drown out those wiser parts of us which argue for self-care, not self-indulgence. We aren't privy to the discussion because we have people behind us in line, we want what we want, we forgot to put apples in the car for snacks, all those factors.
What is before us right here, right now, is temptation. That combined with the thousands of messages we are bombarded with every single day to distract us from photos of chocolate cake to "You Deserve a Break Today" kinds of messages which push us to indulge.
Is it any wonder we aren't mindful? We can’t be mindful, in the moment, and aware of the choices we have before us when we are so constantly bombarded, distracted and forever exhorted "just this once." "You deserve it."
Mindfulness, which is developed over a lifetime of practice, can give us the ability to watch the desires, watch the petty arguments, watch the negotiations, have a good laugh at them, and swiftly do the calculation before reaching for the bar and then, in a moment of pure self-awareness, say "I love myself enough to NOT choose to do this."
I have been known to buy the bar anyway, bite off a tiny piece, start walking VERY fast and drop the damned thing into a trash can before I can change my mind. These days I can’t have candy at all, so it’s a non-starter. But it did work for a long time, that tiny bite.
IF we are willing to do the work, then in the nano-seconds that we have to make that chocolate bar decision, we can 1) understand that such temptations will ALWAYS be there. They will NEVER EVER EVER stop. The chocolate bars will always exist, we can always get one, but right now, no.
2) The cost of succumbing is far more than the chocolate. It's the ingraining of a habit, so that every time I walk by the chocolate display at REI I have this guilty pleasure moment of giving myself a treat, which hits all the dopamine receptors, and boy wouldn't it be nice. Then I do it again, and a third time.
Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit speaks to how we begin such habits by taking the kids to McDonald’s one night a week. In no time, because of the ease, convenience and taste rewards, in no time it's seven days a week.
We hardly even know it's happening. We don’t take into consideration the cost of making that single decision of getting the chocolate bar. Taking the kids to Mickey D’s. How many times have I done this already?
Is this now a habit? What is the cost to me, my body? My family’s health?
That kind of critical thinking comes of developing the awareness in the moment, building better and different habits. They don’t come of compulsive behavior. Increasingly we are a species of wants-driven creatures, compulsive without conscience about the consequences.
Another part of mindfulness is being completely IN our bodies. In one sense, we so closely identify with our physical selves that we don't understand the body at all, its role, its magnificence. It's a skin suit with a job to do, and that's to serve our spiritual development and growth.
The body is not us. We inhabit a physical body, but it isn’t everything we are. That of course doesn’t sell stuff. When completely identify with our bodies we are malleable: fear of aging, fear of not being thin enough, strong enough, pretty enough, name your fear. The body is a use-once throw it away vehicle.
I believe we go on, whatever we are.
If I am truly mindful, then part of my journey is to recognize that an ill body is yet another distraction from evolution and the Deep Work I came here to accomplish. Because it serves society, which profits from our misery, to convince us that we ARE our bodies, that our bodies reflect our complete selves and not simply house that self, then we get whipsawed by both desire and guilt 24/7.
A person with a modicum of mindfulness recognizes that the body is temporary housing. We have a huge responsibility to feed and exercise it so that it moves us through life in a way which allows us to experience, love, have losses, grow, evolve, learn to be deeply grateful for life.
A sick body is a distraction, but a sick body makes money for many operators in a capitalist society. There’s no profit in a well body. As long as our misery makes others money, the battle for our minds is going on all the time.
The very idea of mindfulness has been turned into a for-profit business -tapes, retreats, coaches, gurus. It boggles the mind, what we have of it to ourselves, anyway.
So there is an all-out war for our attention, and the weapons are considerable. We can spend, on average, up to eleven hours a day on some kind of device. We are constantly bombarded with notifications. Ding ding ding DING.
We lose concentration on the report we're writing every time someone hits us from Facebook. Studies on this abound, and on top of this, the media we use also bombards us with ads. Digital marketing folks estimate that we get hit with between four and ten thousand ad messages a day.
In the middle of this maelstrom, we have hunger, both real and imagined, exhaustion, both real and imagined, and all the physical messaging that the natural body communicates to us which most of us have no idea how to interpret. We hardly know our own emotions, which are infinitely shaded. We are afraid of them, at best, and often seek to bury them in that chocolate or that sex or that distraction.
Worse, if we feel the pull of deep and discomfiting emotions, we wonder what’s wrong with us (nothing, such emotions are normal and natural and part of life) and look for a pill to fix us. We don’t need fixing, we need to be more mindful of the ebbs and flows of our natural emotions.
These days if we have a single emotion, there’s something wrong with us if we don’t reach for a pill, a panacea, a port.
To that: more of us eat when we are thirsty, because we misunderstand the signals. We're not aware, we act on an impulse. If we were mindful, we'd query the body whether what we really need is a bottle of cool water vs a Big Mac. Most of us choose the Big Mac. That's how out of touch we are with our physical bodies.
To develop mindfulness, which is another whole journey, starts with being able to turn all this noise OFF. We hardly know our own minds, we are not familiar with the monsters in our basements, we are terrified of the Voices which rise out of the dungeon of our minds because we don't have the wherewithal to challenge them: Who are you, this part of me, and what do you want or need from me?
What are you here to teach me?
Even more interesting, how can I make you (the imagined internal monster) feel safe so that you can sit with me and talk to me without trying to hurt me to get attention?
Developing mindfulness allows us to challenge, question, and strip the Voices (often of parents, teachers, preachers, pastors, priests et. al. who are critical and abusive) of their terror. If we don't take the time to sit with ourselves, our silence, allow those to rise, face them down and look them in the beady eye, those Voices simply become part of the driving cacophony which we're trying to escape.
Then, the chocolate, the martini, the easy and unsafe sex, whatever it is that distracts us, is very difficult to resist, for it offers a temporary oasis.
The mind offers an extraordinary oasis in the middle of great chaos but only if we train it. We need to find the inner silence, which is available to all of us. The works of Jon Kabat Zinn are powerful in this regard, but they are great huge tomes, not 140-character memes.
Where we are today, we want memes, we want easy, we want swift relief and answers rather than the answer that it takes a lifetime of work. Mindfulness right now is a parody of what it actually means in practice.
I most assuredly don't have it, but I work at it more than many.
The self-awareness I have has been developed over decades. Even so I succumb to the messaging when I'm not careful. It's nearly impossible to swim in a tsunami wave, which is what we've created. But I try to do it anyway because I am committed.
It’s the trying that matters. With this I break with Yoda, for in so many cases we have tried and tried and tried and failed, until we can of course, “do.”
What do you do?
You try.
And along the way, you play.
Thanks for joining me. Just sharing observations, lessons, ideas which were brought up during a long interview. If any of this resonated, please consider
Above all thank you for reading my words. Be well, be playful. Today.
RE: “I believe we go on, whatever we are.”
Likewise, for me. I’ve had a few inexplicable, numinous experiences that arrived unbidden. The first one, a warning, was ignored; I learned a valuable lesson from not listening to the warning. When another, intuitive experience arrived, I paid attention. It changed the course of my career because I paid attention.
Were these intuitive nudges from my ancestors? From an abstract idea we call god? Yes & yes. I think. Of course I do not know with 100% certainty. Maybe someday, I will.
RE: “There’s no profit in a well body.”
So true. But why do we feel compelled to measure our individual and cultural worth by using $ and profit as the yardstick? I know that is what we are taught, directly and indirectly, and we absorb that lesson into every cell of our being. WHEN did that idea start (in historical terms)?
There must be a better way…NO JUDGMENT. NO comparison to others. Self-acceptance. Believing, at our core, that we have value.
Thanks for listening, Julia!