"Pieces of the Whole Story" is a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.
Therapy and coaching are sometimes contrasted in terms of their primary temporal focus: therapy is said to be more concerned with the past while coaching directs our attention more to the future. In this (over-simplified) perspective, therapy helps uncover the roots of current distress in unconscious strategies developed in the past, strategies that no longer serve who you are now. Coaching puts more attention on what you want to make happen in the future and how you will manifest your intentions. Yet both approaches to change must ultimately be concerned with the present: Everything unfolds (or doesn’t) based on how one engages the present. No matter what happened in the past and what future you’d like to create, it is this precious present moment where one can find freedom to act freshly rather than just react.
Developing an intimate and transformative relationship to the present is what I call mindfulness. Mindfulness is such a critical element of all that I do, that I thought I would devote a string of posts to this topic. For this first post in that series, I want to consider mindfulness as a way to allow unfolding in the present. Then in later posts, I’ll take the term mindfulness into conversations about stuckness, judgment, meditation, the unconscious mind, sensuality and the superego, portals between worlds, and who knows what else! I will start with the current common understanding of mindfulness, but later inquire into some of the premises of that understanding.
In an oft-cited definition by Jon Kabat-Zinn (founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and a researcher who has done much to establish the importance of mindfulness for integrated human healthcare), three modifiers are delineated to describe mindfulness as a particular way of “paying attention.” Mindfulness, he writes, is paying attention “…on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally.” We will look at the notion of non-judgmentally in a later post. For now let’s just consider the combination of the other two terms: “on purpose, and “in the present moment.”
The “on purpose” part of this definition is what makes mindfulness a practice. It is a practice because left to our normal habits we don’t much pay attention (especially not “non-judgmentally”) to the present moment. We are so preoccupied that we are not even aware of our habitual lack of attention. We are not aware of how we pay attention; rather, our attention is just captured moment by moment by what our drive for survival decides is important to attend to. Since we are not normally aware of how and where our attention is, we may not even be aware of how rarely we are fully present, and how little we are interested in just being directly with the present moment rather than keeping it at a distance through judgment. Beginning to notice where our attention is will allow us to know our own mind, and to begin wondering what is driving our mind away from the present. There is much to discover when we begin to be aware of where we are, where our attention is. Tuning in to where we are now is the simple gateway to allow all-of-who-we-are, with our past conditioning and our intentions for a future, to unfold into fullness.