Wherever You Go, There You Are – how good is this for the title of a book about mindfulness? The acknowledged Western medicine guru who wrote this book is Jon Kabat-Zinn, and he tells of the success of this practice in helping people cope with insoluble problems, like chronic pain. It also helps out with dying.
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Being mindful means paying attention to what is happening at the present moment. Sounds simple enough, until you realise how often our attention wanders around the place. It’s been practised for a few thousand years in the East, but somehow its stress-reducing consequences have only been realised recently in the West. It is now part of the curriculum for medical students at Monash.
Mindfulness and meditation can go together, but mindfulness is not confined to sitting quietly in a corner; it can be done, and is encouraged, during other activities. The activity is observed moment to moment, whether it be walking, listening to music, eating, or doing mundane tasks like the dishes. The observation is done with curiosity, but without judgement.
So it is simple, but not easy. We tend to think virtually all the time, responding to interruptions, often unaware, and on automatic pilot. Our thoughts have been likened to trains coming into a station; it’s natural for this to happen, but we don’t have to catch them all! They can come, and then they can go again. So using mindfulness, any thoughts that take us back to the regrets of the past, or project us into any fears of the future, can be just let go.
One technique of bringing the mind back into the present, and excluding other thoughts, is to concentrate on the simple process of breathing, breath by breath, in and out. It’s a way of detaching, and not judging.
Paradoxically the intensity of pain, or other symptoms, can be lessened by becoming the detached observer of them. The painful sensation can be given a shape, a colour, a surface – physical characteristics to which attention is given, rather than the unpleasant emotional experience that pain can be. There can then be some truth in the statement: “It’s only pain, it doesn’t have to hurt”.
Mindfulness can be effective in dealing with garbage thoughts such as angry and resentful ones, judging and defensive thoughts, bitter thoughts and guilty ones. None of these lead to peace of mind. Of course there may be other things to do in regard to any unfinished business behind such thoughts, if only to work on forgiving and forgetting by asking ourselves the question “Do I want to be right, or do I want to be happy?”
Hoping to achieve peace of mind as death approaches is something that often needs to be worked on in a variety of ways, but mindfulness is one strategy that is worth the practice that it takes.
But don’t delay – there is a deadline!
