Proactive mindfulness starts with an active pause

Neuroscience gives us a new context for mindfulness. It is not some otherworldly state that is a break from ordinary reality. Life is interaction, and mindfulness is our natural ability to manage the interactions of life.

Being mindful means being engaged in what we do. It is a state of relaxed alertness, i.e., neither oblivious nor hypervigilant.

Mindful vs Mindless

In civilized life, we can often get away with being less engaged in what we do. That is, mindless rather than mindful.

For instance, when we walk in nature, we do not need to be alert to predators or look for food the way our remote ancestors had to. And so, we daydream as we walk—until we suddenly realize we have wandered away from the trail and are jolted into paying attention to what we do.

Pause = disruption

It takes disruption to stop the disconnection, to shift from mindless autopilot to mindful engagement. But the disruption need not be an unpleasant surprise, such as realizing we are off the trail. We can intentionally disrupt the mindless default mode by pausing or slowing down to pay more attention to what we do.

Taking a mindful pause is different from pausing a video. When we resume playing the video, the pause has not changed its contents. Not so for us human beings. If you were to resume precisely what you were doing before pausing, you would look robotic.

Inner connection & interconnection

A pause is a proactive disruption that makes it possible for us to be mindful. That is, to pay attention to our inner experience in relation to what we are doing.

This kind of contemplation is not divorced from real life. Moment by moment, it gives us space to be ourselves, as well as space for a mindful connection with others.

See: What I mean by Proactive Mindfulness

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