Traditionally, people who talk about mindfulness talk about the practice of meditation. Their perspective is often grounded in Buddhist traditions.
I like to meditate and have long been interested in Buddhist ideas, especially in the Zen tradition. However, my perspective on mindfulness primarily reflects different areas of experience. When I had these experiences, I did not necessarily consider them related to mindfulness. It took time for me to see how they had shaped my sense of mindfulness.
In this article, I want to share what has shaped my understanding of what I now call Proactive Mindfulness.
Therapy & mindfulness
My work as a therapist is a big part of my experience with mindfulness. In a way, you could say that being a therapist amounts to being a mindfulness teacher.
It’s not that therapists teach people to meditate. We usually don’t. But the practice of therapy shows you that people cannot productively process what happens in treatment if they are not within a window of presence that neuroscience characterizes as Social Engagement.
Another way to say this is that, to do effective therapy, we need to be very aware of our clients’ nervous system state. It is important to notice whether they are mindfully engaged instead of defensive or reactive. And, by the way, we also need to be very aware of our own nervous system state.
So, a big part of therapy involves monitoring the quality of presence or activation in our clients and us.
If that feels a little abstract, try to remember situations in which you talked to somebody who was distracted, worried, or scared. And remember how difficult it was to get through to this person. Compare that with having a conversation with somebody who is very receptive. The key to being heard is not how clever what you say is, but how receptive the other person is. So, if you can foster a situation in which the other person is more receptive, you are more likely to impact them.
Conversely, remember situations in which you were distracted, worried, or scared and how what came out of you was ineffective. As you can imagine, a therapist has much more impact on their clients when they are more present.
In this sense, you could say that the work of a therapist is to foster the conditions in which it becomes possible for the therapy process to be effective. It is not so much about showing people what to do; it is about helping them remove the obstacles that are in the way of using their natural inability to learn from experience.
For that to happen, both therapist and client are present and engaged in the process. Another way to say it is that therapy involves the practice of being mindful, or returning, to a mindful state. Hence, the concept of therapy as a kind of mindfulness training.
Within these ideal conditions, insight can happen. New possibilities open because the nervous system circuit that facilitates openness of mind and creativity is functioning.
Neuroscience & mindfulness
We are now talking about the nervous system. The findings of neuroscience have significantly influenced contemporary therapy.
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges developed a sweeping view of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) based on its physiology and from an evolutionary perspective. His Polyvagal Theory postulates that there is a circuit in the ANS that mediates social engagement and mindfulness.
So, mindfulness is not just something that happens. There is a nervous system circuit for it. In this context, mindfulness is an innate human characteristic with an evolutionary value.
I invite you to a thought experiment. Imagine our remote ancestors in the time they were evolving into becoming humans. As they were walking through nature, they had to be mindfully engaged in finding food and not becoming food for other animals. They were alert but not hypervigilant, the same way that animals in the state of nature are usually alert but not hypervigilant.
The work of Stephen Porges provides a theoretical framework to confirm what practice has shown us: the virtuous cycle of mindful engagement. The more we engage in what we do, the more we progress on the continuum between mindless and mindful (and reactive vs. proactive).
The practice of Focusing
Another significant influence for me has been the practice that Eugene Gendlin called Focusing. I will briefly describe this practice to show how it has shaped my understanding of mindfulness.
Forget for a moment what your associations are with the word ” Focusing.” They probably have to do with notions such as “laser-focused,” which implies an intense concentration. This notion would be very misleading for what I’m about to describe.
This practice came from a study that Eugene Gendlin conducted as he wanted to understand why some people benefited from therapy more than others. He expected the key factors to be related to what the therapist did. Instead, he found that, by far, the significant difference between successful and unsuccessful outcomes was about the clients.
He noticed that the clients who had the ability to pause and reflect during therapy sessions were the ones who were much more likely to have successful outcomes.
We’re not talking about dramatic pauses, such as the client saying: “OK, I need a moment to process.” No, not at all. Just the subtle moments when the client briefly shifts their attention inside. Like taking a moment before speaking. Or looking sideways or slightly down for a moment as they absorb information. Something so natural that you take it for granted until you compare it to people who don’t do that.
Based on this discovery, Gendlin explored in greater detail what happens in this process to find a systematic way to bottle it, so to speak.
First, there is a slight pause. It may be so subtle as to be barely noticeable, but it allows you to take in what you heard. It lets you turn your attention inward to see what comes up for you.
What comes up is very subtle, a bodily felt sense that may be so faint that you don’t notice it unless you have become accustomed to paying attention to such things.
And then, while staying connected with that bodily felt sense, you’re finding a way to articulate what it means. As you adjust which words more precisely describe what you sense, it’s like you’re focusing the lenses of your binoculars to make the view less blurred. Hence, the term Focusing.
In this process, the key moment is the pause that disrupts the autopilot mode. The pause is what makes it possible to be mindfully engaged. This experience is where the concept of Active Pause came from. I am still very attached to it because it captures the importance of the moment when it is possible for something fresh to emerge.
The reason I now put more emphasis on the notion of Proactive Mindfulness is that it captures the context in which such moments occur. It is a context of being engaged in our lives and wanting to learn more from our experiences.
Focusing, mindfulness, and Social Engagement.
You can see from my description of Focusing why I think it is a mindful process.
There is more to it. Focusing has a lot to do with Social Engagement. While Focusing can be practiced independently, it is often practiced in partnerships. You take turns being the Focuser and the Listener. Having a Listener who mindfully reflects what they hear allows you to hear yourself think and reflect on it.
What makes Focusing a mindful process is not just reflecting. It is the kind of space that this process creates. The listening and reflecting generate a rhythm and a sense of connection with each other which reinforce the inner connection of inward sensing.
If you don’t think of mindfulness as a kind of activity but as a state of the nervous system, you can see how effectively connecting with another person fosters mindfulness. Social engagement and mindfulness go hand in hand.
Relational Meditation
This is why I much prefer what I call Relational Meditation to meditating on my own. Relational Meditation means meditating with a friend or a small group. After the meditation part, we take a moment to each briefly and mindfully reflect on what came up during the meditation.
What is connecting us is not just the moment of talking. It is also that, during the meditation, you are aware that you are in a setting where you will soon be talking. This awareness increases the sense of connection and social engagement, which is very useful in fostering mindfulness.
Again, mindfulness is a state of the nervous system that has to do with not just inner connection but also interconnection.
Mindful movement
Some physical activities are another type of experience that has shaped my notion of mindfulness.
The practice of Pilates and Gyrotonics has given me a more profound sense of what it’s like to engage with my body mindfully. The experience of sensing into my body moment by moment, noticing the ability to engage specific muscles, and witnessing the effect of this engagement moment by moment feels great.
In this experience, mindful observation is not separate from action. You are doing something as the movement unfolds.
Actually, the word “doing” is somewhat misleading. This experience is more like participating in the doing.
There’s a quality of watching something unfolding, but not passively. There is a constant sense of being able to influence what is happening. So, this is doing, but not in the traditional sense of unilaterally making something happen. Maybe something more akin to what happens when a bird uses the air currents to flow in the sky. They’re flying, they’re also carried by the air currents.
Skiing
Many other physical activities involve mindfulness. For instance, I hear from golfers how critical mindful engagement is to good golfing. I’m not a golfer, so I do not have direct experience with it. For me, it has been the experience of skiing.
In skiing, the body responds to the terrain. Unlike yoga, this is not just a dialogue with the body. It happens within a context of interaction with the terrain, the downhill slope, the moguls, the quality of the snow.
The experience of me as a person, or of me doing something, has very much to do with how I respond to the terrain. There are the exhilarating moments of feeling my body moving harmoniously with the slope. At such moments, it feels like I am being moved instead of forcing the movement. But not in a passive way, not like an object falling down the mountain. It is very much a sense of being involved in being moved.
And, because of the element of danger, there is also the presence of all the baggage from the past about danger. Skiing involves facing this baggage as part of the present moment. Noticing the difference between moments when I can anticipate a turn versus moments where past experiences hijack my mind, and I am unable to do the anticipating.
And so: Proactive Mindfulness
Mindfulness involves being in the moment, but being in the moment is not some sort of spiritual state. It means dealing with life’s challenges. It means being aware of the uncertainty and possibly danger present in the situation. It includes doing our best to disentangle ourselves from the impact of past baggage but not taking for granted that we can do so. It means being as alive as we can be.
We become more alive as we engage more fully with life. Engagement is not a concept. It is very much rooted in the body. This is why Proactive Mindfulness starts with engaging with our body.
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