This is neither right nor wrong – it’s just how we are, and even as you have read just these few pages so far, part of your mind will quite naturally have wandered off many times to engage with other things that call on your attention. Maybe part of your mind spent some time turning over a problem at work or at home. Maybe you thought for a bit about some of the tasks on your to-do list right now. Or perhaps something you read sparked a memory and an image from the past came vividly to mind. Maybe you began to think about your next meal and you ran through a quick inventory of one of your kitchen cupboards.
As I said, none of this is right or wrong. It’s just how our minds work. And when we’re mindful we bring a much clearer intentionality and awareness to the process of paying attention. When we’re mindful, we choose – to some extent at least – where our attention goes. We pay attention on purpose.
Mindfulness Involves Paying Attention in the Present Moment
Our attention wanders and much of the time it wanders off into the past or into the future. Sometimes there are elements of anxiety or regret involved in this. We may look to the future with a kind of anxious anticipation for what is to come, maintaining an uneasy alertness by constantly scanning the future for the challenges it may bring: encounters with other people we must prepare for, tasks we need to tick off our list – stuff coming our way. Or we may find ourselves constantly reviewing the past, especially the things we regret. There might even be some unconscious sense that by doing so we’ll be better prepared for the future.
Perhaps there are evolutionary processes at work here. Maybe we’ve survived as a species and become the planet’s top predators in part because we’re good at doing these things. But there is a price for this and that price may be the whole of our lives. If your attention is always in the future or always in the past, right now you’re simply not here. Right now, you’re not fully alive.
When you’re mindful, your attention stays in the present moment. Right here, right now.
Mindfulness Is Non-Judgemental
This doesn’t mean that we don’t make judgements when we’re mindful, or that we stop discerning what is appropriate at any time from what is inappropriate. That would be simple foolishness. But think of what we mean when we speak of someone being ‘judgemental’. A thesaurus gives these synonyms: critical, hypercritical, condemnatory, negative, disapproving, disparaging, pejorative. Quite a list.
The non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness, on the other hand, is neither condemnatory nor prejudicial. There are two dimensions to this.
Firstly, there is what we might think of as a wisdom dimension. This involves letting what is the case be the case.
Much of the time we may feel, instinctively almost, unwilling or unable to do this. We can put huge amounts of mental and emotional energy into refusing to allow things to simply be as they are. ‘They shouldn’t be like that!’ ‘It shouldn’t be like this!’ ‘I ought to be somehow different ...’ But things really only ever are as they actually are. However right, however wrong, however just or unjust, desirable or undesirable – they are as they are. And it’s only ever when we can allow this to be fact – that things are as they are – that choice can begin to open up for us. When we let what is the case be the case, whatever it is, then we can begin to choose how to respond to it. What shall we do about what’s showed up right now? What would be the most appropriate next step for us and for the situation as a whole?
When we can’t let what is the case be the case, then we’re stuck. We’re already rooted in a defensive posture of denial and we’ve closed down the possibilities for a more creative engagement with the situation. The wisdom element in the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness opens up the possibility for a more wholehearted creative response to the situations we find ourselves in. It allows for more creative choices.
Then, there is a compassion dimension to the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness. Here, to some extent at least, we still our inner critical voice.
For much of the time, many of us find that we run a kind of inner critical commentary on our experience. Sometimes that commentary can be directed at ourselves – ‘I’m not good enough.’ ‘I don’t measure up.’
How many of us actually think we’re thin enough, good-looking enough, smart enough, fit enough, strong enough, witty enough, rich enough, clever enough, fast enough ... anything enough?
Sometimes we turn that inner critical commentary on others – on their appearance, their intelligence, their emotional appropriateness and so on. Sometimes we run critical commentaries on our immediate environment – somehow or other, in one way or another, things just aren’t right. Nothing is quite as it should be. Nothing, ourselves included, is quite enough.
The compassion element in the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness allows us to rest simply with things as they are – at least to some extent. We allow ourselves to be ourselves, we allow others to be who they are, and we rest a little bit more at ease with life as it actually is – with a bit more kindly acceptance towards ourselves, others and the world around us.
The quality of acceptance that emerges from mindfulness training isn’t simple passivity, however. It’s not that we passively allow the world to roll over us, or that we stop making ethical judgements. Far from it. Mindfulness training might even enable you to be more appropriately assertive. It might sharpen your capacity for drawing ethical distinctions. But all of this can be done with wisdom and with kindness.
With mindfulness training you begin to develop a greater capacity to allow what is the case to be the case and to respond skilfully and appropriately with a warm open-heartedness.
This book is based on a completely secular approach to mindfulness training. It is for people of any religion or none. For 2,500 years, however, the ideas and practices at the core of the approach were found almost exclusively in Buddhist monasteries in Asia. So far as we’re aware, the Buddha was the first person in history to use the idea of mindfulness as we use it in contemporary mindfulness approaches. He taught a number of mindfulness practices and other methods for developing and sustaining mindfulness and he spoke at length of the immense benefits that are on offer from engaging in those practices. That approach and a body of teachings and practices that came from it lived on in a wide variety of Buddhist monastic contexts in Asia but, for 2,500 years, people outside of Asia knew almost nothing about it.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century that began to change as European explorers, scholars and colonial administrators began to discover and translate into their own contexts some of what was going on in Asian monasteries. At first, only a tiny handful of these took up the practices for themselves, and the penetration of mindfulness approaches into European and North American culture was slow and gradual. But it built steadily and received a boost in the 1950s with the emergence of the Beats – poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, who began to publicly advocate the practice. It received more of a boost in the 1960s and 1970s with the psychedelic movement, when people like myself – hippies and wannabe hippies – began to get involved. But mindfulness practices were still largely to be found only in Buddhist contexts.
Towards the end of the 1970s, however, a very significant shift took place. Much of this comes down to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon had trained as a molecular biologist and was working as such at a hospital near Boston – the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical Center. In his student days he had come upon Buddhism and had established a regular daily meditation practice. Apart from his work at the hospital, he also taught yoga. He engaged with his scientific work, but two other questions kept bothering him. One question he expressed as ‘What shall I do with my life? What kind of work do I love so much I would pay to do it?’ The other was more to do with the patients who came to the hospital.
He saw that people came to the hospital because,