Mindfulness is really hard
It was 6:30 AM. I ambled over to the kitchen cabinet, and took out a sachet of the Nescafe instant coffee I drink every morning. “100 percent Colombian”, the sachet read. “Lies”, I thought. I don’t trust any product that says it is or it has a hundred percent of something. If it really was a hundred percent of something, they wouldn’t have to mention the hundred percent. I’d trust them a lot more if they said the coffee is “70 percent Colombian”. I turned over the two mugs on the kitchen counter that had dried out over the previous day. I carefully ripped open the sachet and let the coffee grains fall into one of the mugs in a smooth, streamlined motion. I added equal amounts of milk and water to the other mug, and placed it in the microwave to be warmed up for a couple of minutes. I added a teaspoon each of sugar and water to the mug with the coffee, and reached over to the drying mat for a fork to whisk the contents together. There wasn’t one. “Fuck, I forgot to wash it from the previous night”, I thought, as I looked down at the lone, unwashed fork lying blankly in the sink.
I let out a sigh. I picked it up, ran it under some water, put some dish liquid on it, and started scrubbing it with my fingers. As I scrubbed, I could feel bits of Parmesan cheese stuck on it from the baked pasta I had eaten last night. “I put too much cheese on that pasta. I shouldn’t have put two cubes of Parmesan; one would have sufficed. Not to mention the carrot cake I had for dessert. That was too much. I better not let myself go. I haven’t even been working out recently…..”. “Hey”, said another voice, interrupting the first voice. “Do you notice what you were just thinking about? You had the same thoughts about the cheese in the pasta, and the carrot cake when you were eating last night. You felt guilty about it. And then you reassured yourself that you will start working out again, and that it’s alright to indulge once in a while.” The voice was right. I had already gone through this train of thought in its entirety the previous night. So why was I doing it all over again, and resubmitting myself to the guilt and anxiety?
I believe that a number of the thoughts I think during the day are automatic. I experience little control in determining when they come up. And very often, these automatic thoughts are repetitions or variations of thoughts that I have had a number of times before. In fact, it’s because I have had these thoughts so many times before, that I continue to fall back into them. To me, these thoughts seem to form a pattern; they represent a comfort zone, a familiar place, a convenient pastime, which I fall back into during the moments when I don’t have anything important to occupy my time and attention with. For instance, my thought about the cheese pasta and carrot cake, is part of the thought pattern, “Don’t eat too much, you’ll put on weight”. And this thought pattern has had both positive and negative consequences for me. It certainly has helped me be cognizant of the portion sizes I consume, and consequently maintain some degree of healthy food consumption. It also ensures that I am able to fit under societally acceptable body standards, and thus helps me gain a form of social validation. On the other hand, this thought pattern sometimes induces feelings of guilt when I’m enjoying some carrot cake or a pizza, consequently diminishing the pleasure I derive from satisfying my cravings. It also makes me critical of my body’s shape and size during the times when I deviate from how I think my body should look.
As I see it, mindfulness at its core simply alludes to the process of being aware of my entire experience in the present moment. An awareness of my thoughts, emotions, actions, sensory perceptions, and environment as they are in every moment. Awareness however, is the tough part. Awareness contains no judgement. Awareness contains no attachment. Awareness only is. So, I may become aware that I am thinking about the amount of cheese I put on the pasta last night. However, it instantly becomes clear that there is a judgement that is associated with this awareness; the judgement being that I am somehow wrong for putting so much cheese on my pasta, that I am somehow bad for not caring about how unhealthy it may be, and that I am somehow doing a disservice to my body. Consequently, this judgement leads to me experiencing feelings of guilt.
Needless to say, I have experienced this cycle of thought, judgement, and guilt a number of times. The particular thought might differ- substitute “you put too much cheese in the pasta, you will put on weight” with “complete your job applications, or else you’ll be an unemployed loser”- but the criticism and resulting feeling of guilt are always present. At first, it makes no sense why I would keep turning my awareness to thought patterns which constantly make me experience a feeling of guilt. But when I consider that these thought patterns may represent comfort zones, or familiar spaces, I wonder whether the feeling of guilt is a comfort zone for me.
Guilt isn’t all bad. Guilt is a reminder or an awareness that I have committed wrongdoing or an offense, and so it could motivate me to rectify my wrongs, and possibly to reevaluate my ethical or moral positions. Guilt could also be a reminder that I haven’t said or done something which I think I ought to have said or done. And so guilt is a pretty standard aspect of my life as a human being. Without guilt, I would rarely hold myself accountable for my impact on myself and on the external world. But it’s when I found myself constantly feeling guilty that I began to recognize how distressing this guilt has become for me.
Going back to my annoying example of the cheese in the pasta. What was the voice in my head trying to make me feel guilty about? Not the cheese in the pasta, but rather the fact that I was indulging myself with pasta and carrot cake even though I had not been working out in the recent weeks. In another instance, the voice in my head made me feel guilty about not having worked on my job applications yet. Moreover, it made me feel guilty about the fact that in that particular moment, I was playing a silly cricket game on my phone instead of doing the more important work of sending out job applications. In both these situations, my guilt came up in response to the fact that I was gratifying myself (with pasta and entertainment) instead of focusing my attention on more pressing tasks (like working out and sending out applications). It doesn’t matter to my mind that a bowl of baked pasta or a shoddily made iphone game are far from being huge gratifications. All that matters to my mind is that I have been procrastinating on important tasks. And it will bring up guilt-inducing thoughts about these tasks in an attempt to get me to focus on them. How efficient. And how inconsiderate.
However, what frustrates me the most is that my mind very efficiently, and very inconsiderately brings up these guilt-inducing thoughts precisely when I’m attempting to be mindful. Why? Well, because usually, I am able to keep these thoughts out of my constant awareness by distracting myself. I am after all a master procrastinator, and distractions like television, social media, work, and social commitments make it all too easy for me to keep myself from experiencing these guilt inducing thoughts for too long. The guilt alarm goes off, I ponder over it for a few moments, and then hit snooze. Time to get back to Indian Matchmaking. But when I begin a ten minute mindfulness exercise for instance, that’s ten whole minutes of me sitting on the floor doing absolutely nothing. Nothing to distract me. The gates of my mind are wide open to everything I could possibly experience in the moment. And there is not a better opportunity for my guilt-inducing thoughts to enter my mental space and run amok.
While most of my thought patterns have formed around feelings of guilt, I recognize that the thought patterns for someone else could be formed around something entirely different. For some people, patterns may be formed around thoughts of how superior they are to other people in their life, and for some, their patterns may be formed around thoughts of how everyone is trying to take advantage of them or sabotage them. And in the same way that my tendency to procrastinate or avoid uncomfortable tasks underlies my guilt-inducing thoughts, a lack of true self-confidence may underlie someone’s thoughts of perceived superiority over others, and a desire to form trust and connection may underlie someone else’s thoughts of being constantly suspicious of others.
My thought patterns do often prevent me from being mindful of all the other aspects of my internal and external experience, but they are also demanding that I be mindful of what they are trying to indicate to me. If I only focus on the content of my thoughts, it leads me nowhere. “I shouldn’t have eaten a cheesy pasta and carrot cake” and “I should be sending out my job applications”, don’t seem to be interrelated. Moreover, they are annoying thoughts, which I try my best to get rid of or push away from my awareness. But this to me is the antithesis of mindfulness. In mindfulness, I do not seek the absence of thought. Trying to control my thoughts only intensifies their presence. Hence, rather than be the failed autocrat of my mind, I instead try to observe the thought, and be aware of what the thought is trying to communicate. It was only through mindfully observing my thoughts that I realized the common theme of my procrastination tendencies present within them. It was only through mindfully observing this theme, that I became aware of the feeling of guilt which is produced within me when I procrastinate. And it was only through mindfully observing my feeling of guilt that I realized why guilt has been such a dominant theme throughout my life.
Yet, none of this means that I have learnt how to be mindful, or that I have been able to access some wonderful state of peace and calm. Being mindful is a way of living. It means that I am trying to be aware of my experience during every possible moment that I can. As I have tried to illustrate, even ten minutes of mindfulness is unbearably tough since there are so many thoughts that I find myself inundated with. And I really value my thoughts. I identify myself with my thoughts, since my thoughts usually translate into my beliefs, my values, my morality, and my ideas. The external world I live in today too values thought. My education curricula and the jobs I have held have forced me to think rather than feel. And especially as I have grown to take on more responsibilities- financial, career-related, social, and political- I am almost always thinking about how these various areas of my life will be impacted in the future by my decisions in the past and the present. So, it makes sense that I rarely find myself within the present. Even in the present, my thoughts constantly serve to locate me within the past or the future. And after all, what is anxiety? It is a state of fear or worry about how something in the past or the future will impact the present. Hence, it is quite possible that I am in a constant state of anxiety.
And this is why I find mindfulness really hard. In order to be mindful of my internal experience in the present, I need to constantly engage with my anxiety inducing thoughts until I am truly able to stay with them and observe what they are trying to communicate, instead of pushing them away. As if this weren’t enough, I also need to observe how my mental processes are impacting my bodily sensations, because my mind and body are inextricably connected. What I experience mentally, will have an impact on what I experience physiologically, and vice versa. For instance, the mental stress I experience, manifests physiologically in the form of tightness and pain in my neck and shoulders. And my tendency to breathe in and out in a shallow manner from my chest rather than my stomach, has adversely affected my ability to regulate my breathing and remain calm during stressful situations. I have thus only recently begun to realize how disconnected I have become from my body by believing that my anxiety only has an impact on my mental states. Furthermore, mindfulness also implies an awareness of my external world. There are numerous natural processes occurring all around me. How often do I truly take time to simply observe even the ones occurring right in front of me every day. The sparrows chirping on the weeping willow outside my window as I quibble to myself about the Colombian-ness of my coffee, or the leaves on a branch swaying wildly as a sparrow swoops down to a lower branch, or the sunlight making its way across the branches of the tree. I may catch glimpses, I may stop to notice their beauty, I may even take a photograph. But I am inevitably taken hold of by some thought or the other, and my attention is diverted.
Maybe two or five or ten minutes of mindfulness is all that I can hope for during a day. I can’t see this as a knock against me. And I can’t despair by comparing myself to the sages and yogis of the past. They lived in a different world. The institutions, organizations, and cultures that I live within today have contributed greatly to my inability to remain in the present. Who knows, the Buddha might not have become the Buddha if he were living in our age; might he have survived the temptations of Netflix, Whole Foods, and TikTok? And might Mr. Buddha’s father not have given him a few kicks on the butt for even suggesting a career of a mendicant in today’s era? I don’t know. Maybe, mindfulness just seems too boring to engage in. I know I’ve felt that way. For some reason, I find my thoughts more interesting than what is happening within my body and around my body. I love my thoughts! In many ways, my thoughts have helped me spend more time with myself through reflection and contemplation. But maybe I’ve given them too much of my time. Maybe it would help if I could let my thoughts flow through my awareness without digging deeper into each of them, and by treating them as they are. Just thoughts. And I am not only my thoughts. I am more than them. I am my thoughts, my feelings, my body, my family, my culture, my history- all of it. And much more.
Mindfulness too is much more than simply an exercise, a routine, or something I need to do only when I feel anxious. If there is “enlightenment” to be received through mindfulness, I certainly won’t be the enlightened one. As long as I treat mindfulness like an hour-long session at the gym, I will continue to expect it to give me some tangible results. And “enlightenment” or “peace of mind” or “calmness”, aren’t tangible. There’s no radiant halo that’s going to permanently form over my head one fine day after my mindfulness routine. I won’t suddenly feel like an all-powerful God who is able to levitate six inches above the ground. No, as far as I can hypothesize, I will simply, gradually, and eventually, be aware of more than I previously was. And possibly be more compassionate, possibly be more content. And even then, I might not always feel more aware, or compassionate, or content. Doesn’t sound glamorous at all! But how would I even know that. I don’t even know what genuine mindfulness looks or feels like. If I did, maybe I would stop chasing an abstract concept like “enlightenment”.
