There is another world and it is this one. Paul Eluard
Summary: a small step, but a powerful shift in where we put our attention, is available to us at all times. By practicing this step often during the day, especially as we go about our daily tasks, our awareness broadens, our mindsets are more flexible and resourceful. This shift enables us to live increasing blocks of our days, however busy, with more awareness and more of who we are.
Replace our usual thinking with a different mental state
Thinking is a set of habits, a meta habit, comprised of many subset habits. Being mindful is also a meta habit and it often is pushed aside by thinking. We identify with our thoughts, manipulate them, do good work, and we can also waste our time with them and get lost in them. Awareness begins with the thoughts beneath the thoughts, with the shift that begins with small mental moves like— “why am I thinking about this, do I really want to do that?”
We can go on for hours, days, lifetimes without stepping back from thoughts. We can live full-time, full on, without looking at them. Practice 1 suggests that our thinking mind, where conceptualizing and much planning and control-seeking reside, is a great tool and a lousy master on some essential matters. It is not the part of us to be in charge all the time.
It is widely known, thanks to the neuro-sciences and mindfulness teaching, that the compilation of our internal mental/emotional programs, our unique habituated neural pathways, keep our attention locked in. We remain in our thinking/feeling/living habits—the good and neutral ones and the less useful ones too.
Start from where we are
Like the other nine practices we will describe, we start this first practice with varying degrees of awareness of this simple fact: that our daily lives are largely the product of our past practices of thinking, feeling, and awareness. Practice 1, mindful mind over thinking mind, says what it is about. Of course, thinking is inestimably valuable, but it has its limits. This practice aims at lessening the power of some of our old thinking friends—conceptualizing, forming judgments, and control-seeking, to name three of them–and their incessant pull on us.
A shift away from thinking mind and its regular closed-loop habits to the more aware mindful mindset and its openness is the beginning of our journey into the psychological alchemy of more choices for our daily, by the hour and minute, mindsets. All meditation, reflection, journaling, and prayer too, are parallel, complementary ways to loosen the hold the habits have so we have more options for where we put our attention. Meditation and contemplation and prayer, in their higher forms, come from our wisdom traditions, which over the centuries have taken on the role of weakening the neural pathways of well-worn self-gain habits. This makes room for the now and the new and the deeper places within aware mind.
Let me explain a bit more as this is big, fundamental to the other practices we will cover. Our attempt with this practice is to replace less useful thought loops, inner chatter, and memory fragments leading to nowhere with something more mindful. We want to replace run-on thoughts of incessant problem-solving, or distraction and pseudo-entertainment, with a more comprehensive inner power field that can hold our thoughts without getting lost in them. We want to exchange our unending thoughts with something more relaxed, breath-friendly and under our control. We are calling this mindful mind and it will be explained and described extensively in the other practices that follow.
We do not attempt to stop or push away our thoughts as any push seems to intensify them. By simply observing them thoughts slow and have less compulsive power. This observational state of mindful mind has a felt sense to it, but is not only a body-centered sense of awareness. This replacement state is also heart felt and consciousness-expanding.
With this practice we shift the locus of our identity from the contents of our awareness to awareness itself, always already a state of peace and silence.This is not anti-conceptual in any way. We love, honor and respect, use and cultivate our thinking mind. We have gratitude for all it has done, is doing and will do for us. And, in this practice, we set it aside, temporarily and regularly, as it will always be there for us when we need it.
Pulling in the right hemisphere (RH).
Many of our daily tasks take focus and our work and life will push many of us into analytical and linear thinking, sourced primarily in the left hemisphere of our brains. With mindful mind we are consciously moving to the RH, so it has time to balance us out. During all the mindful periods—short, medium and long–make a habit of sensing the energy in the right hemisphere of the brain. This is not your mental screen, though it may include it. This habit is sensing your brain inside your entire skull, front/back, left right, crown/base, and feeling its subtle energies. You may not feel anything at first, or even after a lot of tries, but keep at and see what happens. It will be subtle at first and with practice you will sense an increase of right hemisphere energy. (Expect more on the right hemisphere later).
Practice for Mindful Mind Over Thinking Mind: (if you already have a mindfulness or meditation practice use it, and go to this mindset as often as you can during the day—see below for a few tips on mini-meditations)
And a frame for thinking about practices in general. We need to keep our sense of humor about all the practices, holding them with both a lightness and an intensity as we:
- accept our humanness and our clumsiness in forcing the practices versus gently but intensely practicing and persisting in them, and:
- look through the holes that language inevitably creates in the “theory” of a practice or describing it. We use words to go past them, and this “going past” feature shows up regularly as the words I use hit their limits.
- I repeat this reminder in practice 6. We use repetitions and iterations deliberately, so thoughts slowly sink in. This work is more about a stance or disposition more than acquisition of information. It is characterological more than strictly logical.
To go to mindful mind we start with the simple steps taught in meditation, and reflection practices:
–Take a breath, somewhat deeper and using the diaphragm and relax the body. (We do not need to be in a quiet place to do this—see below.) Yes, this is the best known and widespread of all the practices, so it gets first mention. If it is the only practice we use or will ever use, it may be enough for going to mindful mind at will.
—Notice the screen of your mind, thoughts and images and words that come in. We let them go. Go back to breath attention often, and to the part of us that watches the thoughts, the part that is aware of having thoughts. You might notice thought specifics, the particularities of the idea-sound-word-picture streaming through and circling around in thinking content-concentrated mind.
—Keep breathing and become aware of a softer focus enter with mindful mind. Particularities fade, awareness seeps in– a less focused energy can take a place inside your head (the pictures of the visual mental screen) along with an awareness of our heart and gut/solar plexus energy. Less particular—that is what we want. Particulars will come back when we need them.
–Go to mindful mind all day long in small, medium or larger periods: as we take a drink, move to the next email, take a breath starting a Zoom meeting, go to get food out of the refrigerator, walk to our car. As we start or continue this practice, hours, even the whole day, may pass between moments of inviting in mindful mind. That is normal and nothing to fret over. With practice, it becomes more frequent.
–Beyond the mini moments. More sustained periods to invite in awareness can include our favorite reading: scripture, poetry, or a favorite author whose language and thought stream we find elevating. (Not news or information—that is thinking mind.) Just step back from the thoughts to breathe as you do this. Walks are great for medium period invitations to the mindful mind through reflection.
Longer periods of mindful mind are common of course. Read a book on meditation or use YouTube for a class (and quality varies enormously here, so be discerning in the ways you best know), if you want to get started. In the meantime, take a breath, think about the thinker of the thoughts, go behind the thought stream to get to that distinctly different awareness that accompanies mindful mind.
–Think about our thinking: engage often underused contemplation and reflection practices. Here we practice visiting the thought level beneath and behind the thoughts on our mental screens showing up as words spoken in our voices. This is what contemplation and reflection do. Engage activities and questions like the following: Journal, think about the assumptions behind your thoughts and conclusions, consider where and how you picked up your favorite thinking pattern. Slow down enough to ask how your thinking could be wrong. What data are you missing? What “interpretive structures”—spiritual know-how, training, bodies of knowledge—are needed? From whom are you borrowing your thoughts? What are their shortcomings? Are you getting a little ego kick out of “owning” this thought and its cleverness.
That’s it for practice 1. We pay attention outside of our thoughts. Mindful mind is always here for the entering. It is the companion non-thinking place our cognition-steeped minds need. We observe our thoughts and slow them down. We build on this practice with nine more of them.
If you missed the introduction to these 10 practices, here is the link for that http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/
And poetically speaking and thinking from a mindful place, take in these poems by Artie Isaac and Fred Anderle.
Intention ~ Artie Isaac
Skating around the fragile edge
where my state of presence
slips with the context,
believing everything I think,
focused on proving my competence.
Let me develop this practice
of re calibrating my awareness,
to become the context,
disfascinated from mental chatter,
so that I can be present
for others at the fragile edge.
Pause ~ Fred Anderle
When we halt our inner converse
the universe is still, like a bold
mouse pausing, not to be espied.
When our monologue ceases.
Our earth is quiet like sunlight
drifting through afternoon lace
like the distant sigh of an old furnace,
the murmur of leaves in spring wind.
Cacophonous our mind’s production
uproarious the raving day within
until we pause to recover
our whole, calm spirit.
Clear the evening angelus bell
hushed the noonday train yard
soft the parlor cat sleeping
bright the air in deepest woods.
This our harmony
this our own cathedral
we err to leave it for the mind outrageous
we could live our lives in sacred dwelling.