What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a word that has hit our culture in a big way over the last decade. Not only has it become a staple in academic research and in therapy rooms across the world, but we all likely know of at least one person in our social circles who has started proselytizing the benefits of mindfulness meditation.

Of course, it is highly likely that this friend is already probably one of your “crunchiest” of your bunch and may also regularly say things like, “CBD helps me with my anxiety,” or “I eat a low inflammatory diet for my gut health.” Not to knock your friends (and there is at least some evidence for both of these things), but these things don’t quite have the evidence base that mindfulness does, so I want to make sure you see the actual benefits that mindfulness has demonstrated time and time again, both in the Western scientific world in the last few decades and the last several centuries in Eastern cultures.

As I mentioned, mindfulness has been increasingly integrated into Western Society’s prescription for how to keep one’s stress down, but it originated far earlier in Eastern religious traditions. There is some debate as to whether it was 2,500 years ago in the Buddhist tradition or perhaps over 4,000 years ago in Hindu early Vedic traditions. Either way, Jon Kabat-Zinn was the psychologist responsible for bringing mindfulness into the scientific literature in the 1990s.

Kabat-Zinn defined mindfulness as best he could to stay in alignment with these traditions but still in a way that seemed palatable for Western cultures when he said that mindfulness is, “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” Of course, that has been since broken down with several other theories and conceptualizations of mindfulness, and my favorite of those (the one I’ve found to be most helpful for understanding it) suggests it consists of the following three primary tenets: Attentive Awareness, Receptive Attitude, and Intentionality.

Let’s break these each down a bit further below:

Attentive Awareness is comprised of two facets: focused attention and sustained attention. Focused attention is the ability someone has to direct attention where one wants it. Sustained attention relates to the extent to which one can maintain attention and refrain from shifting that attention onto distractions that arise. Although not complete in the way it captures all facets of our attention processes, people often use the metaphor of a spotlight to describe this process. That is, the spotlight can focus in particular areas and either keep shining there or shift to other places. Of course, we know that in modern society, there are so many distractions that seem to demand our attention.

Next, a Receptive Attitude is what characterizes the way in which attention is cultivated. It is a quality of awareness that is open, nonjudgmental, and curious with respect to what arises. Purveyors of mindfulness often couple it with discussions of acceptance, and although acceptance sounds like weakness to the average American, it is actually quite the opposite. Acceptance, or otherwise known as a receptive attitude, allows us to be more open to experiencing reality as it is as opposed to stuck in our thoughts about how we think it is. This experience can often be quite distressing in an acute sense, but as soon as we open up to allowing the experience, we find the difference between pain and suffering. Essentially, pain is more of an experience, and suffering is more of a behavior that often comes from our unwillingness to experience the pain.

Although it is sometimes painful to experience those things we do not have influence over (e.g., rejection or loss), our resistance against accepting reality as it is ends up piling suffering on top of that pain, and we end up feeling even worse than we otherwise would have and for a longer period of time. The opposite of a receptive attitude is a desire for control or a resistance to change. When we try to control what we cannot or resist the inevitable change in our lives, then we fail to adapt and live in the world the best way we can.

Finally, Intentionality has been conceptualized in two ways. The primary way Western culture has defined Intentionality involves a deliberate cultivation of attention, which differentiates if from more mindless engrossment such as getting “glued to the TV.” When we are thinking of mindfulness, we are not just thinking of getting sucked into something for long periods of time. There is plenty out there that can grab our attention, and this tenet helps us to differentiate the “attention traps” from the conscious cultivation of awareness where we want it to be.

The second way Intentionality has been described relates to the purpose underlying one’s decision to cultivate attention. Although much of the traditional Eastern Philosophies described the importance of that aspect of this core tenet of mindfulness, it rarely gets included in Western culture’s depiction of the construct, as our scientific literature has mainly focused solely on its “practical” uses, such as stress reduction. Not that reducing stress is not helpful, but there is some implicit assumption underneath that intention that suggests we are going to keep forcing our mind and body to stay in places that are needlessly stressful even when they do not help us live the life we want to live.

For example, if we are stuck in a corporate job that has us working 60-70 hours a week that we actually hate but are cultivating mindfulness to help keep our stress at bay while we continue feeding the machine that Zach De La Rocha raged against to the tune of Tom Morello’s innovative guitar riffs, then we are not really cultivating mindfulness as it was initially conceptualized. The real type of mindfulness we are looking for is one that helps us connect most deeply to what matters to us so that we can orient our attention in alignment with that.

And based on what we do know from early research (before it was totally captured by the Western corporatist ethic) is that it works! An individual’s purpose, or intention, for their mindfulness practice differentially impacted that particular downstream effect. For instance, those who cultivated a practice so they could improve self-regulation improved in that area, while those who wanted to increase their capacity for compassion were able to increase more than others in that area.

Traditionally, compassion has been the primary intention, and you will see that as a theme across our website. Compassion is a critical part of healing, and that is part of what we do. With that in mind, we do not necessarily want to force anyone to adopt that as a core value. We only invite people to try it on for size, and as they do, the world may just show them more how to have compassion for themselves.

In many ways, mindfulness is often mischaracterized as a “woo-woo” hippie-friendly endeavor that requires engagement in incredibly boring week-long retreats that somehow lead to a connection to some sort of mystical oneness with all things that have ever lived and ever will live and everything else in the universe, yada yada, and so on and so forth.

Though on the other side of the continuum, the ones who characterize it simply as a regulation of attention without any understanding of the manner or attitude with which that attention is cultivated or why one aims to cultivate it are also doing a disservice to the construct. However, I would argue that if either one of those sounds better for you (i.e., whether you are likely higher in openness to experience, which relates to the former conceptualization, or you are higher in conscientiousness, which relates to the latter), then I would suggest you lean towards the end of that continuum at least initially as an intention for your practice so you can see how it works.

After a while, our hope is that you start to see how well it works, and even more so, we hope you start to become more aware of what is really important to you in your life and start paying attention to it more.