This began with my observation that I’m noticing more mental health challenges recently and wondering what I might be able to do for the students I see that would both help the suffering and immunize the healthy. Then it wandered. Ah well, this working draft will have to do since the semester has begun and there is just no time on the horizon before May in which to polish these thoughts and opinions of a layman with no particular expertise in psychology or meditation.
Which would you rather feel: the tightness in the chest from anxiety, or the openness and wonder of curiosity? The question answers itself (I hope).
This is what mindfulness can do: bend anxiety (and other negative emotions, which I lump together here despite the differences between a nuclear war and a playful tickle fight) into a sort of curiosity or similar neutral feeling. Although I’ve been aware of mindfulness meditation for more than 20 years, beginning with Stephen Bachelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs and Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are, and I had recognized its potential early on, I had never practiced it with any sort of regularity until recently. My loss.
While mindfulness meditation is not a religious practice, I’m reminded of a western Buddhist monk who, as a young man, happened upon a gathering of older people listening to an experienced teacher. The young man saw that he was by far the youngest in the room and asked the teacher if he was old enough to get anything out of meditation. In return, the teacher asked, “Do you suffer?” Of course he did. “Then, why wait?”
Mindfulness is merely paying attention – at first perhaps to the body and mind – in the present, without opinion or judgment. It’s pretty simple, but as my first chemistry teacher reminded us regularly, “simple is not necessarily easy”.
It’s important to be in the present because so much of our emotional baggage is related to ruminating on the past or anticipating the future. These abilities to sift the tailings of the past for their social implications and to envision future interactions are universal traits, part of what makes us human. In the words of eminent biologist E.O. Wilson,
“Research psychologists have found that all normal humans are geniuses at reading the intentions of others, whereby they evaluate, proselytize, bond, cooperate, gossip, and control. Each person, working his way back and forth through his social network, almost continuously reviews past experiences while imagining the consequences of future scenarios.”
So, no, it’s not just you. However, when these tendencies become problematic and interfere with sleep, school, work, or other aspects of our lives, well, then we have a problem. By gently and persistently focusing on the present moment in meditation, we pull our attention away from both past and future, helping to diffuse the emotions associated with rumination and anticipation.
Mindfulness meditation does not, in my limited experience, require or lead to any sort of pacific bliss. For me, the recurring thoughts and the associated emotions do not disappear, but by paying attention to them I can see them at one remove. By noticing the thoughts come and go in the moment and not being either swept away in either their stories or new self-critical judgments, I find that I develop a useful emotional distance from them. If I can notice my rumination, and pay attention to how it feels in my body, that noticing part of me is not troubled, it’s merely observant, curious. Observing like this provides a perspective that separates ‘me’ from my thoughts and feelings: ‘I’ am not so inseparably identified with my thoughts. By being able to think about them, I am not them. My observant mind is not identified by the thoughts and opinions that bubble up to consciousness. By staying with (or gently returning repeatedly to) a non-judgmental attention in the present moment, I have begun to notice what thoughts tend to capture my attention before I once again detach that attention, return to now, and let the thoughts go like so many individual red balloons in the breeze. By identifying my thoughts, I diminish the tendency to identify with them.
Those thoughts that loop and cycle remind me of a circular path with a deeply rutted trail bed. In recognizing the loop, I can step outside of it. As the great philosopher Erma Bombeck wrote, "Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but it never gets you anywhere." It’s here that meditation can be effective in bypassing or defusing the emotional content of the thoughts. I find I still have essentially the same unproductive thoughts, although perhaps less frequently, but I’m no longer involuntarily carried along or away by those thoughts to unhelpful actions or swept into endless emotional loops. Merely becoming aware of the system, itself, changes the system.
There is a paradox here, since mindfulness meditation provides both intimacy and distance. Maintaining a non-judgmental awareness implies an absolute acceptance of whatever thoughts and feelings come to mind, while at the same time the act of observing transmutes the emotional perspective to more neutral ground. I find that mindfulness takes both a little courage and a little kindness toward my imperfect self to facilitate the necessary intimacy; to allow myself to feel what I feel, without judgment.
Interlude:
“Geese”, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
If you’ve never experienced mindfulness meditation, try a guided meditation; I’m sure there are many great options (and readers with experience, please feel free to suggest some in the comments), but I think a fine place to start is with John Kabat-Zinn’s talk at Google from 2007. For an introduction, I think he has just about the right balance of playfulness and irreverence. Skip ahead to 21:00 minutes in to begin; the guided meditation starts a few minutes after that.
Zinn’s playfulness is important, I think, because the beneficial effects are only a byproduct of the mindfulness exercise, like something that can only be seen in peripheral vision. I can imagine that if one focused too intently on reducing stress through meditation, for example, the results might not follow because focusing on the desired result would inhibit attending to the moment and perhaps could also interfere with the non-judgmental acceptance of whatever stress one might be feeling. In standing aside and not trying to force a particular result, I’m reminded of U2’s chorus “Get out of your own way.” Practice mindfulness because doing so develops resilience, sensitivity, and qualities that help the meditator and others with whom they interact, but recognize that pushing a particular outcome could be counterproductive.
I’ve noticed that more people I know, students, graduates, and older adults have been experiencing various forms of anxiety in the past couple years. I suppose it’s possible that I’m just becoming more aware of it, but I think the increase in anxiety is real and, frankly, justified. After all, it’s a beautiful world if you don’t think too hard about how we’re systematically making it uninhabitable, carelessly mistreating our fellow travelers, and getting swept up in defining an “other” who can take the blame as we’re swept along toward an ecological degeneration and its resultant population bottleneck, a “them” who can be ‘displaced’ from their homes or simply reaped, culled, fleeced, or flensed. And I’m a white male; I can only try to imagine the additional stresses on women and people of color.
Since about the first of May in 2016 – I remember talking with students as we backpacked through Zion National Park – it’s been clear that the malignant populism of the Trump movement was becoming a dominant force in American life. Not just our government, but many of our acquaintances and neighbors are riding a loop of grievance, blame, and vengeance, already willingly blind to the corrosion of our common good. Despite our self-images and our pockets of light, we have shown ourselves to be a nation of “assholes by the truckload, suckers by the bucket.” So there’s plenty of reason for anyone to be anxious, even without considering any personal trauma or conflict.
I wonder if some people experience anxiety that is initiated by these more global perceptions but that anxiety is projected on to other more personal challenges as the loop of anxiety, behavior and thought begins to engage. Just an idle speculation, this, but many I’ve talked to have had their internal experience darken in synch with our national nightmare, but they haven’t necessarily noticed the connection. I’d be curious to see if engaged political action, taking a perspective of agency, would help reduce manifestations of anxiety that my friends and students experience.
I’ve talked to quite a few current and former students and many who have not tried mindfulness meditation seem to have some pretty common misconceptions. I heard from them that “it takes too much time”, that “I don’t have the patience,” that “I can’t concentrate that long,” and a variety of other reasons (or excuses) that are pretty much totally irrelevant dodges. (OK, it does take some time, although I’d argue that it’s time wisely spent.)
I’d welcome any suggestions for secular guided meditations or activities that I could share with my students in 25 minutes or less.
Coda, with Tim Minchin
This is my brain and I live in it. It’s made of love and bad song lyrics. It’s tucked away behind my eyes Where all my f***ed up thoughts can hide, ‘Cause god-forbid I hurt somebody. And the weirdest thing about a mind Is that every answer that you find Is the basis of a brand new cliché… I’m not quite sure I’ve worked out how to work it It’s not perfect, but it’s mine.
Afterword: What’s the reward for ruminating and stewing in anxiety?
I was talking with my insightful friend, Sam, about how anxious rumination could be viewed through the lens of operant conditioning as a cued and rewarded behavior, and I wondered aloud what the reward might be from this perspective. This was Sam’s response:
Auto-flagellation. It’s the self-punishment and self-judgement that’s so easy to fall into that meditation is supposed to alleviate. Judging oneself induces guilt:
“I did x and this terrible result happened”
“It’s all my doing, I have only myself to blame”
“I should have done so-and-so instead”
and so forth. This guilt, strangely enough, seems to be able to soothe, inwardly and outwardly. Outward, spoken guilt is expressed when one wrongs another, and it may come off, verbally, as an apology. However, guilt is not an apology. It never is. It may be an acknowledgment of one’s wrongdoings, but oftentimes it’s far too easy to deflect it back towards the person who’s been harmful, and not the person who’s been hurt.
Despite having the sense of “it’s all my doing”, guilt is actually an evasion of self-responsibility. Self-punishment feels like soothing to the guilt-holder, and will absolve them of their wrongs. After all, pardoning follows penance, does it not? And the steeping of oneself in anxiousness saves the “wrongdoer” from being subject to sincere, possibly critical dialogue with the wronged party.
Internally, the nauseating motto of anxiousness/guilt is “should-have-could-have-would-have”. This thinking extends both into rumination of the past and the future. You have the worn-down paths extending into bygone possibilities that take such effort to walk through, in regret and in guilt, but results in nothing—because the deed is done, the moment has passed, and the consequence cannot be undone. Anxiousness of this specific sentiment into the future is more insidious. Forwardly-projected guilt can be mistaken for planning—harried, frustrated, and rueful planning, yes, but isn’t it all the same? Hypotheticals for similar situations ahead are heedlessly concocted, but this is far from planning, or any sort of preventative measure. Decisions made in guilt are fueled by anxiety, which, in this manifestation, is the speculation, even expectation, of repeating one’s own mistakes.
At its core, guilt (and with it, autoflagellation, self-judgement, etc.) becomes the “reward” for anxiousness because it fulfills the need for forgiveness, retrospects on past decisions, and advises/inform future decisions to avoid further mistakes.
And these are all lies.
Rather, they are slyly deceptive. Guilt has this nasty trick of producing false emotional productivity. Expend enough time and energy to doubt your past actions, fear your future decisions, and deflect your guilt back to yourself without attempting resolution with others around you, and you have the equivalent of a daily P90-X workout for your emotions. It’s exhausting, and, frankly, baffling. (Just look at the serial P90-Xers at the gym, with their overexcited 5AM sessions and alien-looking green protein shakes. Those crazy folks.) Wandering thoughts, even repeating, intrusive thoughts are only natural. Without self-awareness, though—that is, unblinking, radical openness about the root and cause of one’s feelings, and the right amount of detachment in the process—these thoughts get turned up to 11, and then, oops! the lever snaps right off, Looney Tunes-style, and there goes the rollercoaster to ceaseless anxiousness.
Self-awareness and mindfulness meditation can both prevent these excesses and provide a path back to getting those feelings back on scale. Like you mentioned, the practice of it is anything but easy. You might notice some people refer to meditation and mindfulness as a “practice”—because it is. In its simplest definition, practice is the act of repeating something with intent. We repeat the cycling of anxiousness near-ceaselessly, but it is hardly a practice. Mindfulness meditation necessitates an intent that inevitably induces a sense of agency in practicers.
Wile E. Coyote (of said Looney Tunes fame) never gets the chance to glue the lever back together and prevent his ever-imminent fate of being squished by a falling grand piano. We, however, are given the tools not only to tone down our anxiousness, both in the short and long term, but to find a new and restorative place relative to our worries and tension. To continue with the analogy: there are still pianos, anvils, and comically huge boulders that will continue to descend on us. There’s no stopping that, unfortunately. However, we can access the lever, yank it a couple of notches back, and [SFX: record scratch] the plummeting objects of doom suddenly slow enough so that we can side-step them. We won’t get off scot-free; the damage is still done, and we will still be smattered with the resulting debris, but thanks to our distance from our twenty-ton troubles, they won’t come to a crashing wreck onto—or within—our heads.
— S. X. Wong