As David Rock writes in Your Brain At Work, mindfulness has long had association with spirituality, even religion. Ask someone to describe mindfulness, and if they can, they’ll often make reference to things like meditation, Buddhism, prayer or perhaps being one with nature. Whilst all these involve, even promote mindfulness, they are not, themselves, the actual state of mindfulness.
The thing is that mindfulness is quite simple, if not elusive. It is presence. It is demonstrated daily by artists and musicians and elite sports people. On rare occasions, it emerges as a heroic action of some sort: Captain Chelsey Sullenberger, who successfully, and very calmly, landed Flight 1549 into the Hudson River, was totally present and mindful for example.
To demonstrate how simple and accessible presence is, let’s pinch an experiment used in the ABC series, Making Australians Happy. It takes a sultana and five minutes. Do this, and you’ll enter the world of mindfulness with ease:
1. Set up a timer, and give yourself 5 minutes undisturbed in a quiet place.
2. Your aim is to use every sense in slowly observing the raisin.
3. Taking your sultana
a. Taking your time, look at it closely – look for its surface patterns, fine variations in colour, where it was once attached to the vine. Look for things you might not have noticed before.
b. As you turn the sultana between your fingers, note how it feels. Close your eyes now, relying totally on your sense of touch to ‘observe’ the raisin. What textures do you feel? What sensations arise? What differences do you note?
c. Still with your eyes closed, raise your sultana, still between your fingers, to one ear, and listen to it as you manipulate it. Does it make a sound?
d. Still with your eyes closed, begin to smell the sultana. What complexities or ‘notes’ do you discern? What singular smells contribute to the overall aroma?
e. Finally, still with your eyes closed, place the sultana on your tongue. Roll it around on your tongue to sense how it feels. What tastes and smells arise now? How is it different to your sense of touch with your fingers? Gently bite or chew to release the flavours and textures. As you slowly chew, what flavour changes are you sensing? Where on your tongue do you sense the flavours? What textures do you notice?
4. Take a moment as you complete the exercise, to check in on things you have never noticed before about a sultana.
And that’s it. In five minutes and a sultana, you have been in the middle of mindfulness. Now as it turns out, there is some very interesting brain activity going on here, and to summarise David Rock again, there are two main brain systems in play (read the full article and neuroscience around the Farb experiment here):
· The default or narrative experience is when you experience the world with a thought stream that interprets that experience. It's the stream of thinking conversation when you are listening to someone, when you get distracted by thoughts of the future or the past. It is how we are most, for some of us, all of the time.
· Direct experience is when we have little or no thinking, and are immersed in just sensing the experience. Deep engagement with music, walking on a beach just feeling the sand and water between the toes, playing sport in an immersed way are all examples of a direct experience. No little interpreter thinking and saying things for us in our head.
Suffice to say, if you found yourself drifting back into thinking around the things you have to do, or other connecting thoughts triggered by the content here (for example), then you fell back into your default or narrative system of experiencing the world.
If, however, you were fully present with your senses, in ‘the zone’ and connected with the moment, then you were clearly in a direct experience mode.
So what’s the real point here? How does this relate to social skills, such as listening?
If a person you are listening to is, in comparative terms, the raisin, then chances are every element of your available attention is on experiencing that person, and what it is they are saying. You are in full observation mode, fully present with them. You are using your direct experience system, and you will be at your best with them.
If, however, you are using your narrative experience system to listen, you’ll have one or more rapid thought streams, about the future, waiting for them to finish so that you can say something, thinking of a solution or advice for them… You may not even be partially present with them. This is the default social pattern of engagement.
For those who are precious to you, the best way that they can experience you valuing them is to be present with them. Indeed, in any social context (parenting, teaching, treating, counselling, leading, facilitating, coaching), presence is king.
So to finish here, lets look at some everyday examples of mindfulness, of simply being present:
- Being fully present as you drive, being aware of not only potential issues, bit of the needs and issues of other drivers around you.
- Playing a game with your young child (see more of this at The Mindful Parent
- Playing some favourite and evocative musing on your iPod, watching the world go by as if it were a film
- Coaching with all of your available attention in observation mode
- Fully experiencing the pleasure of eating your favourite food, or perhaps drinking your favourite wine
- Listening and observing someone familiar to you, as if you are listening and observing them for the first time.
The more you practice moments of mindfulness, the more you become present in life.
