Let’s not talk about mindfulness. Let’s start with something you do more often, say drinking tea or coffee. I am going to go with tea because of personal biases; you can do the same with coffee.
Consider the following scenarios:
- Scenario 1: You sit on your couch, looking out of the window, sipping tea. What a day it has been! You recall the morning when you had a painful argument with your spouse, then got stuck at a traffic jam while on your way to office, and how your boss embarrassed you in front of everyone. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Life is unfair.
- Scenario 2: You sit on your couch, looking out of the window, sipping tea. What a day it has been! You remember how nice you felt after taking a much-needed break, and you received a good-news which you had been waiting for at least a year. You’re so excited that you can barely sit still. Life is good.
While we would prefer most of our days to turn out like the latter, we do realise that it is only wishful thinking on our part. Moreover, if every day turned out to be exactly the same, we wouldn’t be thrilled about it either. Does this mean we have to suffer every other day? How do we minimise the troubles in our life and maximise the happiness? These are the questions we often ponder upon.
However, even while asking these questions, we are making a fundamental mistake. In both the scenarios described above, we are leaving it to the external world to determine our mood. It doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to wait for good things to happen in our lives to feel good. Nor do we have to become miserable if miserable things were to happen to us. The key to how we feel should stay with us at all times.
It’s likely that you would get sceptical at this point. You might protest and say that it is impossible to not let the world affect us, certainly for mere mortals like ourselves. Allow me to elaborate upon this.
Mindfulness and Drinking Tea
Let’s return to the topic of tea. There are two ways to have this experience. One is to immerse yourself in the act of drinking tea, relishing every drop of it — its taste, aroma and sensations that it stirs in you. The other is by letting your mind wander to past or future, and missing out on the experience of tea while having tea. The first is what mindfulness asks us to do; the second is what most of us do most of the time.
It’s easy to tell which way is better. But then, we cannot keep obsessing over tea, that will defeat the whole purpose of it.
Let’s go a few moments back in time. If while washing dishes, you think only of the cup of tea that awaits you thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then you are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” In other words, you are not being mindful.
What’s more, you are not alive during the time you are washing the dishes. In fact you are completely incapable of realising the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If you can’t wash the dishes, the chances are you won’t be able to drink your tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, you will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in your hands. Thus you are sucked away into the future—and you are incapable of actually living one minute of life.
This is what we mean when we use the word mindfulness. It is the acceptance of the present experience. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it. Simply experiencing things as they come. Without worrying about our thoughts or letting them spoil every other experience that we have.
Mindfulness is a simple practice. That does not mean it’s easy. It can be incredibly hard — it takes a lot of time, sometimes years. But then, you are worth doing hard things.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 