Beware: Your mind is in gear when Mindful!

Being mindful expecting the mind to be still is like shifting your car into gear
with engine running expecting it to stay stationary!
Coacharya

Many Mindfulness practitioners come to me saying that they are more

stressed than when they started. I ask them about their expectations. They
start with stress and anxiety reduction. I then ask how they would have
perceived the reduced stress. They say peace of mind or stillness.

Unfortunately mindfulness, as defined, taught and practiced is about sensory

awareness of the mind that gets the mind moving rather than stationary.
Holding a raisin in your hands, looking at it in a focused manner, rolling your
fingers over it touching it tenderly, raising it to your nostrils to smell it and then
placing it on your tongue to taste it, leaves only in sense not engaged.

The first time I attended a mindfulness program I asked the trainer whether I
should try hearing the raisin as well, as it seemed to me that I was missing an
important sensory perception. She was not amused, quite upset actually; not
very mindful of her.

Engaging the senses engages our conditioned memory, of raisins and other
edibles before setting the mind in motion, sometimes even emotionally. There
are trainers who ask you to visualize slicing a juicy lemon and exclaim along
with you in wonder when you salivate. It is merely a conditioned reflex with
you playing Pavlov’s dog!

Engaging the mind is what stresses us in the first place. It is our mind’s
perception of a situation or object, not the situation or object themselves,
which creates stress in us. Reframing this perception or better still
disengaging from the root cause of the perception would help relive the
stress, not delving into the stress mindfully as a focus.

When I came in contact with mindfulness concepts in the eighties I was quite
familiar with meditation through various pathways of raja yoga, TM, Zen and
others. Most of them relied on a mantra or a thought to induce the meditative
state. I then trained as a healer in which process I learned to disengage from
the thought and action of healing. A researcher tested my brain wave pattern
to verify whether I was in alpha state as befits a meditative healer. He
declared that I was not meditating since my brain wave pattern exceeded the
instruments higher limit of 20 hertz!

Twenty years later another researcher measured me in 35 to 40 Hertz range

declaring me to in active gamma wave meditation in line with findings of
Herbert Benson. During this period I had undergone Vipassana meditation
programs and learnt about the Fourth State of disengaged ‘mindless’
awareness of the Mandukya Upanishad and the No Mind ‘sunya’ state of
Buddhism. These ‘mindless’ practices made a lot more sense to me to me
than mindful ones.

The term ‘mindfulness’ is not from Buddhism. It is an inadequate translation of

the Pali word sati, which along with its Sanskrit equivalent of smriti, both
meaning memory, has a limiting connotation. Buddha spoke of Right Memory
in the context of letting memories go so as to be free of the vagaries of the
mind. Focus of the latter half of Ashtanga Yoga, internal yoga, is on moving
away from memory, the senses and thoughts to the disengaged state of
‘samadhi’ basedc on practices that start with sensory focus. Practices of
yoganidra and vipassana are excellent pathways that start with mind and
body awareness leading to a state of awareness beyond mind and body, one
of energy.

Mindlessness is a far higher state of awareness that starts with mindful

practice. To reach mindlessness mindfulness, the initial awareness of what
mind and body are doing is needed. Paraphrasing Swami Vivekananda,
starting with mindfulness is good, but not ending with it.

A toddler is mindful when starting to walk, aware of each step, mindful. Once
mastered there is no more thought of how to place one foot in front of the
other. Following the earlier analogy of an automobile, a learner driver is
mindful of coordinating the pedals, the steering wheel and objects on the
road. Once mastered, one drives in the unmindful zone, mindless of what one
is doing.

Mindfulness takes us from unconscious incompetence to conscious

competence. Mindlessness is the last mile that takes into the peak zone of
unconscious competence.

Link to webinar on 13 March, 2019