Reblogged from galeyman | Bolding is from me
I felt pretty stupid and uncomfortable the first few times I attempted it, to just BE with the reality of what I was doing, purposefully giving focus to an object or activity that I would never usually think was worthy of my attention. It might not be something I judged as interesting, important or a good use of my time, but I was going to focus on it anyway.
The mindfulness books told me to pick an everyday activity, perhaps brushing my teeth, doing the dishes or simply walking along the street, and to purposefully give it my full attention in order to fully experience the reality of what I was doing. These mundane activities were the best to practice with as they’re just the type of thing that people don’t give their full attention to because they have done them a million times before. Automatically going through the motions allows your mind to wander freely. Of course my mind was quick to tell me that this was a good thing! Why waste my time focussing on walking down the street when I could be giving my attention to something more useful instead? This seemed like a perfectly valid point, but I had set myself the task and felt obliged to carry it out.
I started washing the dishes and, as instructed, tried to fully focus on what I was doing, on the physical sensations of warm water on my hands, the smell of the washing up liquid, the gleam of light off plates, and the sounds of taps running and pots clanging. Yes, this is where I started to feel really embarrassed and stupid. It seemed like the actions of mad man, giving so much attention to something that was so beneath me (or so my mind was telling me). Again and again my attention was pulled away into thoughts, concerns and self-judgement. But, just as with formal meditation practice, I began to notice when I was pulled away from my focus and gently returned my attention to the task in hand. This noticing, and crucially the ability to redirect the attention, was at the crux of the practice.
I took a walk and tried to feel my footsteps, listen out for background noise and really take in my surroundings, constantly pulling my attention back to present reality whenever my mind snatched me away. As I stayed with these activities for longer and longer periods of time a strange thing began to happen - the whole fabric of reality seemed to change and take on a sharper and more intense nature. I realize that this is going to sound a little odd but I felt like I had entered into a different reality! I remember walking through the park early on in my practice and feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of my experience. Objects were taking on a hyperreal (or perhaps surreal) quality that was at once exhilarating and mildly shocking. I looked at the branches of a tree and they seemed to be cut right out from the background, solidifying into something so intensely ‘real’ that I was taken aback. I felt like I was in an alien reality, and it really was alien because I was beginning to see things as they really appeared, right now and right in front of me which is something I did so rarely. Reality, just for the briefest of moments, had lost its veneer of preconception, judgement and bias that my mind usually coloured it with - and all I had to do was fully commit to experiencing it.
As strange as these glimpses into a ‘new’ reality felt, they were not a completely abstract notion to me. Looking back I could identify times in my life when I had felt a sudden and unexpected connection to a scene in front of me - most often when staring out at a beautiful landscape or maybe the ocean - where I had felt a real connection to what I was experiencing, a glimpse of peace or total presence, and a sense of perspective about the world and my place in it. I’m sure that this isn’t an uncommon experience, and of course it really does help if you happen to be standing in the middle of a beautiful natural environment. But that small taste of some unnamed underlying peaceful presence might not just exist when we are swept away and in awe of nature’s beauty or scale, perhaps it could exist in any moment, even when we are doing the dishes! This seemed a bit of a stretch of course, but the idea of being swept away or ‘losing yourself’ for a moment and experiencing this peace might perhaps be something that you didn’t have to wait for to arise spontaneously (how often are we walking along a beach on a beautiful sunny morning?) but something that, with practice, could be cultivated within our mundane daily lives, or at least invited and encouraged to arise more frequently.
So the idea of purposely focussing on the mundane began to make a little more sense to me. I would walk back from a shopping trip (the same route I took day after day) and keep dragging my reluctant attention back to the reality of the present moment again and again. That constant nagging question of ‘why focus on this when you could be using you mind for something more useful?’ kept coming up. But this time I had an answer - what could be more useful that giving attention to experiencing the reality of my life? When I really started to examine where my mind would usually be, it was rarely focussed on anything that came close to what could be described as ‘useful’. It was the same old chit-chat or ruminating on past and future. I might tell myself I was planning or productively cogitating on something important, but nothing concrete was being achieved by giving my attention to those random spiralling thoughts, apart from helping to keep me away from reality. Ok, but surely it’s a good thing to distract yourself from something unpleasant by thinking about something else? Who wants to think about what’s really happening when they are sat in the dentist’s chair, for example? This is an extreme example but the principle remains the same. By constantly trying to keep our minds away from the painful (or simply mundane) aspects of life we are also losing the ability to truly be with the more beautiful aspects. Trying to hold on to the happy moments is equally as fruitless and often the pleasant sensation of staring at the ocean is spoiled by the feeling that it can’t be captured or held onto. Get your phone out and take a snap?
Combining formal sitting meditation with mindfulness in my everyday life has allowed me to have greater control over where I place my attention, and I choose as often as I can to be with reality, whatever that reality happens to be. This helps to cultivate a more accepting attitude of having life as it is rather than repeatedly trying to escape from it or forcing it be something it isn’t. Reality is no longer quite so alien and is becoming less and less so by the day, which makes it easier to recognize it and keep a gentle focus on it. Reality is happening right now, and if we are not giving our attention to it then are we really experiencing our lives fully?
Connecting with reality can be achieved more easily using of a number of techniques - the most straightforward of which is to connect more fully with the body, and thereby the senses. This is where my next post will lead me.
