When I started practicing mindfulness 50 years ago, I did so for a very different reason than the one I now give to folks who ask me why they might want to take up the practice.

My first inspiration for starting a meditation practice came from a little book by Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung called The Secret of the Golden Flower, in which a form of Taoist meditation in explained in detail. It speaks of developing both concentration and what we would now call mindfulness of thought. I was a fan of Carl Jung, and I made a decision to jump in with both feet and start practicing every day. My goal was awakening, self-realization, and higher consciousness. Looking back, it strikes me as a strange decision made by an unusual 16 year old, but also one which turned out quite well nonetheless!

Today, I don’t recommend that anyone practice meditation in order to achieve self-realization (of course, if that’s your thing and you’re motivated to develop your awareness for more spiritual or mystical reasons, then go right ahead). The journey that we call waking up is long and hard and can even be dangerous. I now think it’s far better to practice mindfulness for a much more basic reason, which I call mental hygiene.

When you start practicing, you quickly realize that your mind, your thoughts, your emotions, are pretty much out of control. You find that you can’t concentrate on anything for more than a minute or two without some thought grabbing your attention and sending you down a rabbit hole. Once you realize this, it’s like realizing that you’re out of shape because you never exercise.

The “solution” to being out of shape is to start an exercise program, make it a daily routine, and stick with it for a long time. By the same token, the solution to a mind that’s out of control is to start a meditation practice, make it a daily routine, and in time you’ll have a fitter brain and mind.

A mindfulness practice will develop several skills. Three of these are super valuable. The first one is “attentional intelligence”, the ability to intentionally use the power of attention to be more fully present. A second one is emotional non-reactivity, the ability to recognize and feel emotions without having them control your behaviour. And a third is the ability to observe thoughts as they arise, assess how useful those thoughts are, and change them if necessary.

Good mental hygiene, like good dental hygiene, is a daily regimen that prevents problems later on. There’s a blog from UC Davis that lists 10 benefits of mindfulness practice, backed by research. Here is that list:

1. Reduced stress: Meditation may decrease stress. It can also improve symptoms of stress-related conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and fibromyalgia.
2. Improved memory: Better focus through regular meditation may increase memory and mental clarity. These benefits can help fight age-related memory loss and dementia.
3. Increased attention: Meditation helps with attention span, allowing you to stay focused longer.
4. Enhanced willpower: Meditation develops the mental discipline needed to avoid unhelpful habits.
5. Better sleep: Meditation can shorten the time it takes to fall asleep and improve sleep quality.
6. Less pain: Meditation can reduce pain and boost emotion regulation. Together with medical care, this may help treat chronic pain.
7. Lower blood pressure: Blood pressure decreases during meditation and over time in people who meditate regularly. This can reduce strain on the heart and blood vessels and help prevent heart disease.
8. Less anxiety: Regular meditation helps reduce anxiety. It can also help with mental health issues like social anxiety, fears and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
9. Less depression: Meditation can help reduce the occurrence of depression.
10. Greater compassion: Meditation can help you better understand yourself, find your best self, and increase positive feelings and actions toward others.

That’s a pretty good list and it should provide all the motivation you should need to start practicing. No need to go looking for ultimate truth. No need to strive for self-realization. Those could come to you, unannounced, spontaneously, and if they do, that’s a bonus. Enjoy it and be grateful!

For the rest of us, good mental hygiene will do just fine.

I don’t know anyone whose life has been one continuous high or one continuous low. Do you?

Our brains are designed to compare and contrast. Light or dark. Friend or foe. Hot or cold. Big or small. These measures only makes sense in a comparative way. I know “heavy” by contrasting it with “light”. If every object I’d ever lifted in my life weighed 22 pounds (10 kilos for some of us!) what would I call that – heavy? or light? I’d have no way of answering the question.

So it goes with our lives. Good times, bad times. We’ve all had our share. But we’re all using a different measure. For some of us, a bad day means our BFF didn’t respond to our text message. For others, it means we lost half our family in a tragic car accident. Everything is relative.

So what is the implication for those of us who want to live more mindfully?

Be aware of what gets added to reality by our minds.

Whatever you’re experiencing, something has been added to it by your body, brain and mind. Even before you become aware of that experience, a kind of flavour has been added to it. Baked into it, so to speak.

Imagine a tasteless dough. No flavour whatsoever. Now imagine a baker adds either salt or sugar to this dough, then bakes it and serves it to you. When you eat it, it will taste salty or sweet. You can’t taste the original dough! You can only taste the sweet dough or the salty dough.

We’re designed the same way: our body, brain and mind add salt or sugar to every experience we have, BEFORE we have it. The salty experiences we call unpleasant or bad or awful or tragic. The sweet experiences we call pleasant or good or wonderful and enjoyable.

What would an experience be like without this flavour? We can’t know that. We can only notice that the flavour is already there by the time we become aware of it.

On the one hand, this is rather irrelevant, but on the other hand, it can really change how you experience life. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”.

Understanding that all experience, all life is altered by our bodies, brains and minds to taste good or taste bad can make us less reactive to it. We can be with it more easily. We can experience the unpleasantness of an experience with less emotional reactivity. We can experience the pleasantness of an experience with less attachment or craving or desire.

NOTE: this won’t change how pleasant or unpleasant the experience is! It’ll still feel shitty or fantastic. But there’s a shift that can happen when you keep in mind, even as you’re having that experience, that this sweetness or bitterness reflects a “flavouring” added the body and mind.

We can develop this perspective when we practice meditation, because as we practice what is often called witnessing, we loosen our attachment and aversion to experiences. We don’t automatically crave more of the “positive” experiences and back away from the “negative” ones. We can get curious about them instead.

We can gain just enough detachment to gain a little perspective. Is it really this good or this bad, or am I experiencing it that way because of an unconscious flavouring that’s been added to the experience? When we observe closely, when we carefully pay attention, we start to notice the flavouring that’s been added. That doesn’t remove the flavouring. But it shifts how we experience. We become less reactive and better observers. The experience is less about us – we can stand a tiny bit apart from it.

I wish you nothing but good times. No bad times. And at the same time, I know this is impossible. I know that flavouring will be added to every single one of your experiences. So instead, I wish you perspective. I wish you understanding and insight into this process. May you know the happiness that does not depend on conditions.

I practice meditation in many different ways, most of which I completely made up. That’s right – I make up practices that I think will give my attention “muscles” a good workout, then I try those out for a while and see what happens. I tweak the practices, change things up a bit, until doing them gives my brain a good, hard workout. (if my anterior mid-cingulate cortex is sore the next day, I know for sure it was a good workout! 😂)

One practice in particular that I developed for myself is one that I call “Zoom out, zoom in”. It involves sitting perfectly still and opening the field of awareness to sensations that come up in the body. When a fairly strong sensation comes up, for example, an itch, I then focus all of my attention on the exact spot where the sensation is coming from, and I try to feel what it actually really feels like. Once I know that I’ve felt what it actually feels like, I zoom back out and wait for the next sensation to come up.

Those are the “mechanics” of the practice but what I want to write about today is the mind state that one has to get into when waiting for sensations to appear. I was practicing this with a friend recently and he reported back that no sensations were coming up for him, so he “went looking for them”. He admitted that he wasn’t very good at just sitting there patiently waiting for the sensations to come to him. He had to do something.

Why is it hard for some people to just sit and observe, without making any attempts to control the outcome, I wondered. The instruction isn’t complicated: “sit there and wait for sensations to come up”.

After reflecting on this, I came to realize the important difference between “letting come” and “letting go”.

I’ll write about “letting go” next week. This week I want to explore the idea of “letting come” and why that might be challenging for some people.

Letting come is wide open, in the sense that ANYTHING can come up. This kind of mindful awareness is, in some ways, vulnerable. You don’t know what’s going to come up, and that can feel a bit scary. It’s much easier to focus than to open. Opening means you’re not in control.

“Letting come” entails the possibility that something you’ve been actively avoiding or refusing to acknowledge will make its presence known. Your Shadow might reveal itself at that moment. (indeed, it often does)

Far easier to “go looking” for safe, familiar sensations than to open yourself up to the possibility of seeing what you don’t want to see, feeling what you don’t want to feel. In a focused attention practice, you’re in control and your “demons” don’t get to wander into your awareness. You get to lock the front door.

In an open awareness practice like the one I described, the front door is wide open. Anyone or anything can metaphorically just waltz in and sit on your living room couch. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Doing a mindful awareness practice forces you to acknowledge that you’re NOT always in control. That reality isn’t always going to conform to your expectations. And despite your best efforts, there are always aspects of your personality that you’d rather just ignore.

If ignorance is bliss, then mindfulness practice opens up the possibility of blowing up that bliss. If you’re really “letting come”, then you’re allowing any aspect of reality to show its face. And that’s why open awareness is tricky for some people. The ego defences have to come down. It’s a moment of truth and you might not like what you see. It might not be congruent with the way you like to see yourself or the image you like to project.

On the other hand, “the truth will set you free”. Once you start practicing open, mindful awareness, and get better at letting come, you free up energy and resources that were devoted to keeping unwanted aspects of reality at bay. It can be exhausting to not see, to refuse to look, to take detours around the dark street. Practicing “letting come” allows you to let down your guard. To be just exactly as you are, until you become some better version of you.

If you struggle with “letting come”, know that you’re not alone. I recommended to my friend that he practice letting come with sounds instead of sensations. He liked that idea. The muscle will get stronger, until he can open up to more truth, more reality. In time, all the energy that’s devoted to pushing away the uncomfortable bits of reality will be freed up to engage with life, to create, and to be present to all that is.

Last week, I wrote about how, for some of us, waking up hurts. Waking up sometimes means seeing what a mess you’ve made of things (whatever your particular flavour of that is).

This week, I want to write about the good side of waking up: Choices.

Now, I won’t get into the philosophical debate about whether or not free will even exists. Rather, I’ll stay very practical. Someone who is on “autopilot”, sleepwalking, is not making choices. Their actions are based on their conditioning. No-one is driving the bus. Conversely, someone who is awake has the opportunity to choose to walk a different path.

About 15 years ago, I had what is often referred to as a “wake-up call”. During my annual check-up, my doctor told me that my blood pressure was through the roof and I needed to lose at least 100 pounds if I wanted to avoid a heart attack.

Was I happy to hear this news? No way! But it woke me up like a bucket of ice water. I’d been working 2 jobs, about 70 hours a week, to start a new career, and had gradually stopped taking care of my physical health, (including not making time for mindfulness).

Am I happy now that I got that wake-up call? Absolutely! Because although I didn’t like hearing that I was a heart attack waiting to happen, that wake-up call meant I could choose a different way. I started making changes, lost the 100 pounds, brought down my blood pressure, and I’m still here, 15 years later, to write about it.

Waking up showed me where I had landed because of the choices I’d been mindlessly making. That gave me the opportunity to start making different choices. Waking up shows us the starting line, the trailhead that leads in a new direction.

Waking up is like the arrow on the map that says, “You are here.” You may not like it but now, at least, you know.

And knowing “you are here” is super helpful for choosing another direction. If you have a map that doesn’t show you where you are, you can’t choose a direction.

Mindfulness practices give us a chance to look around in awareness – to see where we actually are, to see what’s happening. I think that if I had kept up my mindfulness practices during those career change years, I would have noticed much sooner that I was sacrificing my health.

It’s super valuable to know “you are here”. No matter how much it sucks, it allows us to map a course from where we are to where we want to be.

Waking up means that we can start making choices mindfully and with intention. That’s something that a sleepwalker simply can’t do.