Effortless Mindfulness and Mindfulness for Living

It seems that everyone is talking about mindfulness these days. There are podcasts, blogs, Facebook adverts, radio interviews, mindful music lists, bath bombs, t shirts…the list goes on, all either discussing the many benefits of mindfulness or reminding us to be more mindful. And it’s true – there are very many benefits to practising mindfulness, I wouldn’t be teaching it otherwise.

So, if it’s that great, why do so many people give up?

Because however beneficial mindfulness might be, there are lots of potential stumbling blocks to maintaining a practice that will support us in times of difficulty, the times when we really need it to be working for us.

First, of course, is the issue of learning actual mindfulness rather than pop / McMindfulness. This is something that I’ve covered in previous blogs and talk regularly about. If you don’t learn the real deal, it’s not going to be as effective, and you will lose motivation.

Secondly, there is the issue of our western based individualist approach. We seem to believe that a) we need to fix everything that isn’t exactly as we’d like it to be, and b) that we can mostly do this on our own, preferably with an app and with very little time and effort on our part. Unfortunately this isn’t how mindfulness works and, once it becomes apparent that we aren’t ‘getting anywhere’ very quickly, we give up.

Third, there’s a lot of good science out there, but not all of it is followed and some of it is entirely neglected by many of the self-help books, apps, gurus etc. If it isn’t evidence based, it may well not be the right practice for you at that time and be quickly abandoned. Some of these resources are well intentioned but misdirected, some are downright scams, but without guidance how can we tell the difference between these and clinically proven beneficial mindfulness practices that will meet our current needs?

But the biggest reason people give up is because they have been mis-sold. If we buy into mindfulness thinking that it is a means to an end, and are therefore expectation focused, we are missing the point and will be severely dissatisfied with the process.

Ironically, we have people who are stressed, ill, depressed, overworked, burned out, exhausted and struggling to juggle the daily demands of life, putting huge amounts of effort into mindfulness for few, if any, benefits. Effort for which they don’t have the energy, and which becomes counterproductive.

Effort leads to success

Our society teaches us that success requires effort, therefore, to benefit from mindfulness we need to be good at it and work hard.  

But if we get too focused on being ‘good at it’ rather than learning how to allow mindful attitudes and characteristics to simply develop, we will just be feeding the beliefs that got us stuck in the unhelpful habits in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, we need to achieve things. If we just sit back and let everything unfold around us, never taking any action, then we aren’t engaging in the world. We aren’t taking responsibility for anything. On the other hand, if we try to control everything and force outcomes, that can be disastrous and destructive. Jon Kabat Zinn uses the chrysalis analogy to explain this: no matter how much you want to see the butterfly emerge from its chrysalis and spread its beautiful wings; you have to wait until it is ready. If you open the chrysalis to peek inside, the developing butterfly will simply die, and you will never get to see it.

The term non-striving is often misinterpreted in the west since we are encouraged from a young age to strive for material rewards, and after all, we need to work to earn money to live – but if all we do is strive to accumulate things so that we can impress others, or through fear of not being the best – we will burn out. When will we have impressed others enough that we can stop striving? If we are the best at one thing, will we then feel pressured to be the best at other things as well? What if someone else sneaks up behind us and takes first place?

But likewise, if we don’t put in any effort, then we will never reach our full potential with anything in life.

Finding the balance in our practice.

We need to do our meditation – that is action – but with patience, allowing it to unfold within each individual practice, and throughout our whole practice over many years. Meditation teacher and Bright Minds app developer Toby Sola says that this is key to a helpful meditation practice: let it develop.

He goes on to explain that this natural development doesn’t just happen on its own, however. It takes some effort, but one of the fundamental themes of the practice is finding the balance between effort and ease. We are always going to be somewhere between the two. If we can find this place of balance in our meditation practice, then we have a better chance of finding it in the real world.

When we first learn it will require more effort; we have to remember to do it, it’s a new habit after all and easy to forget about. Then when we do remember, we have to remember what to do and how to do it. There are skills involved which we are still learning, and all of this is very effortful. We can see this in the brains of new meditators, the areas of the brain involved in learning, thinking, planning, making sense of experiences and remembering new information are all very active for around the first twelve months of mindfulness meditation practice.

But after that we need to learn to let go a little. And even during this phase of our development, we can still practise non-striving – the skill of letting go of the desired outcome and all the expectations that we place on ourselves when we are too goal orientated. If we are always looking for a specific outcome when we meditate, e.g. I want to feel more relaxed; we will spend part of our meditation checking whether we are achieving our goal rather than actually meditating. This constant checking (discrepancy monitoring) actually increases tension in the mind and body so has the opposite of the desired effect.

‘Not too tight, not too loose.’

Like the stringed instrument, we need to tune in and learn how to put in just enough effort without overdoing it. This will change overtime, and even during the course of a day, so this is where guidance from a teacher can make a profound difference, especially when working one to one. An experienced teacher can spot when we need to ease up a little, and when we need to work a bit harder.

But we mustn’t confuse effortlessness with lack of focus. The ability to focus on what you are doing coupled with the clarity to track and explore your sensory experience as it unfolds, moment by moment, is a large part of what we would define as ‘mindfulness’.

Loch Kelly has extensively studied and written about the relationship between what he terms ‘deliberate’ mindfulness (e.g. focusing on the breath coming and going) and effortless mindfulness, and is clear that effortless mindfulness still requires some initial effort.

Confused?

In case this is getting a bit confusing, think in terms of the effort it takes to get out of your warm, cosy bed and go and sit in your meditation place with your headphones on to ‘do’ your practice on a cold, dark winter morning. It requires some effort. Just like it took some effort to turn up at class, read that book, do the ‘sitting with difficulty’ practices etc.

Effortless mindfulness is where we go next. Once we have made the initial effort (we have had some training, started a daily practice, learnt a bit of background theory) we now want to discover our innate mindfulness, our innate compassion, our innate awareness and resilience. Think more in terms of discovering your own mindfulness, rather than learning how to do it.

Effortless mindfulness and mindfulness for living

Let’s compare effortful with effortless mindfulness. You have started your meditation with the goal of reducing your stress levels and becoming calmer or more relaxed. It sounds great, and isn’t this what everyone’s banging on about? Learn mindfulness and feel less stressed. Ok, let’s do it!

Only, you start trying to focus on your breathing and all you can think about is the row you had with someone earlier, or that problem at work, or what you might cook for dinner, do you need to go shopping? You realise that you’ve become distracted, so you decide to try harder. But the weird thing is that every time you try harder your mind seems to get busier. The goal of relaxation seems to be getting further away. It’s extremely difficult to stay calm with all of these thoughts and concerns in our minds. Then frustration creeps in, frustration with ourselves for not getting it right, or frustration with the meditation itself. We can quickly decide that either we are not suited to meditation or that mindfulness doesn’t work for us.

One of the great things about effortless mindfulness is that we can practise it anywhere, anytime. We can have our eyes open or closed. We can be moving or still. Alone or with others. And, as Willem Kuyken has shown with his most recent studies, we need a method that works for us in the world in which we live now, rather than striving for the sorts of experiences people may have had after many years of living a monastic life far removed from the busyness of cities and towns.

Why do we get caught up in striving / achieving?

How many times have you heard the phrase, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try not trying’? Probably never. The problem is that if we try too hard to focus on one goal whilst pushing everything else away, this can result in something called directed attention fatigue. Directed attention is the kind of attention we need when we have to focus on learning something for a test for example and temporarily ignore everything else. It’s a useful skill, but if we use it all the time it fatigues the brain to the point where we can’t function properly. This leads to more frustration; we then try harder still and so it continues.

Many people take this approach to their mindfulness practice. I see it all the time with beginners who are determined to make it work for them and put huge efforts into trying to ignore distractions, but all this effort in trying to manipulate our experience instead of just experiencing it leads to more tension and can do more harm than good.

Putting this into practice

Toby Sola’s motto is, ‘make meditation as simple as possible but no simpler.’ Why? Because this leads to the most effective learning. If we keep it too simple (like some of the fluffier popular forms of ‘mindfulness’) we get few benefits. If it is too complex however, it quickly becomes overwhelming which leads to us giving up with no benefits at all.

Try this practice:

Start by focusing on your breath. As soon as you do this you will start to question whether you should be changing the way you breathe.

You might choose any number of breathing practices (straw breathing; 2,4,6 breathing; box breathing; the physiological sigh…) they all have benefits, and I teach them all. But you can only keep these up for a few minutes at a time, you can’t walk around all day breathing like this. You choose when to practice them, the rest of the time you simply breathe.

You might also notice that you stop thinking about your breathing and get distracted by something else and then feel compelled to stop that thought and get back to your breathing. Again, a useful skill, but not one we can keep up all day.

How about trying to just notice that you are breathing? Let your body be just as it is.

And then notice that you have thoughts. This is good, if you are thinking, then your brain is working normally.

Maybe you are noticing that you are having feelings. Again, this is good, we are meant to feel things.

Now we are being mindful; we are aware that we are a living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being. This is moment by moment awareness without effort.

If you spend most of your meditation time trying not to experience, i.e. pushing away thoughts and feelings rather than noticing them and then choosing to come back to the breath, or the sensation of walking, or the flower in front of you, or the sound of the ocean, you are just expending effort for no gain.  

Space to breathe, space to practise

Regular practice like this opens the door to developing all of the other benefits of meditation. It helps us develop patience, perseverance, compassion, and acceptance.

Acceptance of how things actually are in this moment is the starting point for any change we want to bring about. If you were about to renovate a house, you would need a survey to show you what the state of the house is currently. Without that information you could make some very unwise choices and costly mistakes. And yet we try to make changes in our lives without first getting to know how we currently are. The enhanced awareness that comes with this type of non-judgmental acceptance allows us to develop emotional intelligence and make better decisions.

Once we have learnt how to create the space, we can then ask, can I let this be here without trying to change it? If we can learn to do this, we can save an awful lot of time and effort trying to change things that cannot be changed. And that effort can then be put to better use, towards those things that we can and need to change.

Most of the time what is here now is okay, a lot of the time it can be rewarding and fulfilling if we get out of our own way and allow ourselves to enjoy it fully. And once we can do that, we find it much easier to manage the challenges when they arise.

I hope you enjoy your next meditation with as little effort as possible!

All best wishes,

Natalie x