mindfulness as revolution.
We are at a powerful and important moment in our society’s evolution and we need to rediscover the tools available to us in order to move through the turmoil of this moment.
Everything is so loud right now. Voices from all sides, expressing anger, pain, fear, grief, and so much rage. And whether our circumstances are that economic struggle and survival or achieving and maintaining some idealized version of affluence, most of us are chained to the endless treadmill of capitalism and the “American Dream”.
Oppressed communities across the nation are crying out to be seen, to be heard, and to enjoy equitable access to the ideals of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The divide feels vast beyond our human abilities to traverse.
How did we get here? Is there a way out? What skills have we lost (or maybe were never taught) that could be the tools we need to create a better world?
There is strong evidence that mindfulness is that tool. That by becoming still, welcoming silence, mindfulness can be the tool to change the world. Here’s how:
Critical Thinking. Critical thinking is defined as “objective analysis of an issue” (Oxford Dictionary). In a 21st technological society in which we are consistently and constantly bombarded with messages and algorithms, we have largely stopped thinking critically. According to an article in the Washington Post, this is partly due to the increase in high stakes standardized testing: because critical thinking isn’t evaluated by those measures, it’s not being taught.
We are blitzed with headlines all day, every day. Yet, in that onslaught of information, we seem to have disconnected with an ability to dig into, look at it, examine it. In fact, it is likely the very fact that we are so bombarded with information that we can no longer take the time and space to work with information.
Meditation teaches mindfulness and mindfulness teaches us to take a moment and truly digest the information we’re being presented with. It teaches us to explore our biases, our emotional responses, and to delineate fact from our personal fictions.
Experiential self versus narrative self. We move through the world, moment to moment, experiencing. There is another part of ourselves, though, sometimes called the remembering self, or the narrative self. It is the part of us that looks back on those experiences and crafts a story, meaning, from them. They aren’t always the same, and we’re left with a disconnect. Moving through motions but not truly connected to the experience. We then create a narrative that doesn’t always align with our true lived experiences.
The present-focus of mindfulness helps us to see more consistency between our experiential self and our narrative self. To live more truthfully, and to conduct ourselves according the story of who we think we are.
Mindfulness also teaches us to live with duality and seemingly contradictory ideas. We can start to recognize that we’re doing our best, and yet still have much to learn.
Emotional intelligence. The Oxford Dictionary defines emotional intelligence as “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically”. In short, emotional intelligence is a crucial skill in navigating our internal experiences, our relationships with others, and the world around us. Mindfulness is similarly crucial in developing emotional intelligence in multiple ways.
First, and maybe most obviously, mindfulness helps us become more aware of our emotions. It brings us into the present so we can be with our emotions instead of numbing or distracting away from them (and boy, do we ever numb - with work, with “busy”, with binging food, TV, substances). With more practice, mindfulness also equips us with the skill to evaluate our emotional experiences and act, well, mindfully. Through metta (lovingkindness) practice and other meditations, we also grow in our capacity to understand the deep connections we share with others. As we grow in our ability to recognize, name, and work with our own feelings, we can also grow in our ability to recognize these same forces in others. Ultimately, this opens the door to empathy. Empathy is the key to everything.
Our primal selves and capacity to evolve. It’s also important to recognize the roles our inherent humanness plays in the struggles we have as a society. From an evolutionary perspective, it is important that we remember danger, even more than we remember good things. The best way I’ve heard it explained is this: it was important that our hunter-gatherer ancestors remember where they found the good juicy berries. This way they could return to that spot. It was even more important, though, that they remembered where the poisonous berries were, or where the animal dens were. where the danger was. It is a matter of survival. Our primal brains haven’t changed very much in that regard. We respond viscerally to things we perceive as dangerous.
As we navigate a technological world in which we are confronted, nearly around the clock, with messages that are designed to provoke an emotional response, and recognizing that our strongest responses are correlated with messages around danger, it is no surprise that the algorithms are working against us, against our innate human connectedness. Fear drives, it divides, and it certainly sells.
Mindfulness can help us in that it provides a space to tap into our evolved brain and to reason out the perceptions of danger. When we are mindful of, aware of, the stimuli surrounding us, and mindful of, aware of, our responses, we are less likely to be blindly driven by fear away from one another.
The act of meditation and the practice of mindful living provide a multitude of ways to explore these ideas. If you’re looking for a concise how-to guide, a great place to being is practicing the Four Sublime States. Lovingkindness, compassion. sympathetic joy, equanimity. These states, also called the Immeasurables, were taught by the Buddha and have been described as:
These four attitudes are said to be excellent or sublime because they are the right or ideal way of conduct towards living beings (sattesu samma patipatti). They provide, in fact, the answer to all situations arising from social contact. They are the great removers of tension, the great peace-makers in social conflict, and the great healers of wounds suffered in the struggle of existence. They level social barriers, build harmonious communities, awaken slumbering magnanimity long forgotten, revive joy and hope long abandoned, and promote human brotherhood against the forces of egotism.
When faced with all the various avenues of activism we can pursue, it may seem counterintuitive that seated meditation and mindful living is one of the most direct routes to change. I believe it to be so. By elongating the space between what we perceive and how we react - in taking in, considering, and using information; in understanding our experiences and our reactions; in touching upon our shared connections to one another; by recognizing our emotional states and the feelings of others - we can take steps toward something better.
So, why don’t we all act mindfully? Good question. The small sampling of resources above start to draw a picture of the effectiveness of these practices making substantive changes in our lives: in our thoughts, in our hearts, in our relationships, in our communities. And sitting in meditation should be really simple, right? Right. It is simple, but it’s definitely not easy.
We numb. We turn away from our pain. Research by physician Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris has begun to shed light on the pervasiveness of traumatic experiences facing our communities. Practicing meditation calls us back into our bodies, into our present experiences, and mindful living requires us to not look away when it’s hard or it hurts. This is not messaging that the average American is regularly exposed to in our toxic feel-good-or-don’t-feel-anything culture. Mindfulness is simple but it requires patience and courage.
Can you sit in silence with your eyes closed and not scratch that little itch on the tip of your nose? That’s what mindfulness teaches.
Thich Nhat Hanh touches upon this with the following:
We do so much, we run so quickly, the situation is difficult, and many people say, “Don’t just sit there, do something.” But doing more things may make the situation worse. So you should say, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.” Sit there, stop, be yourself first, and begin from there.
Meditation teaches mindfulness. Mindfulness brings us back to ourselves. From the center of ourselves we can meet one another.
Mindfulness can change the world. Mindfulness is a revolution.
