Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

Mindfulness is one of those “spiritual”  terms kicked around so freely that it is challenging to grasp what it means. I’ve been reading about Mindfulness in my spiritual work, which has deepened in the past five to ten years. There is a lot more to it than I realized.

I no longer plunge into things like Mindfulness; I take my time to do my homework and experiment. And I no longer jeer at them or dismiss them out of hand.

I think about it and see what sticks and what works.   I try it on. This could be the revolution we are hoping for in a time of mayhem.

The blog is not a book; it is the virtual memoir of my life, an experiment in creative writing.

I always experiment in public and the open. I share my successes and my failures.

I am learning to be more open about things I once rejected or brushed off. One of the curses about being young is that it’s time to live, not challenge oneself. One of the joys of aging is that I am finally open to learning.

Mindlessness began as one of those ancient woo-woo Buddhist ideas, but it has evolved and moved into the mainstream, like meditation itself.

I’m excited about its potential to help me appreciate my life rather than fight over it. But its benefits are practical. Driving with awareness makes you less likely to be in an accident.

If you eat with Mindfulness, you will eat more slowly, eat less, and taste better. This is also better for the heart. Mindfulness eating helps to lose weight and digest food, which is healthy.

We rush through everything in our lives in America, frantic to get things done, pay our bills,  stack away enough money to retire (a myth that insurance companies love to promote) and suffer politicians gone mad.

Mindfulness is about living a more considered life. It’s life in the now, but it recognizes the need to make money, pay our bills, and plan intelligently for the future. And perhaps best of all, it is an antidote to fate and resentment.

Can you imagine our former President eating slowly and considerately? Mindfulness is not taught in the Florida public school system. It’s considered “woke,” just like me. So I know it has promise.

Mindfulness, researchers have found, has enormous mental health implications and has unquestionably helped me to be calmer and more patient and pretty much eliminate the panic attacks that used to be a prominent and destructive element in my life.

I want to write about it, but first, I want to make it clear, in my mind and my readers, what it means.

Trich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, is one of the spiritualists whose writing I am studying, is a persuasive advocate of Mindfulness as an antidote to fear and anger. And something that separates me from the hatred and cruelty that has become a disease in our country. It’s a place to grow and learn while the mayhem boils.

I’m not joining the hate parade.

Mindlessness begins with small things – breathing, driving, eating, washing dishes, meditating. In our world,

Mindfulness is increasingly valuable, promising, and urgent. I’ve started slowly and am working my way up the ladder. This is something I need, and that has benefited me considerably already.

The powers that be want to make us crazy so we will stop bothering them with our squishy and expensive lives.

As long as we mistrust one another and fill up with resentment and grievance, we can’t be happy, and neither can anyone else. Hatred wears us down and kills us in its way. It is not healthy. It poisons the soul.

Mindfulness is keeping me sane and hopeful. Everyone suffers, I learned some years ago, not just me. And mostly, if I look around the world, much worse than me.

This morning, I read one of Hanh’s essays about mindlessness; it was helpful to me. He called it “The Lamp Of Mindfulness.”

“We have a lamp inside us, the lamp of Mindfulness, which we can light anytime. The oil of that lamp is our breathing, steps, and peaceful smile. We have to light up that lamp of Mindfulness so the light will shine out and the darkness will dissipate and cease. Our practice is to light up the lamp.”

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and the surrounding environment through a gentler and more compassionate lens.

Mindfulness involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment.

Our mind is our mind; in meditation, there is no wrong; we think what we believe. The idea is to experience it without condemning it or criticizing ourselves. In my Meditation Class, I repeatedly emphasize that there is no wrong way to meditate. Our minds go where they go; if we follow them rather than judge them, we can learn much about who we are.

When we practice Mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we sense in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future. We put aside the past and the future and focus on the now. Last night, I ate my crab chunks mindfully, eating slowly and paying attention to the flavor. I usually eat quickly, a habit I learned in childhood because my parents always fought.

I couldn’t wait to escape from the table for most of my life. Last night, I was enchanted by the sound of my chewing and the flavor that flowed through my mouth.

It is a revelation to me to eat more slowly, chew more thoroughly, and take my time. Food isn’t just something I eat to keep alive, but something that is miraculous and interesting if I pay attention. In our world, few people pay attention to anyone or anything for long. Nothing is savored.

I wash the dishes in our house and dry them. I rush through it, eager to get to work or continue reading a book. Yesterday, I tried mindfulness dishwashing: “…when you do the dishes after dinner,” writes Hanh, “you can practice mindful breathing so the dishwashing time is pleasant and meaningful. Do not feel you have to rush. If you hurry, you waste the time of the dishwashing. The time you spend washing dishes and doing all your other everyday tasks is precious. It is a time for being alive. When you practice mindful living, peace will bloom during your daily activities.”

I tried this, and it was enlightening.

Instead of being anxious to finish a tiresome chore, I slowed down, considered what I was doing, thought about the meal, and dried the dishes carefully instead of banging them around. I felt differently about it all.

It was the complete opposite of the experience of watching the news. It felt more peaceful; I saw it as a gift, not a tedious chore. We have pretty dishes; we have healthy and nourishing food. I thought about that, but it was not the next thing I wanted to get to.

I finished feeling calm and at peace.

I did this again at lunch today. It felt good. Rushing doesn’t feel good. It is a waste of time.

Though it has its roots in Buddhist meditation, a secular practice of Mindfulness has entered the American mainstream in recent years, in part through the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, which he launched at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979.

Since then, thousands of studies have documented Mindfulness’s physical and mental health benefits, particularly MBSR, inspiring countless programs to adopt the MBSR model for schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans centers, and beyond.

There is nothing woo-woo or complicated about Mindfulness. It is the perfect antidote for me in a world that often seems chaotic, cruel, dangerous, and self-destructive. I’m embracing the secular Mindfulness, nodding to the religious.

In Mindfulness so far, I am learning to hold back my anger, regret, and fear with the energy of Mindfulness so that I can recognize the true roots of my suffering and anxiety.

While being mindful, I find I am much better at recognizing the misery of the people I love and my own. Mindfulness has taught me to be less angry at the people I know and love and more tolerant and empathetic of them as I realize that they are suffering as well or more than me. All of us humans suffer in our lives and our world.

I decided in meditation that everyone has suffered more than I have, and the more I accept that the less angry and self-pitying I am.

I notice that the people who promote likes, hate, and tolerate both suffer more than I ever could or have. Theirs is a pitiful and awful way to live.

At a meditation retreat, Maria and I went to some years ago; we were asked to practice “mindful walking,” an awareness of the steps we were taking and where we were going. I was not ready for this idea of Mindfulness; on our walk, I couldn’t walk as slowly as others were, and I found it almost impossible to be silent.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book “Your True Home,” Hanh gave me another way to look at mindful walking.

With mindful walking, he wrote, our steps are no longer just a means to arrive at an end.

“When we walk in the kitchen to serve our meal,” he writes, we don’t need to think, “I have to walk to the kitchen to get the food. “With mindfulness, we can say, “I am enjoying walking to the kitchen,” and each step is an end in itself. There is no distinction between means and ends. There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way. There is no way to enlightenment; enlightenment is the way.”

Stay tuned; there is more to come.