What is Mindfulness & Why Practise It?

Mindful Eating Exercise

Follow the Mindful Eating Exercise written out below or follow the guided audio.

Traditionally, several raisins are used for this exercise in mindful eating, but interesting alternatives are tangerines, a square of chocolate or a shortbread biscuit. To begin with, have the food resting in your hand and just see it, noticing how it looks, whether light reflects off its surface, the colours and textures that can be observed. Now feel the weight of it in your hand and notice how the contact feels between the food and your hand, and if the object is a tangerine, feel the process of peeling it. Spend some time smelling the food, what scent do you notice? Also, as you smell the food do you notice if anything happens in your mouth. Now place the food in your mouth and feel it resting on your tongue. Can you notice the feelings of contact between the food and your mouth? Do you notice any difference from how the food felt in your hand? What is happening in your mouth as the food rests there? Then take one bite into the food and notice what happens. Are there any textures and tastes that you notice? Slowly chew the food and notice how your experience of eating unfolds. Then swallow the food and see if it is possible to follow the passage of the food down the throat and notice how far you can feel it go. Notice whether there is any aftertaste in the mouth. Then mindfully eat a few more bits of the food, exploring the different senses of taste, smell, touch and sight. Take about 10 minutes in total to eat mindfully.

Write down here what you noticed about your experience:

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Did you notice the weight, texture and feel of the food in your hand before you put it in your mouth? What did it smell like? How did it feel in your mouth and how did it taste? Is this your normal experience of eating?

For many people this exercise can be a revelation, because they realise how the rich and nourishing experience of eating is usually rushed and ignored. Usually we eat quickly and then swallow our food without savouring its taste and texture, so often caught up in thinking about something else. In this way we miss out on the simple delight of eating that is available to us through our senses if only we choose to pay attention.

In a similar way we live so much of our lives on automatic pilot, out of touch with our moment-by-moment experience and lost in thinking. A good example of this is driving a car or taking a bus. On arriving at our destination we might realise that we have noticed very little about our journey – the sights, smells and sounds along the way and instead we might see how we have been caught up in thinking or dreaming, listening to music on the radio, or immersed in the virtual reality of our phone. In doing this we are missing out on the richness of our lives, missing out on connecting with people around us and missing out on the insights that can arise from being in touch with our inner world.

Perhaps this wouldn't matter so much if we were thinking happy thoughts, but so often this is not the case. Mostly we get caught up in ruminating about our problems and worries, and in the process we become even more stressed and miserable. This is where Mindfulness can make a big difference to how we live our lives, so let's look at what Mindfulness is and why we might choose to practise it.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a faculty that we already possess. It is not something that we need to import from the outside. It is like a muscle that we did not realise we had and that we have seldom used, so it is weak. Just as we can train a muscle by going to a gym, we can train the faculty of Mindfulness through doing practice. In short, this faculty needs to be recognised and then trained.

Rob Nairn describes Mindfulness as:

Knowing what is happening, while it is happening, without preference.

The key element in this definition is 'knowing'. This does not refer to conceptual knowing, but to a quality of simple awareness: we are aware of what is happening while it is happening. This might not seem like a big deal when we start, but the more we practise Mindfulness the more we realise that although what we experience is constantly changing, awareness does not change. More and more we learn to come to rest in this awareness and to relate to our lives from this place. When we do this we find a place of stability within ourselves that we can come to rely upon and trust. From this stability, insight naturally arises into what is happening within our minds and in life around us. In this way, we do less and see more.

The definition also illustrates that there are two aspects to Mindfulness training. The first is technique: "Knowing what is happening, while it is happening" and the second is attitude: "without preference".

Technique

The technique is to stay present and be aware of what is happening both within our mind and the outer environment. Mindfulness is a way of being in touch with life directly as it emerges, unfolds and changes. This skill is deceptively simple but hard to practise. The mind very quickly drifts away from simple awareness of the present moment into thinking about things, and in this way we lose touch with the quality of knowing that lies at the heart of Mindfulness. For this reason we need methods to help us stay present.

In our approach we use a four-stage method:

• we learn to settle our jumpy 'monkey mind' through breathing and counting

• we bring ourselves more fully into the body through grounding

• we come to rest in the space of awareness that exists in and around our experience

• we use a neutral support (like sound or breath) to bring our attention back to this simple awareness of being present when it drifts away into thinking

This will be explored in more detail later, but right now the important point is to appreciate that we need a set of methods or techniques to help us train the mind. As many Buddhist teachers remark, it does not matter how many times our attention drifts away into thinking, the only important thing is to notice this and bring our attention back to the present – and for this we need a...