In the mindfulness pillar of The Foundations of Well-being program, this week we focus on the mind. We have a mind, there are thoughts, there are sensations, there are feelings; or perhaps the mind has us.
What is this mind? In the language of neuroscience, the mind fundamentally is a matter of information. Information is immaterial, you can’t weigh it, you can’t touch it. Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel (awarded for his work on how the nervous system learns based on the information that flows through it) puts it: “
So we have this mind and it is mysterious how the experience, the color red or the smell of coffee, arises from the operation of the nervous system. In the frame of science, the mind and nervous system are intimately interconnected. That is, flows of experience and flows of neural activity. Even though the mind itself may seem amazingly immaterial and ineffable, because it is linked to underlying physical, material, biological and neural processes, that gives us three different ways in which we can engage our mind. So in terms of something that is happening in our mind, we can: 1. Let Be: simply being with what’s present in awareness – including painful thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – without trying to change it. 2. Let Go: reducing what’s negative by preventing, ending, or decreasing harmful thoughts, perceptions, emotions, desires, and actions, and 3. Let In: growing what’s positive by fostering, preserving, or growing beneficial thoughts, perceptions, emotions, desires, and actions.
The garden of the mind
We can compare the mind to a garden – it has got lots of stuff in it – rocks, soil, weeds and flowers. In effect the three ways to engage the mind give us three ways to relate to this garden that we have:
1. Observe the garden. Just witness it, be with it, it is what it is.
Be with the mind
Feel the feelings, experience the experience
Acceptance: you may not like it, but you don’t resist or suppress it or try to change it
Explore – opening to what’s more vulnerable, deeper or central
2. Pull weeds.
Reduce the Negative
Challenge wrong or harmful thoughts or selective perceptions; release unneeded tension
Regulate harmful desires
Inhibit harmful actions
We can also shift our perception by pulling our awareness away to avoid getting glued to some negative and shift our perception to take in the bigger picture.
3. Plant flowers. We can grow the good that we want inside this garden.
Grow the positive
Think what’s true and beneficial
Perceive what’s true and beneficial
Feel what’s true and beneficial
Desire what’s true and beneficial
Act in ways that are true and beneficial
Being with and working with:
Being with is primary but working with is necessary
The brain does not change through observation alone
Reducing the negative and growing the positive help us be with the mindBeing with and working with are synergistic
The role of mindfulness:
Mindfulness is present in all three ways of engaging the mind
We need to grow resources to develop mindfulness (e.g., attention regulation)
Other mental resources occur alongside mindfulness (e.g., self-compassion)
Trajectory of being upset:
Recognize you are upset.. find strengths to be with it (self-compassion, understanding). . .
Open to it, exploring its aspects and depths. ..
Begin releasing wrong or harmful thoughts, perceptions, feelings, desires and actions
Begin receiving true and beneficial thoughts, perceptions, feelings, desires and actions
Three practices with being upset:
Let be – find strengths, open to it, explore its aspects and depths
Let go – prevent, decrease or drop what’s untrue or harmful
Let in – cause, increase, or preserve what’s true and beneficial
“
M.C. Richards
humor:
"I wondered why the frisbee was getting bigger, and then it hit me!"
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