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What is Mindfulness?

Unless you're deaf or live in a cave, you've heard the word mindfulness. The term has started creeping its way into psychotherapeutic vernacular. Originally an Eastern mystical exercise, it has now forms the cornerstone of some major Western psychotherapy techniques including Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness Psychotherapy. What is it? How do you practice it? Why won't the Dalai Lama shut up about it? What will it do for you?

Mindfulness is a technique that concerns the way you respond to the content of your mind. When you are mindful, you watch the contents of your mind with a curious, innocent nature, rather than an analytical and judgmental nature. To really understand what mindfulness is, you have to understand what it isn't. To do that, lets examine our day-to-day mental life.

We go through most of the day somewhat oblivious to what's going on inside of us. We analyze, worry, prioritize, and plan one thing to the next. When we get bored, anxious, or sad, we respond by thinking of ways to relieve that feeling. If I'm bored, I think about what I can do for stimulation. If I'm anxious, I start telling myself not to be anxious and plan out ways to gain an upper hand in the situation. If I'm sad, I might start analyzing the crap out of my life, looking for something I can correct to alleviate the sad outlook. There is a snap, automatic judgment that occurs in between the unwanted thoughts and feelings and our reaction where we say: I don't like this; I want something better.

This automatic resistance to experience is normal. It's what keeps our species going. For example, if I'm lonely, I look to solve that loneliness by meeting someone. If I'm concerned about my status and appearance, I do something to help boost that status. When I'm horny, I call up your ex girfriend/mother. This is how our ancestors pushed forward, found ways to survive, and deposit their genes in you.

The trouble occurs when you realize that contentment and satisfaction aren't the aim of evolution. Following your "genetic destiny" by resisting and reacting doesn't guarantee happiness. Why? Well, why should it? The "aim" of evolution is survival. It's tricky, because our biology and psychology coaxes us into believing that if we follow the plan our genes have designed for us, we'll be happy and content. "Keep fighting for money, love, status (generally, "security") and you'll be happy! I promise!*"

Mindfulness is a different way of responding to mental content. Instead of being stuck in our heads, planning, thinking, dwelling, worrying, resisting, and reacting, mindfulness tells us to STFU and wait. In mindfulness, we look at our experience with curiosity as it unfolds and morphs from one thing to the next. When you're bored, you look at the way boredom feels. When you're anxious, you see how your back is all tense and twisted and your mind cluttered with thoughts about what might happen. It's interesting. Strange. When you're depressed, you see how your moods and interpretations are gloomy. Hm. Okay. Not the greatest feeling in the world, but interesting.

All of this is accomplished with relaxed attention. You aren't trying to force yourself to do something special with your thoughts or perception. You aren't trying to see the world as all rosy and full of rainbows and love. You're just looking at what's already here without being a dick to yourself.

Mindfulness slowly collects you and puts you back in your body. You don't automatically stop thinking, and when you first start, your mind starts to wonder and analyze content, but over time, you start to analyze less. You stop thinking about your thinking, which has the overall effect of minimizing the clutter in your head. You can kind of think of it like frogs mating. When your mind is reacting to content, you generate new thoughts, and then new thoughts about the new thoughts. Each generation doubles in size. Before you know it, your mind is full of frogs**. (Wait, what?)

When you practice mindfulness, you stop generating new thoughts about your thoughts. Over time, the original thoughts pass and your mind starts to clear up. When your mind clears up, strength and joy start to creep in. You find that you're able to work through difficult feelings, situations, and stages without resorting to automatic resistance and reaction. You find alternative, wiser ways of responding to things that help create long-term rest and harmony.

Your perception begins to crystallize a bit too and you can see things just as they are. Buddha and his posse taught that with that clear mind, you can look at your own identity and realize that it's not made of anything independent. There is no "I," no actual thing called Edahn. Edahn is just an idea I represent in my mind as having certain attributes, stories, and aspirations, not an independent thing that needs to be defended. It isn't something in the universe; it is the universe. Not the whole thing, but connected with it in a very intimate way. This is the point where all resistance to experience (karma) stops.

If you want to try it out, just see what's going on with your right now. What does your body feel like when it breathes? Do you feel any tension in your shoulders? What kinds of thoughts are youo having? Take a look and see if you can answer those questions. Pretend like I gave you a quiz with those questions and your job was to present the answers not in the form of words, but in the form of an experience. Show me the experience of breathing, feeling, thinking, hearing, touching, pain -- whatever is going on.

*I wouldn't deny that there's some truth behind those promises, but it occurs because of a confusion of terms, mainly, the term "love" which comes in the form of romantic and platonic love. I'll explain this another time.

**I've been informed by one of my loyal readers that frogs produce more than 4 offspring together so each generation multiplies by a factor great than 2. You're right. I assumed, naively, that each pair would have 4 kids, so each generation would double from 2 to 4 to 16. I was wrong for assuming this and I apologize, sincerely.

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Freudian Slipping

"Yesterday I had a Freudian slip at my in-laws' place over dinner. I meant to say 'please pass the carrots' but I accidentally said 'your mother's a stupid hooker.'"

Ah yes, the Freudian Slip. Freud called it fehlleistung which I think is German for completely bullshit theory. While I dig a lot of Freud's work, I'm not a big fan of this particular idea. Nonetheless, it behooves the amateur psychologist to understand what the fuck Freud was talking about and why he cared so much about your mother. But first, I would just like to get to know you we need a little background.

Freud was a smart mofo. He helped pioneer the idea (in the West) that people were not fully aware of what was going on in their mind. He divided the mind along two dimensions, what I'll call content and awareness. The id comprises your primal desires, you know, basic stuff like killing, stealing, and mother-fucking. It operates unconsciously. The superego comprises the social rules that restrict the id: don't fuck that, don't kill this, don't take those. The ego mediates between the two when anxiety is running high by using defense mechanisms. I can't have that? REPRESS! I can't do that? RATIONALIZE! I can't achieve this? INTELLECTUALIZE! The superego and ego operate at the conscious, unconscious and preconscious (almost conscious) levels.

Freud thought that people get tripped up when they don't process things correctly. He thought, based on what he observed, that people were avoiding expressing their disappointments and traumas through their defense mechanisms and this led to complications in their life. When people finally got in touch with their hidden traumas and disappointments, they experienced catharsis, a big emotional release. They could then attain insight into the relationship between their past trauama and present reactions and no longer be controlled by those traumas.

The whole process was taking the unconscious, hidden material and bringing it back into conscious awareness so that it could be squared away. Once you appreciate that, it's easy to understand what Freud was trying to do: summon the unconscious. Freud had a nifty bag of tricks to accomplish that task. He investigated dreams because he saw them as unconcious goldmines, free of conscious editing and censorship. He tried to eliminate the personality of the therapist to create a blank screen for the patient to project their unconscious conflicts (which explains why old-skool Freudian therapists are so unresponsive and irritating). He encouraged free association to coax patients into stop monitoring themselves and tap into their unconscious reserves, like making them dream while awake. And of course, he paid attention to Freudian slips. A Freudian slip happens when a person means to say one thing but slips up and says something else. Freud thought of that as unconcious content bubbling up to the surface and exploited it for deeper meaning and insight.

That should give you a basic idea of Freud's penis. Next time we'll delve deeper into the defense mechanisms.

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What exactly is an Identity Crisis?

The term "identity crisis" was coined by Erik Erikson (1909 - 1994) a German-Jewish psychologist who was educated and was analyzed by Anna Freud, Freud's daughter. Erikson is famous for his contributions to personality and developmental psychology. He proposed that development occured in a series of 8 psychosexual stages. Each stage proposed a certain dilemma or "crisis," and healthy psychological functional depended on the successful resolution of each crisis.

Age / Crisis / Resolution

0-1 / Basic Trust vs. Mistrust / Hope

1-3 / Autonomy vs. Shame / Willpower

3-6 / Initiative vs. Guilt / Purpose

6-12 / Industry vs. Inferiority / Competence

12-19 / Identity vs. Indentity Confusion / Fidelity

20-25 / Intimacy vs. Isolation / Love

26-64 / Generativity vs. Stagnation / Care

65+ / Integrity vs. Despair / Wisdom

The 5th stage, as you can see from the "chart" above corresponds to identity formation. In this stage, the individual undergoes the identity crisis and must make decisions regarding occupation, values, political orientation, sexual orientation, and group affiliation. You can think of identity as an internal, self-contructed organization of aspirations, skills, beliefs and experiences that each of us lugs around in our heads. In other words, it's the way you think of yourself.

Canadian psychologist James Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! expanded on Erikson's work and further divided the stage into 4 distinct states. The state one falls into depends on where they are in their crisis and what type of decisions they're made. Marcia was careful not to call them stages because he didn't believe people worked through them serially.

Marcia's four states are:

1. Identity Foreclosure - A person in this state has accepted the identity that's been foisted upon them by their friends, family, and significant others. They have not undergone a crisis, but have accepted the identity they've been assigned. They tend to be authoritarian (conventional, obediant to authority and dominating subordinates) and show little autonomy. They also tend to have low self-esteem.

2. Identity Diffusion - Diffusers don't know who they are and are not actively seeking to figure it out. They generally have low self-esteem and poor relationships, but show an ability to think independently.

3. Identity Achievement - These folks have undergone a crisis, searched for their own identity and have developed personal values and self-concepts. They have resolved the crisis successfully. These people have a positive self-image, think for themselves, are moral and reject authoritarianism. They are, in psychologists' view, teh awesome.

4. Identity Moratorium - People in this stage as in an actual crisis and searching for themselves but have not yet fully committed to an identity. They tend to be more fearful and uncertain about the future than the Achievers.

Some people never reach Identity Achievement. You might be able to think of some right now. It's interesting to reflect on your own life using Erikson and Marcia's scheme. For more reading, check out Chapter 4 of Social Problems and Social Context.

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