August 7, 2018

Can I let you in on a little secret?  When the mindfulness craze exploded in our midst a few years ago, I had a hard time working out exactly what it was and how to do it.  I read all the theories and tried a few exercises but it wasn’t enough to convince me that this was a useful technique to improve my life.  I continued experimenting with it and over time concluded that everybody has to find their own interpretation of what mindfulness means to them, and find a way that works for them personally, because that it is only way you will ‘own’ it and do it often enough to make a real difference to your everyday life.

I love working with symbols and metaphors and one day came up with the idea that learning to be mindful is like learning how to play a jukebox.  It might seem old fashioned, but a playlist on your phone doesn’t have quite the same effect.  Who remembers how a jukebox works?  You drop a coin in a slot, choose your song, push a button and voila, your favourite song is playing!  Now, what does this have to do with mindfulness?

We all have a jukebox inside our head with all our favourite songs.  Some of these songs are not actual songs but they are our favourite stories, thoughts, feelings or memories.  A favourite story can be anything you like to think or talk about often.  It could be a positive story that motivates you to work hard, to cook nutritious food for your family or do daily exercise.  These are all ‘positive’ stories, but a better word to use would be ‘helpful’, it is stories that help us and motivate us to live our lives like we want to.

Usually, we have a lot more negative stories or thoughts spinning around our heads.  These could be thoughts about how broke, fat or depressed we are or how difficult it is to get a job.  Rather than calling them negative, we call them ‘unhelpful’ because it is the stories that keep us stuck and from doing what we love to do.

If we are not mindful, these songs, stories or thoughts will spin around in our heads as if someone pressed the repeat button and forgot to switch it off.  We especially enjoy the unhelpful stories, the dramas we keep alive by fighting with people inside our heads.  Or we fight with ourselves, with our inner critic, the part of ourselves that thinks we are such a loser, and that we can only improve our lives with constant criticism and nit picking.

These thoughts are triggered every time we feel down, stressed or anxious and there we go again, just as if someone put another coin in the jukebox to replay the whole sorry drama.  And we all know that we don’t stop after just one song!  Once we are hooked it takes hard work to unhook our mind and find a more helpful story to focus on.

Most of us have trouble focusing on helpful thoughts to keep our minds busy, and if we can’t find any, we start daydreaming.  We wander off inside our minds, hoping that all our problems will fix themselves, that our partners and children will change their behaviour, that one day we’ll find the perfect job, the perfect house or we dream about a romantic holiday for two on a tropical island.

These daydreams and wishful thinking are also on our jukebox playlist.  Every time the situation we are in now becomes too difficult or too uncomfortable, we escape by putting another coin in the jukebox to find the song that will help us avoid dealing with the now.

Important to notice, is that every song on your playlist, every story or thought, has an effect on your energy bank account.  Every time a song, story or thought plays inside your mind, ‘money’, or in this case ‘energy’, moves.

Unhelpful songs cost energy and helpful songs earn energy.

Every time you are mindful, and consciously choose a more helpful song or story, you add energy to your daily energy account.  But if you are not mindful, and keep on playing the unhelpful songs, you lose energy, and then wonder why you are always feeling so tired. It is these unconscious patterns in our head that are robbing us of our life energy, right under our noses.

Now I don’t know if doctors still do this, but from cartoons we all know they hit you on the knee with a hammer to test your kicking reflex.  A reflex is an unconscious reaction to a stimulus.  We don’t stop to think about what is actually going on, we just react.  Somewhere in the past, we reacted in a specific way on something that happened, and now every time we are confronted by that same thought, feeling, person or situation, we react in the same predictable way.  These habits become so ingrained that we never stop to question or explore them, we just accept that this is what happens, every single time.

What mindfulness can teach us, is to stop and have a look at what is going on, without judging or getting involved or avoiding the situation.  We carefully step back, bring our full awareness to the situation, and find as much information as possible, from both inside and outside us, before we respond appropriately to the situation.  It is in this pause, this moment of checking in, of becoming aware, that your power lies.  It is only in this moment that you can wisely choose your response.  If you are not mindful, not in this moment, not fully aware of all that is going on, you react according to all your previous conditioning.  By the way, that is where the word responsibility comes from, your ability to re-spond, rather than the knee-jerk re-flex where you react out of habit.

So, when we are not happy with where our lives are going, we can use mindfulness to become aware of all our programming, to start questioning these songs and stories in our minds.  To identify the ones that are not helping us and to make a decision to stop listening to them, and to find other songs or stories that will work better to help us reach our goals.