Just before the holidays I interviewed Brett Hill for my podcast. Brett is a mindfulness coach who’s been studying, practicing, and teaching mindfulness and other forms of meditation for decades.
At first I was hesitant to do the interview, only because mindfulness as a topic seemed to be suffering from over-exposure. Hardly a day goes by without a new study touting yet another benefit of a mindfulness practice. Among the things we’ve learned so far: being mindful improves relationships, helps relieve stress and anxiety, increases our capacity to deal with adverse events, treats heart disease, lowers blood pressure, reduces chronic pain, improves sleep, strengthens our immune system, improves our memory, and – get this – even reduces cell aging. Whew!
That's an impressive list, but written out like that, it lacks a certain context or coherence. What exactly are we doing when we become mindful? What’s changing in us that leads to all these benefits?
The larger context for Brett is that a mindfulness practice is a journey for “becoming whole.” A journey to “stop acting out of our woundedness” and instead be in a state of vibrant connection to the present moment. The “practice” part is becoming attuned to our body and our feelings so that we know when we’re not connected – when we’re operating from a place of woundedness. Only then can we attend to our woundedness and discover its deeper source, giving us more conscious control over its influence.
All of this brings to mind a supporting passage from Gary Zukov’s book, The Seat of the Soul:
The road to authentic power is always finally through what you feel, through your heart…If you do not know what you feel, you cannot come to know the splintered nature of your personality, and to challenge those aspects and those energies that do not serve your development.
The journey toward wholeness requires that you look honestly, openly and with courage into yourself, into the dynamics that lie behind what you feel, what you perceive, what you value, how you act. It is a journey through your defenses and beyond so that you can experience consciously the nature of your personality, face what it has produced in your life, accept that, and choose to change.
I was interviewed for a podcast recently and shared a personal story that relates to what Brett and Gary are talking about. I’m 66 years old, and when I go to the gym there’s often a pod of high school guys working out together. There’s a certain swagger among some of them that I realized set me off, and caused me to think negative thoughts about them. Once I became aware of those thoughts I was able to ask myself, where do these feelings come from? Why am I bringing them into this moment? I don’t know these kids. They might be the nicest people in the world.
That led me to a connection I hadn’t made before. Growing up there were certain kids who liked to pick on me and the feelings of anger, hurt and resentment were still lurking in my unconscious. These kids, innocent bystanders all, triggered those feelings. Making that connection allowed me to withdraw the negative perception I had of them.
The challenge of all this, of course, is that in the moment of conflict, looking at “the dynamics that lie behind'' what we feel is often the last thing we want to do. It might mean confronting painful memories, or assuming a level of responsibility for ourselves we’d rather not. We’d rather stay justified in our feelings, giving them free range, and in the process doing damage to our relationships.
That resistance to exploring our feelings and our reactions, Brett says, is why we need a mindfulness practice: “If you want to be mindful and present when you're under stress, you have to practice when you're not. Just like if you want to play a piano in a concert, you have to practice when you're not in a concert.”
And what are the rewards of such a practice, of becoming more mindful? Says Brett:
“That's where all the juice is, that's where all the lusciousness of life is, that's where all the richness is – in the connection and the depth of rapport and appreciation that comes from living in the world in a way that feels like you're really in it, versus just kind of skimming across the surface.”
You can listen to my whole interview with Brett here.