Being Present

Jon Kabat-Zin, a famous mindfulness teacher and author of Full Catastrophe Living, defined mindfulness this way:

paying attention in the moment, on purpose, without judgment

“Paying attention” “means moving our attention and focus into the present moment where we can experience all that is happening right now. We all have the experience of not paying attention to what is happening. Sometimes, we find ourselves miles down the road and wonder how we got there. Sometimes, we find ourselves coming awake to realize we were not listening to the person talking to us. Sometimes, we walk along a path and miss the flowering plants or wildlife standing just off to the side. How often have we been on vacation and spent our time absorbed with thinking about returning to work, or planning the next vacation?

My favorite example of being mindless happened as I was walking one morning along a neighborhood road. All of a sudden, I heard someone yelling at me. A driver in a pick-up had stopped and was yelling at me about the bear who had crossed right in front of me. I never saw the bear. This is despite the commitment I had made to myself to practice mindfulness on my walks.

Paying attention requires us to become aware of where our attention is in the current moment and move it firmly into the present. I was planning dinner rather than listening to the speaker during this meeting. I remembered the last time I was with this person and missed what he/she said just now.

Where is our attention? What are we focused on? Where are we concentrating our efforts?

“In the moment” means right now. Right here. Nowhere else. It means to move away from being absorbed by the past and future.

Much research has shown that when we are caught up in rehashing the past, we often find ourselves depressed. We are ruminating about something we no longer have any control over. There is nothing we can change about the past. Likewise, we often find ourselves anxious when caught up in rehearsing for the future. We are ruminating about something that has not happened and is not likely to happen because we tend to see only adverse outcomes. See my blog on “negativity bias”.

A Harvard study asked people to respond to a cell phone chime periodically throughout the day. When prompted, they were asked what they were doing and how happy they felt. The researchers discovered that people spent much time ruminating about the past and future. Those who were ruminating were unhappy. Those engaged in what they were doing at the moment were much happier.

“On purpose” means consciously bringing our intention into the present moment. We have become aware that ruminating and rehearsing create a great deal of discomfort, while paying attention in the moment often brings us into contact with joy, connection, choice, and peacefulness. The more we practice and become mindful in the moments of our lives, the more we understand the benefits of being here now. Then, we want to be in the present on purpose.

“Without judgment” is probably the toughest part of this definition and the hardest for most of us to work with. Approaching the moments of our lives without judgment asks us to change our relationship to the present moment. We are always in judgment, rating things as good or bad. And as we rate them, we usually want them to change. Either to have the bad go away or the good stay.

Meeting the moments and experiences in our lives without judgment is asking a lot of us. It is asking us to change natural human habits of wanting to stay in the land of feeling good and avoid the land of feeling bad. What kind of freedom might there be if we accepted what is without judgment and needing it to change? Could we feel the dropping away of so many stories about how things should be and begin to appreciate what is? There is a tremendous amount of freedom in this approach. See my blog on acceptance.

Tara Brach suggests that when we meet a moment, we greet it with a small whisper of, “Just this, just now.” or “This, too.” This kind of mental reminder can help us keep from judging what is happening – inside or out – and simply accept what is happening. Once we accept, we have a choice about how to respond.

Our mindfulness meditation practices bring us in direct contact with the elements of our definition. We begin to pay more and more attention to the moment because we want to experience the benefits of being in the moment, and we suspend judgment, moving toward acceptance of what is.