3rd Post How Can Mindfulness Reduce Suffering & Make Life Better

No matter what the specific cause of our personal agony or fear, there is one dimension that we all have in common: the mind. Without the mind there is no suffering at all. Surgeons can cut into my body but since I am asleep their assault has no effect on me. With the help of anesthesia my mind is blissfully out of the loop. The most dreadful things in the world can occur to me but if I'm asleep or unaware I am blissfully untroubled.

Why?

Because my mind is out of the picture.

Bring it back the mind however and then watch out! Misery returns in the blink of a thought. Worries about the future, regrets over the past, and confusion about the present crowd my head with a conflicted chorus of thoughts, ideas, wishes, and impulses. 

When I sit with my clients I often find myself sketching out this diagram:

 

 

 Of course, getting the mind out of the picture is not very practical (unless we want to remain tethered to anesthesia). The best we can do is to manage the mind so that it serves our purposes without making matters worse.

2nd Post What Is Mindfulness And What's Jewish About It?

Mindfulness is a way of living that emphasizes thinking over action. In emphasizing thought, mindfulness instructs one how to take hold of the mental experience so that one can have a better life and more happiness.

All humans think and act of course.  Most people however judge circumstances, themselves, and others based on the concrete, physical results of actions. If those actions bring about results that are pleasing then those actions are judged as good; if the physical results are painful or the opposite of one's wishes then they are judged as bad.

Mindfulness however says that pleasure and pain, success and failure, and all of the dialectics* of life have much more to do with how we think than the tangible circumstances that we encounter throughout the 168 hours of every week of our lives. Instead of living our lives based on the physical world that we live in, mindfulness directs us to look beyond the packaging of the pains and distractions of the physical world to discover the opportunities for joy, mastery, connection, and healing that lay there ready for the taking. Mindfulness teaches us how to avoid the traps that the superficial, physical world lays for us. At the same time, mindfulness allows us to love life and all of the pleasures that it contains.

Looking beyond the physical and focusing on the mental experience is reflected in many places in Jewish thought and literature. It was Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi who taught us that instead of looking at the bottle one should instead look at what lies inside (Avot 4:20). This was his poetic way of telling us to avoid being seduced by superficial trappings that may be pleasing to the eye or soothing to the body. Lest one assume that pleasure and comfort is taboo, we are taught over and over again that God made the universe for us to deeply enjoy.

*Dialectics is a Greek word that means 'the study of opposites'. Life is made up of many, many sets of opposites such as cold and hot, cook and bad, life and death, and freedom and slavery. Finding the best balance between the two opposites is a key to a happy life.

1st Post A Mindfulness Manifesto

Misery

Suffering

Inconvenience

Stress

Fear

Pain

Sadness

Terror

Confusion

Worry

These are some of the reasons that people, much like you, turn to mindfulness. Perhaps they have heard about it in lectures or read about it in newspapers and magazines. It seems that mindfulness is everywhere whether it be in reducing stress or as a adjunct treatment for those suffering from a myriad of diseases and afflictions.

The truth is that despite the faddishness of mindfulness, there is a lot to be gotten from it and its practices. After all, the conscious mind is present in every single experience of suffering and pleasure and it adds something to equation. It makes sense then that any method of changing the mind would also bring about a different result as well.

This blog is intended to describe mindfulness in a way that makes it relevant to my readers, especially those who share my commitment to Jewish living in the fullest sense. Mindfulness and its techniques have been marvelously useful to me throughout my life, well before I knew that what I was doing was mindful in the slightest way. And it is those ideas that I wish to share with you as you progress forward in your life.