Perhaps the first major step of mindfulness practice is just to ‘feel’ our experience, to make direct contact with experience, without merely thinking about it. Although this might sound straightforward it really isn’t. Just ‘feeling’, being aware, or making direct contact with our experience puts us in a vulnerable position that can often be painful, for instance when experience is unpleasant. As a defence mechanism the mind begins to filter all of our experience through thought, attempting to mitigate this vulnerability by analysing, examining, evaluating, conceptualising, imagining, commentating, narrating etc. our every experience to create an illusion of control over it. This veil of thought creates a buffer between us and the full reality of the present moment where life happens.
By ‘immediate experience’ here we just mean the simple objects of experience like sounds, shapes, colours, tastes, smells, sensations in the body, impulses, emotions and so on. Take the breath. Simply feeling the breath means bringing awareness to the immediate physical sensations that arise in the body as the breath comes in and out: sensations of expansion and contraction at the belly or chest, or pressure, coolness and warmth at the nostrils.
However, we are so used to experiencing the world from up in our heads that simply being aware of the breath and resting our attention on the simple objects of experience without pointing to them with thought can take time and practice. If we are not being mindful here, we can end up merely thinking about or conceptualising the object of experience. (This is not to be confused with being ‘lost in thought’ or ‘distracted’ from the object of meditation).
There are a number of ways that this veil of thought can be pulled over our eyes and cause us to miss our immediate experience altogether:
- Mental Talk.
Here, pointing to experience with thought means literally thinking about the object of meditation, say the breath, in an inner linguistic chatter, commentary, or monologue. “Now the breath is coming in, when will it stop? I wonder why it feels a little ragged now, maybe I’m not breathing right? Is it because I’m anxious? Now the outbreath feels much longer than the last. Ooh I really noticed it then, maybe I’m getting the hang of this. Now this pause is uncomfortable. When will the inbreath start?’ In this example, there is still some awareness of the breath that the mind is commenting on, but the commentary prevents us from making full contact with the breath and we become more absorbed in the story about our experience than actually feeling our experience directly.
Tips: When you notice this chatter in the mind see what happens when you turn your full attention towards this mental talk. What is mental talk? Does it continue when you pay attention to it? Or does it disappear almost immediately? Then return to the sensations of breathing.
Part 2 of this series will look at mental imagery and the role of the imagination in obscure our connection to our immediate experience of the world.
