Meditation & Beyond: Mindfulness Is Not A Spectator Sport

Serge Prengel talks about expanding our definition of mindfulness as an embodied practice of active engagement in life. To illustrate this, he describes his meditation practice. He also talks about we can cultivate active presence and active engagement through other practices.

Transcript

In this episode, I will be talking about something I call mindfulness is not a spectator sport. And it's about expanding our definition of mindfulness as an active presence or active engagement. One of the most tangible benefits of mindfulness is the clarity that gradually emerges when we give ourselves space to settle. And that's certainly what happens to me when I meditate. At the beginning, I often feel somewhat scattered, Mentally noisy. The first few minutes can feel like stepping into choppy water. But if I stay with it, Something shifts. It's not that the turbulence suddenly disappears. My mind still rises and falls. But there is a noticeable settling. Something softens. And what comes with that settling is a felt sense of clarity. It's not clarity in the sense that I've solved a problem. Most of the time, Nothing concrete is resolved. It's more of a sense that clarity is possible. A sense of being less weighed down by the usual mental clutter. So the clarity doesn't come from figuring things out. It comes from toning down the background noise, The reactivity, The unresolved tensions, The old coping strategies that we carry from the past. And I want to relate that a bit to the notion of observing. Mindfulness is often described as taking the perspective of the observing self. And that definitely fits my experience. But the word observing can be misleading. Observing can sound passive. So when you watch a movie, That's passive. Nothing you do changes what's on the screen. But when you're mindfully observing your body, That's different. If you've ever paid attention to your breath, You know what I mean. The moment you observe it, It changes. So mindfully observing your body is not neutral. It's participatory. And I'm going to give you an example from my own meditation practice. I usually center my practice on posture, Especially my back. It gives me something concrete to engage with. If I told myself, Don't be in your head, That wouldn't work. It's like telling myself to relax. It just draws more attention to the very thing I'm trying to avoid. So instead, I shift my attention toward my body, My spine. As I sit, I make small adjustments. Some are somewhat intentional. Others seem to happen on their own. But intentional does not mean forcing. It means gently experimenting. A slight shift here, A small adjustment there, And then noticing what happens. It's a moment-by-moment process of tweaking and tuning. And that, Of course, Is very different from passively watching the movie of my life. So the clarity of experience in meditation comes from engaging my mind in something different. It's like the reset that you get after a vacation, Especially when you have been actively engaged in something new. You come back refreshed. Or, To use a different image, It's like rotating crops in agriculture. The soil regenerates because something changes. In meditation, What changes is where I place my attention. Instead of being caught in what's happening outside of me, Or caught inside my own thoughts, I actively engage with my body. So now, I've been talking about meditation, But I want to go beyond that because mindfulness is not limited to what happens when you sit still. And for me, Mindfulness includes a wide range of experiences. I'm a therapist, And psychotherapy ranks high on my list of practices that foster mindfulness. If you think about a therapy session, It's really a special space, And it creates a space for a reset. The client begins to notice patterns. They experiment with small adjustments. They sense what happens when they respond a little differently. That's not so different from what I experience adjusting posture in meditation. Now, Calling this mindfulness only makes sense if you don't think of mindfulness as something static. It only makes sense if you understand mindfulness as active engagement, Which is learning from moment-by-moment adjustments while staying attuned to the effect of these adjustments. By the way, Talking about therapy, It's not just the client who's engaged in a mindful process. The therapist is as well. We therapists are not like engineers sitting in a control room, Watching the systems from the outside. We're human beings. We have our own moment-to-moment experience, And we engage with that experience as we work. That introduces additional layers, Which I won't go into here, But just mentioning them to give a sense of how broad the living process is. Coming back to activities that fit under the umbrella of mindfulness, If you look around, You'll notice that many activities cultivate that same quality of deliberate, Embodied attention. Yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais, The Alexander Technique, Tai Chi, Qigong, To name a few. All of these involve slowing down, Sensing, Adjusting, Learning from the body. And Japanese martial arts are deeply rooted in this kind of mindful engagement. If you take karate and judo, There's a practice called Kata, Which is structured sense sequences of movement that you perform slowly, Deliberately, As a way to really own them. You're fully engaged in each movement. It's the opposite of mindless repetition. So I've talked about Eastern practices, But it's not limited to Eastern practices. Just think of tennis or golf. Serious training in tennis or golf often involves slowing things down, Rehearsing movements carefully, Intentionally, Becoming aware of reactivity and refining it. And that, Too, Is mindfulness in action. So once we shift our understanding, Once we see mindfulness as active engagement rather than passive observation, Then a much wider field opens up. Mindfulness is not a static state. It's not a spectator sport. It's an active process of engaging with what's happening inside us and around us and learning from the small adjustments we make along the way. We can find mindfulness anywhere we pause, Engage intentionally with present experience and create a little space between automatic reaction and conscious response.