My Context For Proactive Mindfulness

In this talk, Serge Prengel shares what has shaped his understanding of mindfulness. It is oriented toward the present and the future rather than the past. This perspective was inspired by his work as a trauma-informed therapist, by contemporary neuroscience, by the practice of Focusing, as well as some physical activities.

Transcript

In this talk,

I will describe what I mean by proactive mindfulness.

Traditionally,

People who talk about mindfulness talk about the practice of meditation.

Their perspective is often grounded in a Buddhist tradition.

I like to meditate,

And I have long been interested in Buddhist ideas,

Especially in the Zen tradition.

However,

My perspective on mindfulness primarily reflects different areas of experience.

When I had these experiences,

I did not necessarily consider them related to mindfulness.

It took time for me to see how they had shaped my sense of mindfulness.

So here,

I want to share what has shaped my understanding of what I now call proactive mindfulness.

First,

I would start with my work as a therapist.

It has been a big part of my experience of mindfulness.

In a way,

I could say that being a therapist amounts to being a mindfulness teacher.

It's not that therapists teach people to meditate or to be mindful.

We usually don't think of ourselves as teachers of that.

But the practice of therapy shows you that people cannot productively process what happens in treatment if they are not within a window of presence that neuroscience characterizes as social engagement.

Another way to say this is that to do effective therapy,

We need to be very aware of our client's nervous system state.

It's very important to notice whether they are mindfully engaged instead of defensive or reactive.

And by the way,

We also need to be very aware of our own nervous system state.

So a big part of therapy involves monitoring the quality of presence or activation in our clients and us.

Now,

If that feels a little abstract,

Try to remember a situation in which you talked to somebody who was distracted,

Worried,

Or scared.

And remember how difficult it was to get through to this person.

Compare that with having a conversation with somebody who is very receptive.

The key to being heard is not how clever what you say is,

But how receptive the other person is.

So you can foster a situation in which the other person is more receptive.

If you do that,

You're much more likely to impact them.

Now,

Conversely,

Remember situations in which you were distracted,

Worried,

Or scared,

And how what came out of you was ineffective.

As you can imagine,

A therapist has much more impact on their clients when they are more present.

And that's why you could say that the work of a therapist is to foster the condition in which it becomes possible for the therapy process to be effective.

It's not so much about showing people what to do.

It's about helping them remove the obstacles that are in the way of using their natural ability to learn from experience.

For that to happen,

Both therapist and client are present and engaged in the process.

Another way to say it is that therapy involves the practice of being mindful or returning to a mindful state.

Hence,

The concept of therapy as a kind of mindfulness training.

Within these ideal conditions,

Insight can happen.

New possibilities open because the nervous system circuit that facilitates openness of mind and creativity is functioning.

So we're now talking about the nervous system.

And so it's good to note that the findings of neuroscience have significantly influenced contemporary therapy.

A neuroscientist,

Stephen Porges,

Developed a sweeping view of the autonomic nervous system based on his physiology and from an evolutionary perspective.

His theory,

The polyvagal theory,

Postulates that there is a circuit in the autonomous nervous system that mediates social engagement and mindfulness.

So mindfulness is not just something that happens.

There is a nervous system circuit for it.

In this context,

Mindfulness is an innate human characteristic with an evolutionary value.

Let's go into some kind of a thought experiment.

Imagine our remote ancestors at the time they were evolving into becoming humans.

They're walking through nature.

And as they do,

They had to be mindfully engaged in finding food and not becoming food for other animals.

So they had to be alert but not hypervigilant.

The same way that animals in a state of nature are usually alert but not hypervigilant.

The work of Stephen Porges provides a theoretical framework to confirm what practice has shown us.

The virtuous cycle of mindful engagement.

The more we engage in what we do,

The more we progress on the continuum between mindless and mindful and reactive versus proactive.

So now I want to talk about another significant influence for me and it has been the practice of what Eugene Gendlin called focusing.

I will briefly describe this practice to show how it has shaped my understanding of mindfulness.

So to start,

Forget what your associations are with the word focusing.

They probably have to do with notions such as laser focused which implies an intense concentration.

And this notion would be very misleading for what I'm about to describe.

The practice came from a study that Eugene Gendlin conducted as he wanted to understand why some people benefit from therapy more than others.

He expected the key factors to be related to what the therapist did.

Instead,

He found that by far the significant difference between successful and unsuccessful outcomes was about the clients.

He noticed that the clients who had the ability to pause and reflect during the therapy sessions were the ones that were much more likely to have successful outcomes.

Now we're not talking about dramatic pauses such as the client saying,

OK,

I need a moment to process.

No,

Not at all.

Just the subtle moments when the client briefly shifts their attention inside like taking a moment before speaking or looking sideways or slightly down for a moment as they absorb information.

Something so natural that you take it for granted until you compare it to people who don't do that.

Based on this discovery,

Gendlin explored in greater detail what happens in this process to find a systematic way to bottle it,

So to speak.

First,

There is a slight pause.

It may be so subtle as to be barely noticeable,

But it allows you to take in what you heard.

It enables you to turn your attention inward to see what comes up for you.

What comes up is very subtle,

A bodily felt sense that may be so faint that you don't notice it unless you have become accustomed to paying attention to such things.

And then,

While staying connected with that bodily felt sense,

You're finding a way to articulate what it means.

As you adjust which words more precisely describe what you sense,

It's like you're focusing the lenses of your binoculars to make the view less blurred.

Hence,

The term focusing.

In this process,

The key moment is the pause that disrupts the autopilot mode.

The pause is what makes it possible to be mindfully engaged.

This experience is where the concept of active pause came from.

I'm still very attached to it because it captures the importance of the moment when it is possible for something fresh to emerge.

The reason I now put more emphasis on the notion of proactive mindfulness is that it captures the context in which such moments occur.

It is a context of being engaged in our lives and wanting to learn more from our experiences.

So you can see from my description of focusing why I think of it as a mindful process.

But there's more to it.

Focusing has a lot to do with social engagement.

You can do focusing on your own independently but it's usually or often practiced in partnerships.

You take turns being the focuser and the listener.

Having a listener who mindfully reflects what they hear allows you to hear yourself think and reflect on it.

What makes focusing a mindful process is not just reflecting.

The listening and reflecting create a space through a rhythm a sense of connection with each other and this sense of connection,

This space that exists now between people reinforces the inner connection,

The mindfulness of inner connection of inward sensing with the connection with each other.

If you don't think of mindfulness as a kind of activity but as a state of the nervous system you can see how effectively connecting with another person fosters mindfulness.

Social engagement and mindfulness go hand in hand.

And this is why I much prefer what I call relational meditation to meditating on my own.

Relational meditation means meditating with a friend or a small group.

After the meditation part we take a moment to each briefly and mindfully reflect on what came up during the meditation.

What is connecting us is not just the talking.

It is also that during the meditation you're aware that you're in a setting where you are soon going to be talking.

This awareness increases the sense of connection and social engagement which is very useful in fostering mindfulness.

Again,

Mindfulness is a state of the nervous system that has to do not just inner connection but also inter-connection.

Now I want to talk about mindful movement.

Some physical activities are another type of experience that has shaped my notion of mindfulness.

The practice of Pilates and gyrotonics has given me a more profound sense of what it's like to engage with my body mindfully.

The experience of sensing into my body moment by moment noticing the ability to engage specific muscle witnessing the effect of this engagement moment by moment feels great.

In this experience mindful observation is not separate from action.

You're doing something as the movement unfolds.

Actually,

When I say doing the word doing is a bit misleading.

This experience is more like participating in the doing.

There is a quality of watching something unfolding but not passively.

There is a constant sense of being able to influence what is happening.

So this is doing but not in the traditional sense of unilaterally making something happen.

Maybe it's more akin to what happens when a bird uses the air currents to flow in the sky.

They're flying but they're also carried by the air currents.

And I want to talk about other activities that involve mindfulness.

So I hear from golfers how critical mindful engagement is to good golfing.

I'm not a golfer so I do not have direct experience with it.

For me,

The physical activity that has had an influence is skiing.

In skiing the body responds to the terrain.

Unlike yoga this is not just a dialogue with the body.

It happens in the context of interaction with the terrain.

The downhill,

The moguls,

The quality of the snow.

The experience of me as a person doing something has very much to do with how I respond to the terrain.

There are exhilarating moments of feeling my body moving harmoniously with the slope.

At such moments it feels like I'm being moved instead of forcing the movement.

But being moved not in a passive way not like an object falling down the mountain.

It very much has the sense of being involved in being moved.

And because of the element of danger there is also the presence of all the baggage from the past about danger.

Skiing involves facing this baggage as part of the present moment.

Noticing the difference between moments when I can anticipate a turn versus moments when past experiences hijack my mind and I'm unable to do the anticipating.

And so,

Where do we get from there?

Mindfulness involves being in the moment.

But being in the moment is not some sort of spiritual state.

It means dealing with life's challenges.

It means being aware of the uncertainty and possibly danger present in the situation.

It includes doing our best to disentangle ourselves from the impact of past baggage but not taking for granted that we can do so.

It means being as alive as we can be.

We become more alive as we engage more fully with life.

Engagement is not a concept.

It is very much rooted in the body.

This is why proactive mindfulness starts with engaging in our body.