I am Simon Cole and I would like to offer you a new way of looking at mindfulness.
Do you have one of those apps which alert you at a preset interval to take a mindfulness moment?
Or perhaps you have a way of alerting yourself to bring you out of the bustle and distraction of what's going on in order to connect with a different reality.
Ground yourself,
Listen for the sounds around,
Focus not flit,
Bathe in the peace of intentional attention,
Away from all the jostling activity.
And you do that,
Perhaps you are very good at it and hopefully you are appreciating the experience.
But then a hint from somewhere of what seems almost like a counterpoint.
Okay,
What now?
I've done the exercise,
I'm in my mindful moment,
What comes next?
I want to introduce you to mindful flow.
Because to really benefit from your newly discovered tool for awareness,
You need to move beyond the notion of mindful moment.
If you focus on mindful moments,
You risk making mindfulness into a thing,
An object.
And objects don't flow.
I have always wanted the way we approached mindfulness to include the notion of flow.
After all,
Living is analogue,
Not digital.
And we don't look back at our day as a series of edits or screenshots.
We were there all through,
Joining up the movie.
And the action was,
Is continuous.
Now of course,
We can easily see how life in a physical sense is continuous.
But doesn't it feel as if there is something else which is running all the time?
An invisible thread being spun which connects everything.
Or a melody playing in the background,
Like the incidental music in a film,
Which reflects what is happening,
But is also a part of what is happening.
Can't this be in our idea of mindfulness too?
We would need to think a bit differently.
To incorporate this into our practice,
We would need to think instead of mindful flow.
The thread spinning,
The melody playing,
These are not like the normal stimuli of our senses.
They're not something concrete which we touch or smell or see or hear or taste.
Instead,
They are the sense of our passage.
The passage of the me who has arrived here and is engaging with the present.
So mindful flow has to contain this sense of our passage as we connect and exchange with what is around.
There's a word I use for this.
Musicking.
It's the medieval English word which had a K after the C,
From a time when everyday musicking had a much wider scope than we think of as music today.
I extend this medieval meaning even further when I talk about musicking.
Let me give you an idea of what I mean.
When you're walking along and you can feel your body relaxed because you've got the pace and the rhythm just right,
And it fits your mood and how your spirit is,
And you're adapting to the ground beneath your feet,
Then you are musicking.
If you sit with bare feet dangling in a stream and you twiddle your toes and notice how they move and you swirl your feet around and then keep doing it and let it all develop a rhythm,
Then you are musicking.
If you go outside and let the noises of the country or the town drift around you and envelop you,
Not trying to block anything but just hearing the outsideness and being a part of it,
Then you are musicking.
And if you listen to a favourite song and let the sound take you over so that your whole being resonates its shape and its beat,
Then you are musicking.
Musicking is one of the three components in what I now call mindful flow.
It's really the link factor.
There are two more components.
One is dialoguing,
Which sounds easy.
Isn't that just talking,
You might say?
Well,
Sort of.
But talking that's not just one way.
You have to listen as well.
Really listen,
That is.
And the third component is levelling.
Perhaps that one is not so obvious.
But if you want a picture to liken it to,
Think of being in a crowd in a park watching an event.
But instead of some people being tall and some not,
So that you might be able to see,
I'm alright,
I'm tall enough,
Or you might not.
Or perhaps you were able to see,
Then someone moves in front of you.
Okay,
Instead of that,
Everyone is on a level and everyone can see.
That's a very simplified example,
Because levelling goes a lot further than physical difference.
It's about regarding everyone as being just as human and worthy as everyone else.
And,
More importantly,
Just as human and just as worthy as we are ourselves.
We need levelling in order to be able to genuinely do the dialoguing.
Because dialoguing,
As opposed to talking,
As we said,
Needs listening as well.
And listening,
Genuine listening,
Means getting as close as we can to what the other person really means as the person they are.
Not what we,
As who we are,
Would like them to mean,
Or what we assume they mean.
And it is the musicing that ensures we keep flowing and don't get hung up on isolated bits,
Whether they're the good bits or the bad bits,
But most often the bad bits.
If our aim is to achieve a state of being mindful,
We cast mindfulness as a thing.
Which is fine as far as it goes,
Because our minds do headings and we like to have a handle for everything.
But things and their headings tend to get fixed as what they are and life isn't like that.
Life is a flow and we,
Like the rest of creation,
Are constantly changing.
In reality,
Our life is the thread which spins into itself the myriad happenings and encounters and episodes and experiences which tell our story so far,
To this very point here and now,
And leads on from here in a continuous flow of movement and melody,
The future constantly becoming the present.
Like the piper on the hill whose music sings to the world,
We play ourselves in the symphony of all created life,
If we receive and give back in an ongoing mindful flow.
Thank you for joining me and I hope that this will enhance your practice of mindfulness.
Think Mindful Flow.
