Six Ways to Improve Mindfulness – Part 1

It’s flashing red! The car’s fuel gauge, that is. There’s only one thing to do when we see this warning and that’s to start looking for a petrol station. To ignore it and carry on would of course be very stupid.

Our mindfulness also has a gauge, and we need to learn how to read it. If we sense that thoughts and emotions are taking over, that we are losing perspective, and that problems are beginning to overwhelm us, then it’s clear that our mindfulness levels are getting low.

So it’s crucial that we become skilled at topping it up when a suitable opportunity arises. It may not take many minutes to do this – even thirty seconds of concentrated mindfulness amidst an hour of chaos will bring relief and revitalised awareness.

Short spells of deep mindfulness punctuating our day will also have a cumulative effect: at the end it, we will find that the day’s events have rolled off us as if they were water drops that have fallen from a lotus leaf.

1. QUIET

When I was a lay-man, shortly before I came to live at the monastery, I had this little exercise that worked wonders for my mindfulness. Firstly, I would take all of the drinking glasses out of the dishwasher and place them on the work-surface beneath the cupboard. Then, I would try to put each of those glasses away without making a sound.

As you can imagine, it made me exceptionally mindful. If I was careless, if my mind wandered off on some trail of thought, the glasses would tell me – ‘CLINK!’ – and I’d be brought right back into the moment.

You could say that the glasses functioned like the rumbling strips between the lanes on the motorway and the hard-shoulder – if you doze off and veer to the left you’re suddenly awoken by gudukgudukgudukguduk as you cross the strip. Then you promptly straighten back up.

Trying to be silent forces you to concentrate on every moment. Every action, even down to the most insignificant of movements, must be precise and executed with great mindfulness. Afterwards, even though you move with normal levels of speed and noise, you will find you are naturally much more mindful.

2. STOP

Yes, it’s as simple as that: just stop. Put down your pen, take your hand off the mouse, cease chopping the carrots, turn off the lawnmower, and just stop. Then, put down everything you’ve been carrying in your mind. Let it all fall away and focus entirely on the stillness of your body. After one or two minutes, or however much time allows, make a deliberate and fully conscious decision to carry on with what you were doing as mindfully as possible.

If you are anything like most people, however, you will probably find that just stopping is not as easy as it sounds.

Up until the moment of stopping we are a passenger on that great locomotion of desire. And until we stop it’s been whooshing along unhindered. So what happens when we do stop? It wants to keep going. You will want to grab the pen, the mouse, the knife, the lawnmower – you may even find your hand flies out without warning! But try to be still. Even the fastest train will come to a halt if you stop adding fuel. Our desire is the same. So just stop, put everything down, and allow it to come to a halt.

Of course, desire may not be the only thing in the driving seat – it may be aversion, frustration, impatience or even fear – and all of these will similarly want to keep going. But it is important that we let go of these too, and focus on simply remaining still.

Once the desire, aversion, etc. have slowed down, and the thoughts that were running rings around our mind have settled, we begin to open to the experience of just stopping. A still body and mind will quickly pay dividends: we will feel light, refreshed and focussed. The more deeply we can stop, that is – the less mental movement we can experience, the more powerful these results will be. Then, when it’s time to return to what we were doing, we can confidently pick up the pen, the mouse, the knife, the mower, and carry on with mindfulness revitalised.