Learn from mistakes before you make them

If you’re new to mindfulness meditation: welcome. If you’re not new: welcome anyway.

Before we start… “mindfulness meditation” is quite the mouthful. Personally I think of mindfulness as a thing you might do at any time during many things you might do in everyday life, and mindfulness meditation as the specific practice where your focus is on improving the skill. This distinction isn’t really all that useful in terms of learning as a beginner, and I’m going to cover more advanced concepts anyway, so I’ll just call it “mindfulness” throughout the rest of this book.

Why bother with mindfulness?

Just to check in with the beginners so we’re on the same page: what’s the point of doing mindfulness, anyway? Well, if you look at all the popular sources on the internet and scientific research, you’ll find a few things that show up basically every single time. Let’s focus on the big points with strong scientific support: stress and anxiety reduction; improved ability to focus and other cognitive improvements.

That’s not wrong, but I’ll claim additional benefits on top, most notably freeing yourself of baggage from the past that is dragging you down. This is obviously harder to prove conclusively in a scientific sense because the strongest level of scientific support comes from things that can be fit into a nicely controlled study, and individual life experience is kind of hard to box in like that. It would, in theory, be possible to do a long-term study in which participants keep getting coached individually by mindfulness experts, but that’s ridiculously expensive and I don’t see it happening any time soon. I hope that I’ll be able to convince you that it’s still a reasonable conclusion to make, even if I can’t exactly prove it to scientific standards.

Another thing worth mentioning is that my experience (and also the experience of many others I’ve encountered) supports the notion that mindfulness can help to dissolve habitual tension, which makes life less enjoyable in many subtle ways (in fact, chronic tension can lead to chronic pain in extreme cases). I have a totally unproven hypothesis that this also includes a range of medical issues that are difficult to pin down in medical practice, but since this is even more vague and controversial, I’m not going to go into more detail here. If you’re going to give mindfulness a serious try and really commit to it at some point, you can draw your own conclusions about this.

Besides mindfulness, other styles of meditation allow you to experience vastly altered states of consciousness, and create new ways of learning and processing. This isn’t going to be the focus of this book, but I’m going to cover it to some extent simply because I think it’s really cool. In the spirit of talking about ways in which to do it “badly”, I’m going to focus less on the applications and more on the typical reasons why people struggle with anything going in that general direction.

How the heck can something do so much?

Excellent question. Again, this would be challenging to prove, but the general effect of mindfulness is making it easier to let things go, including things that you aren’t even really aware of yet (awareness improves with practice). I’ll clarify this a little more throughout the book, but even this short explanation does sort of seem relevant to things like insomnia, stress, anxiety, tension etc. Right?

I was very tempted to dive into a very detailed explanation of how I think it all works. It wouldn’t have been an explanation that I could prove (again, hard to do in the first place), but I think it’s quite plausible and it doesn’t even have to be right for it to be a useful way of thinking. Ultimately, though, I figured that would be a bit too much to start out with. Instead, I’ll still cover all of it but it’s now simply a thread that runs through the whole book. So, don’t worry, I’m not swindling you out of the details, I’m just hiding them a little better.

Why should you listen to me?

Maybe you shouldn’t, actually. I don’t have any formal qualifications to teach, I don’t have 50 years of experience, I’m not even in the official top 100 of mindfulness practitioners (that’s not a thing, of course). What I have to offer is that I’ve made many, many mistakes, and I’ve talked to other people who have made mistakes, and also to people who have fixed their mistakes. This is my attempt to condense all of that into a convenient 2000 pages. Well, maybe a little less.

The structure of this book

To make things easy, I’ve split everything up into convenient steps to follow. In each step, first I’ll tell you how to do it as incorrectly as possible… then I’ll explain which aspects of the step matter the most, and finally I’ll outline how to do it better and what alternatives to consider. Sound good?

How to actually succeed in learning this kind of thing

Here’s an easy mistake to make especially for analytically minded people, and one that I made myself for quite a few years: when you discover something like mindfulness, you read a lot of material about it to try and understand the theory as completely as possible. If you take this path, you’ll end up knowing a lot about mindfulness, but you won’t develop any actual skills.

There’s a sneaky variation on this: you’ll decide to read the whole thing so you know all the steps, and then you’ll know what to do and can start practicing everything at once.

Let me tell you, it really really doesn’t work that way. Each step has a lot of subtlety in it that you have to learn to recognize. Doing everything at once will flood your mind with many very subtle cues and that’s just a big mess for it to puzzle out. It will either not find any patterns at all or, more likely, the wrong patterns, and then you develop skills that look a bit like mindfulness but fail in important ways.

As a result, I very strongly recommend that you read this one chapter at a time, and spend at least a few days on each before you move on to the next. You’ll want to stack the odds for your mind to learn to recognize subtle signs and patterns before you start adding more nuance and layers. The only way to reliably achieve that is to space it out and practice one thing after the other. I’ll include some pointers for cases in which it truly might be better to skip a step, and maybe return to it later.

The other big mistake to make is to feel like you’re on a schedule and you need to learn fast and efficiently. You can’t control how long it will take until a step sinks in. Trying to rush it will usually make it take much longer or stop you from succeeding altogether. You can’t “force” your mind to make it happen. The much better approach is to do any exercise in a lighthearted way, much like you’d treat a curious spontaneous experiment you came up with, and not worry about any direct results (and I can tell you right now that there won’t be any, starting out). As a rule of thumb, the less pressure you put on yourself (to do it well, to do it quickly, to do it smartly…), the easier it will be and the sooner it will start to “work”.

Creating a reasonable practice schedule

People work in different kinds of ways. Some people work best with structure, others struggle with that. I don’t know what’s going to work for you, but as a general rule, try whichever ways you can think of that result in you practicing often. “Often” is much more valuable than “long sessions at a time”. One person might plan short sessions two or three times per day (and once per day is still much better than very irregularly), another might manage better by not setting specific times but bundling practice sessions with other activities (e.g. while doing the dishes, brushing your teeth, riding a bus…). Do what works for you. If you have a lot of trouble with consistency, this might take some creative thinking. If you have to put a stuffed unicorn on your door handle to remind you, that might seem silly, but whatever works is allowed!

Well then, with all of the important introductory points out of the way, let’s dive right in.

Step 0: relax!

At every corner there’s someone who wants to help you meditate, for a small fee. Surely that’s an efficient time saver, right? So, you might decide to check that out. What you’ll get is tracks with maybe soothing noise, laidback music, possibly someone talking you through some sort of experience. And maybe that appeals to you, and you decide it’s worth the money.

Or maybe you’re a cheapskate like me and you’d rather not have to pay for something like that. Instead, you try to relax your mind, all by your lonesome, and then kind of drift along in whatever state that results in. Maybe you succeed in doing that, and then it kind of feels nice. Or maybe you find that you have no clue what relaxing your mind is like in the first place, and anyway nothing you do seems to get you any closer to that.

Perhaps relaxing your body will help? So you look into stuff like progressive muscle relaxation, visualization exercises, maybe even something as fancy as yoga. And maybe it helps, or maybe it doesn’t. What gives?

What matters about this step

The thing is, most forms of meditation are not about relaxation, and specifically they are not about just drifting through some sort of pleasant experience. This applies to mindfulness too. Don’t get me wrong, relaxation and drifting are nice and can have all sorts of benefits, but they’re entirely separate from what we’re trying to achieve here.

What I can tell you is that mindfulness creates certain mental skills, and listening to guided meditation tracks does not. They might help you relax a little more, and (if you’re receptive to the way they try to help you do it) you might get better at having that kind of experience, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Relaxation is nice… and it’s healthy in many ways.

When to not relax

Relaxation is just one thing, though, and it’s not a panacea. You’ll often see the notion that people are stressed out and the solution is to relax. I beg to differ, sort of: yes, ideally you’d fix stress… but does relaxation fix the “cause” or just the “symptoms”? Of course, relaxation is the opposite of the overactive state of the central nervous system that we call stress. What causes stress, though? Psychological factors, usually. In broad terms, there’s a level of psychological tension and pressure (deliberately vague terms) and this, in turn, creates the elevated activity level in the nervous system. Now, if you “just relax”, that elevated activity level will be counteracted for a bit. But will it also deal with the psychological tension/pressure that created it in the first place? It’s a possibility, I suppose, but there are hardly any guarantees. The worst case might be that you get good at putting yourself under pressure in a seemingly ”relaxed” way but ultimately something still gives. Maybe it will affect your blood pressure, maybe you’ll start having trouble sleeping, who knows. It’s impossible to predict but there are many ways it could go.

I’m not just saying this, I experienced something similar myself. I got pretty good at using mindfulness principles (or at least so I thought) to sort of delete negative emotions. This worked decently well (though not for everything), but at some point I noticed that I’d started having a range of diffuse issues (with muscle tension and sleep, for instance) that had no obvious medical cause and that I couldn’t magick away with my “mindfulness skills” (or so I thought at the time). When I did get stressed out, dealing with that failed completely too, and in the same way. Me trying to relax deliberately (which I have a decent bit of experience with) didn’t really work, either.

I realized that I’d been trying to use this stuff as a quick fix: just remove the symptoms (bad feelings in this case). I had to completely rethink mindfulness to start undoing the “damage”.

There’s another hidden danger of depending too much on tricking yourself into relaxation: it has a chance of masking issues in your life. It’s easy to not notice that something is going really wrong when you feel good and have no reason to take stock of where you’re at. It happens again and again that people succeed in convincing themselves that there is no problem but anyone else can see that there absolutely is. Sometimes, admitting that there is an issue is a difficult step to take. It’s much easier to just, you know, try to relax. It’s also part of what will make it easy to stay stuck.

Relaxation vs “relaxed alertness”

Mindfulness is quite different from relaxation: you’re not going to drift along lazily or anything. Instead, you stay fully aware and in the present moment, and the only way in which you’re “relaxed” is that you let things happen and don’t try to interfere. If you’re new to mindfulness that might seem like a crazy approach to change, but bear with me. I hope I’ll be able to convince you that there’s something to this. It takes a bit of practice until you first start seeing true evidence of this, but I’ll do my best to explain why it’s a reasonable expectation to have. Later, though… after all, we’re not even at step 1 yet.

The lure of guided meditations

I know, just switching off your brain and listening to some meditation tracks seems like a simple way to change your life with very little effort. Just keep listening to relaxation stuff and that stress will be gone, etc. Right? (Well, no. At least not in my experience.)

Selling guided meditation recordings (or, better yet, subscriptions to guided meditation recordings) is a very profitable way of helping people: create content once and then sell it hundreds of thousands of times. That’s not to say that they are categorically useless. In fact, I know some people benefit a lot from them. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict if that will be true for you as well, or even if it will be true for any given recording. For instance, a recording designed to help you deal with stress, more often than not, will simply have a bunch of ideas in there about relaxing and letting things go. That might work, but the person who recorded it hardly knows your specific situation… and even if you described it to them, they’d just get the same ideas that you already have, and putting them in a recording wouldn’t fundamentally change the fact that you already know all this stuff and so far it hasn’t done anything useful for you.

If you want to try out something like that, don’t let me stop you. It totally can work. Only one way to find out. Personally, though, I’m not a fan of outsourcing this sort of thing, because I could be using the same time to practice mental skills that will take me even further and apply more broadly in my life.

In mindfulness terms: how do you relax? By “resolving” everything that causes tension that you don’t need. Again, I’m being a bit vague on purpose. How mindfulness truly works is hard to understand until you start experiencing some of it. So, I’ll work my way up to a full explanation throughout this.

Step 1: obsess over breathing

If you look for introductions to mindfulness, almost without fail, they’ll tell you to observe your breathing, and whenever you get distracted, bring your attention back to the breath, “gently”, and keep going. So, let’s sit down and breathe.

For most people, conscious breathing feels kind of weird, so you’re probably going to get annoyed about that, then annoyed at yourself because how could an exercise like this possibly be so hard, you’ve already gotten distracted, what the hell? All kinds of other thoughts might come in and you’ll desperately try to ignore them, ignore the annoying sounds from the outside world that are trying to invade your awareness, and feel like you no longer know how to breathe ”normally”.

There are two ways to cope with that, of course: either give up after a few moments, telling yourself you’ll just try again later and hoping that things will be totally different then… or you keep going until your twenty-minute timer has run out, getting steadily more frustrated along the way.

An alternative way to get frustrated is because you might find these exercises incredibly boring. Breathing isn’t exactly five star entertainment, is it? So, your mind will wander to make sure you don’t actually die of boredom. You’ll also be not all that motivated to continue exposing yourself to the same boredom over and over. And thus endeth your mindfulness journey before it even really began.

Of course, the obvious implied goal is to keep pushing until you can easily focus on nothing but your breath for two hours.

What matters about this step

Remember how I mentioned in the introduction that mindfulness is about letting things go? The funny thing is that the breath-based exercises seem to be about focusing hard on one single thing, first and foremost… but that’s only half of the story. If you think it’s mostly about the focus, you’ll tend to draw all the wrong conclusions when your mind wanders or when random other things (or thoughts) distract you.

Don’t get me wrong, focus is one of the things these exercises are about. A crucial component of mindfulness is “staying present”, and it’s also the hardest thing to explain about mindfulness. Let me try, because there’s really no way around understanding this.

Attention, focus and awareness

Have you ever done something on autopilot? The dishes, maybe, or driving (on a familiar route, with nothing unusual going on, e.g. maybe on the way home in the late evening)… there are lots of things you’re good enough at so that you can do them while thinking about basically anything else, or sort of daydreaming. Then, when something unexpected happens, e.g. one of the dishes slips out of your hands, or the car in front of you suddenly brakes, it immediately grabs your attention and you’re instantly focused back on your task.

This is the way we function most of the time, and it’s also the way things work inside our minds most of the time. When there’s nothing that pulls your focus (like a video game, a book, a complex task that is roughly within your skill range, etc.), your attention will wander and more or less random thoughts and/or imagination will start doing their thing.

On the other end of things, sometimes your attention gets pulled in by something. Suppose the driver in front of you cuts you off… you might start thinking about how much of a jerk they are, and how annoying it all is, and it’s easy to keep going round and round on these thoughts for a while, until eventually your attention starts wandering again, or something else draws your attention.

So, there are two ways in which attention can run away from where we want it to be: either it just randomly starts floating off, or there’s a sharp pull of sorts by something interesting or seemingly important.

Mindfulness is about cultivating a relaxed sort of attention on what’s happening inside your mind (and body, and sphere of perception), so that you’re aware of what’s going on but without strongly focusing on anything in particular. If you managed to be perfectly mindful, your attention would not wander at all, and if something drew your attention, you could give it just as much as you want and easily go back to that relaxed attention on nothing in particular.

What do I mean by relaxed attention? Again, a bit hard to explain. I like this analogy: if you take a photograph of a small detail, for physical reasons the rest of the scene will usually be blurry and out of focus, and you’ll hardly even look at anything but the detail that’s in focus. That’s much like focused attention in general: your attention is very narrowed down on just a few things, or even just one thing, and everything else sort of just exists in the background and you sort of ignore it. A more relaxed attention is more like a photograph that’s equally blurry everywhere: there’s no one thing you focus on, so now it’s really more the overall scene you’re aware of. This is also why I call this relaxed attention “awareness”.

Focusing on your breath vs awareness

Getting good at this particular kind of awareness is quite an adjustment for most people, so the beginner exercises sort of put training wheels on it: by focusing on the breath, you use your mind in a mode you’re much more accustomed to, focusing on a detail. The breath is fairly neutral for most of us (i.e. we don’t feel strongly about it), plus it’s always there so we don’t have to prepare anything to do these exercises.

However, the ultimate goal is awareness, so there is a particular way of focusing on the breath that this exercise is about: this is what you’ll be putting your attention on, but the real goal is to get better at being more relaxed about this attention, and also about times when your attention slips away from you.

How to do it better

Again, the starting point is focusing on your breathing. For some people it might be easier to focus on a very narrow aspect of it, e.g. the feeling of the air touching the outer half of your right nostril or the sensation of your lungs expanding and contracting. For others, it might be easier to have a more general awareness of their breath. Try it both ways and see which seems to make the whole exercise easier for you.

Dealing with random thoughts and feelings

If any thoughts or emotions come up that might seem like they’re disrupting the exercise, that’s not actually a disruption, it’s a vital part of the exercise! Your “job” is to notice that they’re there but not really worry about them. Having thoughts and feelings is not forbidden, and actively trying to fight them (e.g. by trying to remove them from your awareness, or “thinking them away”, or wanting to get rid of them) actually disrupts the path to that relaxed sort of attention. In truth, if you have a thousand thoughts while you pay attention to your breath, that’s perfectly fine, and if you manage to still focus on your breath even while those thoughts are running around in your head, you’re beginning to master this stage.

The same is true with sounds coming from the outside, or bodily sensations, like a weird tingling or an itch. It’s not even like you have to resist scratching the itch. Just be sure that you don’t do it on autopilot, because we’re trying to be less autopiloted. So, feel free to scratch the itch, but make sure you do it deliberately and not thoughtlessly as an automatic action. By keeping (most of) your attention on the breath while you scratch the itch, you’re still doing everything right and you don’t need to worry about forcing yourself to ignore the sensation. In time it might get easier to just let the itching sensation happen, but that time might not be there yet. Don’t worry, it will happen at its own pace, and you don’t have to do a single thing about it.

Generally speaking, any time you notice something and let it happen while you still pay attention to the breath to some extent, that’s a sign you’re doing the right thing. Ideally the breath thing will be in the “foreground” most of the time, but that’s not a realistic expectation to have when you’re new. For now, let your goal be to keep at least a bit of your awareness on it whenever you haven’t totally gotten lost in random thoughts… which will happen.

Dealing with losing your focus

Speaking of: the other goal is to practice catching yourself when your attention wanders. And it will… a lot. This is a good thing, because each time your attention wanders gives you an opportunity to notice, and the more often you notice that your attention has wandered, the better you get at noticing. In fact this means that as a beginner you’ll learn this a lot faster than later on, because your attention will wander a lot more often.

Just like with random thoughts that come up while you’re focusing on the breath, the wandering attention is best treated as nothing to worry about. The more okay you feel about your attention having wandered, the easier it is to stay relaxed about focusing back on the breath.

Dealing with “attention black holes”

A thing that’s going to happen (more often for some and less often for others) is that something will come up and you won’t be able to help yourself getting all focused on it. It could be something totally innucuous: perhaps construction work outside keeps making noises and you start getting annoyed and then you start thinking about how annoying it is that you’re getting annoyed and then you start getting frustrated about the annoyance and the annoyance about the annoyance… well, you get the idea.

This is a preview of what being mindful in everyday life will be like much of the time. You have an initial “event” (in this case, the noise from the outside, but it could also be a thought or feeling or sensation), and then you have some automatic mental responses to that, and responses to the responses, so you’ll have a nice little chain of responses going in very short order… and often it will start going in circles very quickly since one response circles back into a rehash of a previous one, and then you’ll be on a nice little merry-go-round until it kind of loses traction, or something else draws your focus (ideally a thought like “wait, wasn’t I supposed to focus on my breath?”).

At this stage, I wouldn’t worry too much about these cases. What we’re going for, ultimately, is keeping enough of that relaxed attention, that mindfulness, going so that enough attention bleeds off of the chain of responses so that the chain sort of peters out. It might be too soon for that, so the next best thing is to not think of this as a bad thing, and certainly not a sign of failure. It’s just… something that’s going to happen. In fact, if this never happened to you at all, I’d start wondering if you’re even human.

How much time to put in

This differs very much from individual to individual. If in doubt, err on the side of “short”. Especially when starting out, much about this will be a little frustrating. In my opinion, the best time to stop is after you’ve started getting a little annoyed/frustrated and shortly before it starts drawing so much of your attention that you start getting that merry-go-round experience I was talking about earlier. So, basically, always push the boundaries a little bit, but not so far that “relaxed attention” starts feeling completely impossible.

You can do this multiple times per day if you like. There is some power in rituals, i.e. setting aside a fixed time every day to “do meditation”. Fixed times help with building habits. It’s not strictly necessary, though, and if you’re the kind of person who struggles a lot with keeping to schedules, don’t bother trying to force it. Just do it whenever.

It’s totally fine to “practice to exhaustion” (i.e. up to the point where it stops feeling relaxed) five times per day, maybe even ten times per day. For many people that might be just a few seconds, or up to maybe a minute or two, at a time. That might seem like nothing, but it will still help, and stopping soon enough makes it a lot more effective than trying to push through the frustration for five minutes.

Most likely for the duration of this step, it’s not terribly useful to exceed ten or twenty minutes total per day. There’s a limit to how much time is useful, and doing more isn’t going to speed up the results. Much of the learning our brain handles for us happens during “downtime”, and trying to force practice in nearly all the time interferes with that. So, be sure to give yourself plenty of time during which you put this whole topic aside.

If you really want to, and you’ve developed enough skill to keep going beyond that time without losing the relaxedness of your awareness, you totally can go beyond that limit, and you might get interesting results out of it, but don’t feel like you have to.

How should I breathe?

It really doesn’t matter. There are some approaches to meditation that are more centered on specific breathing techniques, but that’s not what we care about here. If you struggle with conscious breathing and want something as a reference so you don’t obsess over the details too much: breathe more or less normally, but slightly more slowly than you would normally: slower inhales, slower exhales, longer pauses in between. This isn’t about challenging yourself to breathe as slowly as possible, and there is no fixed target rate. It’s really just to give you something to do, plus slowing down the breathing tends to help focus a little and counteracts an overhyped nervous system to some extent. Just make sure it still feels fairly easy.

The folly of deep breathing

I’ll tell you a secret: people get way too focused on deep breaths. There is surprisingly little benefit to those. Let’s think about it in terms of physics for a bit: both the rate and depth of your breaths affect the volume of inhale and exhale in a given amount of time. If you breathe at the same depth but more slowly, the volume per time decreases. If you breathe at the same rate but more deeply, the volume per time increases. If you slow down and increase the depth, typically the volume per time will not actually change much! In other words, if you slow down the breathing but also breathe more deeply, you’re not really changing anything, except it will tend to feel more awkward.

To simplify the physiological aspect a little (the full story involves talking about the oxygen/carbon dioxide balance in the blood, but we don’t have that kind of time here): less volume per time = more relaxation (activating the parasympathetic nervous system), more volume per time = more “activation” (sympathetic nervous system). Both have their place, but for exercise purposes, relaxation tends to be helpful, which is why I recommend slowing down your rate of breathing a bit. Chances are it won’t make a huge difference, but it doesn’t hurt either.

Deep breathing is more useful if you want more stuff to happen. There are a bunch of breathing techniques that are meant to achieve this, e.g. “fire breathing”. We’ll talk about that later. For now, don’t bother with deep breaths. Just breathe at a natural-feeling depth, and don’t go chasing records in terms of how slow you can go. Keep it feeling natural and easy.

What if you keep struggling anyway?

There are some ways in which this can still be difficult:

• Remember how I said that for most of us, breathing is fairly neutral? For some people that’s not true. There might be tension or pain tied up in conscious breathing for you. If that’s the case for you, don’t push too hard on this step, and just move on to the next one. Keep in mind the overall goals and important bits from this step, the only difference is that you won’t be focusing on the breath. In time, though, you’ll be able to observe the breathing in a “mindfulness way” even if feelings of tension or pain or whatever come along with it, and it’s totally possible that this will, over time, help you change the way you experience breathing.

• If you have a particularly high level of difficulty focusing, you will almost definitely hate this exercise much more than you’ll be able to handle with your beginner-level skill of relaxed attention. You can still make progress by being very strict about stopping whenever the sense of boredom or frustration gets too much to handle (and, again, err on the side of caution, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone here, nobody else knows what you’re doing and I’m not going to tell anyone)… but you might prefer to skip this step altogether and move on to the next one, remembering the general takeaways from this step about relaxed attention, how to deal with distractions, and so forth. You might even have an easier time with the next step than most other people, because step two is designed to be much more permissive about what happens inside your mind.

If there are any other reasons you’re having trouble with this, please get in touch so I can (hopefully) provide pointers and also include them here with an update, so that others can benefit from the same insights. Same thing applies to all the other steps, of course.

Step 2: try to take in all of the outside world at once

Another common beginner-level exercise is to “be mindful of your surroundings”. Let’s call it “external mindfulness”. The obvious way of doing that is to start turning your head this way and that way, trying to take in as many details as possible, all at the same time. Naturally, this will involve a certain level of struggle, because who can keep track of everything? Just like in step 1, thoughts will enter the picture, maybe about how challenging this is, how frustrating it feels to not be able to follow these very basic instructions, maybe confusion about what the hell you’re supposed to be doing, anyway, and what the point of it all is.

What matters about this step

Compared to step 1, there is no difference in objectives or skills you’re supposed to be building. You’re cultivating the same sort of relaxed-but-alert attention as in the breath-based exercise. That means that scrambling to take in as many details as possible is counterproductive.

Different kinds of observation

Aside from how hard you focus on something, there are other distinctions that can be made. Most of the time, your awareness of the outside world will be somewhat abstract: if you pass by a tree and waste any thought on it at all, usually it’s going to be “well, that’s a tree there” or, perhaps, “oh look, a birch tree”. Rarely does it get more involved than that.

Abstraction is a way of reducing cognitive load: instead of looking at all the details, you can just look at an object and your mind helpfully supplies its pre-made (learned) conclusions about what you’re looking at. As a result, you can recognize a chair as a chair with zero effort (aside from maybe some fringe cases where it might be hard to tell if you’re looking at a chair or a stool, for example).

True observation involves intentionally looking for sensory details. This doesn’t eliminate abstraction: you’ll still look at a chair and recognize that it’s a chair… but you might choose to focus in addition on specific details. For example, you might notice that the chair is red, or white, or brownish, or whatever. That it maybe has rounded edges. That the back rest is rounded, or straight. That its surface is slightly shiny, or matte. And so forth.

If you were to try and shovel as many of these details into your brain as possible, that would, once again, be counter-productive. Instead, you could choose a random thing to look at, in no particular hurry, and pick a random property that you notice about it, and just observe that quality for a moment. Then, you can move on to another.

The same kind of thinking applies to all of your other senses, but it’s easiest with visuals. However, you could totally walk through a busy area and notice all the individual sounds. And each sound has properties, too: it might be loud or quiet, tonal or atonal, high-pitched or low-pitched, harsh, soft… you get the idea.

Widening the focus

Another approach – that is a little harder to grasp at first – is to focus less on any particular aspect of what you’re perceiving, and get more of an overall sense. The way it made the most sense to me when I was starting out was by likening it to peripheral vision. Go ahead and focus on a spot in your field of vision, something not too close if you don’t want to have to strain your eyes. Keeping your focus there, try to be more aware of the fringe areas of your field of vision rather than that spot itself. This can be a bit tricky at first, but once you start getting there, you’ll notice that you’re not really able to see any details from your peripheral vision, it’s a much more vague sense of the things in that area. Your peripheral vision is extremely good at picking up movement, though, so if you do this in a public setting, you might notice that it’s surprisingly easy to see things or people moving while not actually looking at them directly.

What’s the use of this? Well, in the previous section I talked about removing some abstraction and getting closer to the sensory data, by focusing on individual details. Focusing on nothing in particular is the “nuclear” option: if you don’t even focus on any object, there’s no abstraction going on at all! As a beginner you’ll still have some “accidental abstraction“ purely out of habit, but that’s perfectly fine. Some practice, and not worrying too much about habits like that, is all it takes.

Getting rid of abstractions

So, we’re unabstracting… but why?

This is actually a bit of a sneak preview of one of the core principles of mindfulness: not judging, observing impartially. Abstraction are undoubtedly useful (and, in fact, pretty much unavoidable to be able to function), but they can go wrong: sometimes, your mind will create abstractions that are questionable, i.e. misleading or outright harmful. For a drastic example, someone might have created an abstraction saying that seeing a dog means danger, so they’ll panic when they see a dog, even if it’s an extraordinarily lazy or cuddly one.

Now, this is another of those things I won’t be able to prove, but based on my experience, I’m fairly certain that part of the reason it’s so difficult to get rid of a phobia is that you’re stuck in the abstraction: every time you see a dog and you freak out, that “proves” to you that the abstraction is correct, and so you keep reaffirming the abstraction. This is not something you do deliberately, of course, it’s just the natural consequence of not being able to separate the abstraction from the actual thing. Instead, people will get sidetracked “arguing” with the abstraction… meaning they’ll fight the abstraction on its home turf: in the abstract. This has never been effective for me, and I’ve talked to many people who have never had any success with this, either. Makes sense too, right? Of course, telling yourself that that dog is actually not dangerous at all is perfectly logical and rational, but it’s also not new information to you even while you do feel anxious/afraid. If you keep telling yourself what you already know, you’ll much sooner feel frustrated about your seeming inability to change than you’ll actually make a difference with it, and that frustration is counter-productive too because it will nudge you towards new abstractions that tell you that you’re incapable of changing and that you’d better stop trying to stop wasting energy.

In my experience, what has a lot more potential to help is what, in the writing world, they call “show, don’t tell”: experiencing something is way more convincing than being told about it. So, if you could magically experience facing a dog without feeling afraid at all, chances are that would eliminate the phobia very quickly, right? But that’s not so easy to make happen, so let’s go with the next best thing: become more aware that the experience you’re having and the conclusions you’re drawing from it are connected on an abstract level, but the feelings come directly from the experience and not from the abstract part. The abstract part is just what convinces you that the experience and the feeling can’t be separated.

I suspect we haven’t done enough of this yet so you’d believe me when I say that this separation is actually quite simple to achieve, so we’ll get back to that later. In the meantime, the takeaway is this: staying away from the abstract level and keeping to the experiential side of things is much more likely to open up space for change, even if we don’t quite know yet what that would look like. We’ll get back to this in more detail later.

For now, what does that mean for external mindfulness? Honestly, bypassing abstractions in these exercises isn’t useful in itself, but it lays a foundation for building the ability to bypass other abstractions in other contexts. It’s one of those things that seem kind of stupid but will make a huge difference later, just like practicing your scales when learning to play an instrument, or drawing lots of straight lines and circles and random curves to improve your drawing skills.

How to do it better

The basic version

The guiding principle is: relaxed-but-alert “effortless” observation. Let your focus wander a bit and let it rest on random things and random qualities of those things. Initially, you’ll find it hard to keep your focus on one thing and quality for extended periods of time, and you don’t want to force it because then you’ll learn to associate struggle and frustration with this exercise.

Instead, keep your attention on that single thing and quality until you start getting a bit restless. Notice that feeling of restlessness and maybe a bit of frustration and some thoughts that creep up along with them. There is nothing wrong at all with these feelings and thoughts, they’re completely natural, so there’s no need to judge them. Just let them happen. Once you’ve done that for a few seconds, or if you start finding it hard to let the feelings and thoughts happen without judgement, let your attention wander again and then come to rest on another thing and quality. Keep going.

All of the principles from the previous chapter still apply, e.g. on how to deal with other thoughts and feelings or with losing focus, and how much time to put in.

I suggested that each time you rest your attention on something, you pick a random detail about it. It could be the object’s colour, for example (and please don’t agonize over the choice or think about it in detail. Just pick something very spontaneously. It doesn’t have to be original or clever or anything like that). Now, you don’t have to go “red, red, red, red” in your mind. It’s enough to just know the colour. Initially repeating the name of the colour to yourself might help to keep your attention on it, but do it as slowly as you can without getting distracted: “red… red…… red…” and so on. After a while, you’ll manage to do less and less of this until you can do it completely without any internal dialog. Don’t rush towards this as a goal, though. As always, your first priority is to make this mostly effortless for yourself.

The intermediate version

Remember that exercise with the peripheral vision? It can actually serve as a proxy for building the skill of observing in a less focused way: while observing the world around you, put more of your attention on your peripheral vision than you normally would. This will automatically stop you from focusing on a single thing and creates an interesting different quality of awareness. Looking back, it’s hard for me to tell what had the most impact on my learning, but I think this definitely made a significant difference.

What exactly you’re cultivating by doing this is kind of hard to describe. You just have to do it several times (and remember to do it in an effortless, relaxed sort of way: it’s totally fine if you have no idea how to even go about it. Just experiment a little and don’t worry if you’re not getting it. Each time you try, it gets a little more likely that it will click next time), and at some point it will start happening.

Don’t go expecting something particularly magical or mind-bending, though… this is still a very natural, normal type of state, just not one you might habitually get into or recognize. In fact, the same is kind of true for all of mindfulness: I can almost guarantee that you’ve been mindful in the past, but sporadically and not on purpose, most likely without even realizing what you were doing. As you get better at this, you might notice some similarities to things you’ve experienced in the past. Only one way to find out!

Opportunities

What I like about this approach is that you can do it at almost any time when you have nothing else to do: while doing mindless chores, while watching TV, while sitting on the bus or train, while walking around, while taking a shower… the possibilities are almost endless. It’s less of a great fit for any situation in which you need to actually focus, though, so I wouldn’t recommend doing this while driving (though at an intermediate level you might be able to) or while doing your taxes or whatever.

Step 3: eliminate your thoughts

Time to get a little more serious about this, right? You keep hearing about this “monkey mind”, meaning your brain doing random stuff and bringing up thoughts all the time and such. And that’s a bad thing and mindfulness/meditation is about stopping it. So, time to try and murder all those thoughts with extreme prejudice, right? Which means you’ll sit down and try to not think, and then those thoughts come in, and you mentally shake their fist at them and try to make them go away because the “not thinking” isn’t working for some reason!

This, of course, creates that same old frustration that you already had in the previous steps, and makes the whole experience difficult.

On top of that, you’ll still get lost in the thoughts sometimes, following them on a merry chase because it’s just so natural to follow along with a thought and create a nice chain of thoughts, maybe loop it around a bit, then eventually jump to another random thought, and so forth. Sometimes several minutes might pass until you remember that you were supposed to not think, and maybe at some point you start wondering if you’re doing it all wrong or if you’re just not cut out for this.

In this chapter I’ll depart a bit from the previous formula because I feel like separating the explanations from the descriptions of what to do would actually make it harder to understand. So, here’s a happy wall of text that does it all.

How to think about controlling thoughts and feelings

We’ve already talked about how a lot of what mindfulness is about is not trying to micromanage what your brain is doing. It’s time to get a little more “aggressive” on that general principle, by not interfering at all. This might sound stupid but bear with me.

Dealing with frustration

I implied in my explanation of the previous step that a big problem with trying to change the way you feel using logic is that it creates frustration: you know the feeling is “silly” (or, in slightly more neutral terms, unnecessary), and you keep telling yourself so, but the feeling keeps on coming. The same applies to thoughts that bother you, of course: if you try to control your thoughts but they refuse to cooperate, that too creates frustration, which is going to add an emotional charge to the whole situation that makes it even harder to actually achieve something useful. The feelings of frustration will tend add a certain tint to your whole session, and if you keep going like that anyway, you’ll quickly get very good at feeling frustrated about mindfulness (which, of course, isn’t going to help things at all).

This is the canonical experience for people who are newish to mindfulness: the attempt to do it quickly shifts into an attempt to somehow deal with the seemingly inevitable frustration, and there’s an easy opportunity for a nice vicious circle: having trouble dealing with the frustration creates additional frustration on top. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where that leads.

Since the frustration is almost guaranteed, you need to go into this with an attitude that makes it irrelevant. That attitude is very simple: frustration is a standard part of practicing mindfulness, and you don’t need to make it go away. You don’t have to reason with it, you don’t have to try to ignore it, you don’t have to try and displace it by focusing hard on something else.

Remember how in the last steps I talked about a softer mental focus of sorts? That applies to this step too. Without mindfulness, we tend to get really focused on strong emotions and sort of lose track of everything else. The key difference mindfulness introduces isn’t that we focus on something else instead – it’s that we allow the feelings and thoughts to happen, but also stay aware of whatever else might be going on, i.e. any other thoughts, feelings and sensations. That’s literally all there is to it.

How does this help? Well, first off, it’s part of the practice: each time you feel frustrated with how it’s going, that’s another opportunity to try your mental hand at staying aware of the feeling without trying to control it and without trying to push it away (or focus away from it). On top of that, this has a subtle effect on your tendency to feel frustrated in this kind of situation.

Let’s look at a very mechanistic perspective on emotions. Step 1: thing happens. Step 2: you feel an emotion. That’s not the whole story, though. In between those two steps, the truly interesting part happens: your brain looks up whatever it associates with the “thing”, i.e. any thoughts and feelings that you’ve come to associate with it, and brings those up. How does association work? To dumb it down a little: feedback. Imagine a child who draws on the walls with markers and gets yelled at as a result. The thing is drawing on the walls; the feedback is getting yelled at (which in turn probably conjures up negative emotions). If the experience is somewhat intense for the child, this is going to encode into an association “draw on walls = bad” very, very quickly. The next time the child considers drawing on the walls, it might recall getting yelled at which, in turn, brings up those bad feelings. Repeating this cycle a few times will likely “optimize” the association to the point that the mere thought of drawing on the walls feels bad, without any obvious intermediate thoughts. This is a general pattern in the mind: repeat something a lot and it gets optimized, so that more steps happen automatically without any conscious experience (which would basically slow it down).

The same learning pattern works for adults too, of course, and the feedback doesn’t have to be someone else rewarding or punishing you. It can even be your own thoughts. If you consider trying out something new but immediately start thinking about ways in which it might go wrong, that too is a sort of feedback, and repeating it over and over will make you very good at feeling bad if you even consider trying something new.

Let’s go back to our starting point: feeling frustrated while practicing mindfulness. It’s the same thing here, right? The first bit of frustration comes from associations that you’ve already acquired in the past. Not being able to control the flow of your thoughts isn’t implicitly frustrating: the feeling comes from a clash between what you’re experiencing and what you want to be experiencing, and you rejecting that clash as, well, “bad”. Often that’s a more general pattern we all tend to have: if things don’t go your way, not only do we not get the result we wanted, but on top of that we start feeling bad about it (which, of course, is in no way helpful… but also it will never occur to most people that this feeling bad isn’t an intrinsic part of things going wrong, it’s an emotional response we’ve built over the course of our lives without meaning to).

There is no silver bullet to just delete that existing association. It’s not impossible, but challenging to do on your own and also that’s a completely separate topic that I can’t cover in depth in this book. The good news is that if you manage to mindfully let the association (feeling) happen, it interferes with the feedback mechanism that keeps it going. As it happens, feelings that you don’t keep feeding feedback into tend to dissipate. I know I’ve had many vague negative feelings that didn’t really come back the next time simply because I didn’t really care about them too much.

So, while in the past you’ve been unwittingly reinforcing these mental associations, by applying principles of mindfulness, you allow your mind to “lose” an association over time. The feeling will still come, but it will get less intense and last less long. It might never totally disappear, but it can get so close to that that it might as well be gone.

Here’s an example from my own life: at one point in university, I was just about to head home when I saw a professor’s ID card on the printer. These cards doubled as a payment system, so they were used for printing as well: you had to insert your card into a reader attached to the printer to be able to print. Just as I was passing by, the professor left his room (which was right next to the printer). Assuming that he was looking for his card, I handed it to him. To my surprise, he gave me a “what an idiot” kind of look.

At that time I was really good at obsessing over situations like this, so I ended up feeling weirdly embarrassed even after I had finally figured out what probably happened: he was doing an extended print job and so left his card in the printer while doing something else. In the meantime, someone else needed the printer, so they removed his card and inserted their own, leaving the professor’s card on top of the printer. When I handed it to him, he must have assumed that I had removed his card from the reader, and so was annoyed at me.

For quite some time, I’d randomly recall this situation and feel intensely embarrassed all over again, until finally I realized that this was an opportunity to practice mindfulness. So, while I was recalling the situation and feeling bad, I did exactly what I’ve been describing: I stopped trying to get the memory and the feeling to loop around in my mind and instead just observed what my mind was doing. Obviously that didn’t make it stop instantly, but just this attitude shift changed the whole experience of recalling: it stopped making it about me having to force my mind to stop it, and made it into more of a fun experiment of sorts where I was just seeing what would happen if I did nothing to try and change what was going on. I don’t remember in detail what happened the first time I did it, nor the next few times – probably nothing particularly interesting. What I did notice after a while was that the next time I recalled that situation, somehow it felt much less intense and it was easier to just naturally shrug it off and think about something else. Today, when I think back on this little episode, I kind of smile to myself internally, and find it kind of amusing. In a way, this thing that used to bother me has turned into a mark of progress with mindfulness. I could probably still get the feeling back to its original intensity if I really wanted to, by obsessing again about how stupid I was for not immediately understanding what had happened or something, but I’m not going to do that.

This is how things work: you get more freedom of choice about how you think and feel, by just letting things happen. It sounds illogical on the surface, but it works.

Dealing with the monkey mind

So, frustration aside, what do you do about all those thoughts that naturally happen while you practice mindfulness? Well, nothing, really. You simply let them happen, stay aware of them (and whatever else your mind might be doing), and make no effort to control them in any way. What this practice might lead to, ultimately, is a calm mind, but that’s not the primary mark of doing it right, it’s just the end result. Doing it right is giving up control and still being fully aware of what’s going on.

Be prepared to have a lot of seemingly random thoughts while practicing mindfulness. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can be thinking about a lot of stuff and still be doing it correctly.

Dealing with distraction

Another universal experience is getting distracted: if your attention gets thought on a train of thought or emotion, you will end up following along with it and forgetting to maintain that more general awareness of what’s happening in your mind. In fact, while you’re caught up in thoughts, you’ll stop having a sense of being in the present moment; that simply fully disappears from your conscious experience. All that’s there is the thoughts or feelings you’re focusing on, until something else draws your attention or you finally remember that you were supposed to be mindful.

Getting distracted is another thing you might be tempted to feel frustrated about, but it’s perfectly normal and, in fact, also a great opportunity for learning: each time you get distracted, that’s an opportunity to get better at realizing that you’ve gotten distracted (even if it takes a while). The more often you realize that you stopped being mindful, the better you get at realizing faster – and at some point, on average you’ll be so fast that you’ll be spending more time being mindful than being distracted, and then things really get going.

The moment you realize that you’ve gotten distracted is also the moment you instantly become mindful again and being aware that you’re in the present moment. In a way, the realization is going back to mindfulness. So, there’s nothing special you need to do once you realize you’ve gotten distracted: you’re already back on track.

The lure of speeding it up

In my experience, most of the time people practice mindfulness because they have certain goals in mind: relaxation, dealing with stress or whatever. So, there tends to be a subtle pressure to make certain things happen, e.g. get rid of negative thoughts or feelings. Even if I’ve managed to sell you on the general principle of “giving up control”, this pressure can still leak through in less obvious ways.

Here’s a somewhat subtle misinterpretation of how to practice mindfulness: I might observe my thoughts and feelings while mostly focusing on the comforting notion that if I just keep going for long enough, that will delete the thoughts and feelings. And this is actually sort of true, but there’s a nasty failure mode. I’ll give you an extremely contrived example.

Suppose I feel pain in my hip. I don’t like that pain, so maybe I’ll try being mindful with it and sort of looking forward to the pain going away. This might actually work, for reasons I might cover later on. Problem solved, right? Well, given this example, it’s obvious that the problem probably isn’t solved. Where did that pain come from, after all? If it’s because there’s a fracture in my hip bone, now it feels like the problem is gone but since I’ll keep doing whatever causes the pain, presumably involving putting weight and stress on the bone, eventually it will probably snap and then I’m, to use a technical term, screwed.

The problem isn’t that I was mindful, the problem was the implicit expectation that I’d make the pain go away, which is exactly what happened. Let’s step away again from this example because making the pain go away is obviously the wrong solution. Instead, let’s talk about, say, social anxiety. For example, maybe I start panicking a little when I have to talk to strangers.

So, how might the same failure mode apply to that? Let’s spin it into a little story: somehow I succeed in eliminating the sharp fear that comes with the thought of having to talk to someone. My heart still races when I approach someone to talk to them, but a bit of racing heart and such is hardly much of an issue, right? So, I consider this solved, and in fact I’m now perfectly capable of talking to strangers, but I feel this weird nervous energy whenever I do. And maybe eventually it goes away, but it might just as well get more intense over time. The feelings of fear don’t return, but maybe at some point the bodily sensations get so intense that it feels like I might pass out anyway.

Clearly something went wrong there, right? It’s easy to conclude that these sensations just can’t be helped because I’m a highly sensitive person or whatever, and if we leave it at that, there is no way to change this. But what if we choose to interpret this differently? Let’s just try the following explanation on for size.

Once again, the “trick” I used, accidentally, is to internalize the idea of the fear going away so well that it actually happened… but remember what I said earlier about the steps involved in a mental association? Thing happens – associated thoughts and feelings come up – thoughts and feelings associated to those in return come up – etc.

If all I do is delete a particular feeling from my conscious awareness, that doesn’t mean that the whole chain actually goes away by necessity. Often enough, all it means is that the chain still happens in exactly the same way, except the feeling no longer clears the threshold of consciousness. I can still end up reinforcing the rest of the chain in the same way that I used to reinforce the one link that brought up the feeling of fear.

I’ve actually managed to do this to myself several times, until I realized that I was doing something wrong. It’s just so very tempting to shoot the messenger (the feeling), isn’t it? If only I stop feeling bad, things will be great. The problem is that the feeling is just part of what’s going on, and I might not notice some of the other components. Or, ironically, I might have succeeded in removing conscious awareness of some components in the past, so now I’m concluding that the feeling that I’m still aware of is the most important part, while I’ve already lost awareness of another part that might be even more important.

This might sound a little too convenient, but it turns out that your mind is actually extremely good at figuring out what’s important and what isn’t and can course correct all on its own. I know what you’re going to say: if the mind was so great at doing this stuff, why do I have these useless feelings and thoughts that clearly aren’t important? Well, the problem is that the mind’s notion of what’s important and what isn’t is derived from feedback, and it’s not terribly picky: negative feedback signals importance too. That’s a good heuristic for life-threatening situations: if a bull is charging towards you, that should feel important, right? It should command a lot of your attention. Unfortunately it works in just the same way with “manufactured” negative feedback: if you keep telling yourself how stupid you are when you make mistakes, those mistakes will get a high importance value and you’ll get very, very good at noticing mistakes, and very intensely so.

Part of what mindfulness is about is rebalancing this importance heuristic. By not feeding into the feedback loop, the mind gets to approach conditions in which the importance heuristic actually works. Once you stop feeding into the feelings of how stupid you are, by just noticing the feelings and the associated thoughts without trying to confirm or reject them etc., the mind can evaluate and process the feelings and thoughts under more realistic conditions, and that’s what will ultimately steer it towards letting go of its current associations about them.

However, if you do mindfulness “correctly”, sometimes you experience a side of “it gets worse before it gets better”. While the mind reorganizes the chain of associations, things that you managed to erase from conscious awareness in the past might make a reappearance. Generally speaking that’s a good thing because this allows you to break the feedback patterns over time by applying mindfulness, but it will tend to feel like it’s a bad thing, because if you suddenly feel worse clearly you’re doing it wrong, right?

Well, no. If you were kind of angling for bad feelings (because of the misguided notion that you need more bad feelings before things can resolve themselves), then maybe. The true principle, of course, is that you should let whatever happens happen. Mindfully observing thoughts and emotions might result in them circling around a little more, or in new thoughts and feelings coming up – maybe better ones, maybe worse ones, or in the whole thing just fading. Ideally you assume that whatever happens is the “correct” result, because then you won’t be tempted to steer it in the direction you think it needs to go.

This is a complicated subject and we’ll probably get back to it a few times throughout the rest of this book. The overall takeaway is: let whatever happens happen. If you feel frustrated, that’s okay and you don’t have to fight the feeling. If lots of random thoughts come in, that’s okay and you don’t have to fight them. If you start feeling good or bad for no reason all of a sudden, that’s okay and you don’t have to interfere with it. If you suddenly remember that one time that that thing happened, that’s okay and you don’t have to wrench your mind away from it. If you have trouble letting the thoughts and feelings happen, that’s okay and you don’t have to try and stop having trouble – though if you feel like it’s getting harder to stay mindful, maybe take a bit of a break. Remember, just a few minutes per day can make a world of difference, and you’ll progress much faster if you stick with “slightly challenging” instead of trying to fix everything straight away. You’re trying to start an avalanche through accumulating skill over time, it’s never about getting the whole thing moving in one go with sheer force. It takes less baby steps than you might think.