The secret of mindfulness meditation

I don't know why introductions to mindfulness don't tell you this.

One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It's not a "secret" in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I'm most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove's medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I've listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it's easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace's meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove's likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it's become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

Rather, the point is about what happens when you lose focus.

Instructions to meditators will likely include the words "when your mind drifts away from the focus of attention…" Not if, when. You will find your mind drifting away, certainly as a beginning meditator, and very likely even if – like me – you've been doing it several times a week for over a decade. It may drift to feelings of anxiety in your torso, to plans for the future, to memories, to abstract thoughts, to sounds, or to any number of other things. I can say from my experience that I am not actually significantly better at keeping my attention focused on an object of concentration, like the breath, than I was when I started regular meditation practice over ten years ago.

And that's fine, because keeping focused on the breath is not the point!

Rather, the key to mindfulness meditation is in what follows the words "when your mind drifts away from the focus of attention…" That is: when you drift away, you notice and observe that your mind has drifted away, and then you redirect your attention away from the thing you drifted to and back to the original focus, the breath or bodily sensations. It doesn't matter so much what that focus is. What matters is just that you have something that is relatively easily focused on, like the breath – so that when your mind drifts away, you have something to turn it back to. That allows you to practise that turning of attention, and that is crucial.

Because it's that turning of attention that makes mindfulness meditation a real game-changer. Our minds, it turns out, are incredibly unruly – Śāntideva compares them to an elephant in heat, which gets aggressive and goes on a rampage. Actually keeping your attention entirely focused on a simple object like the breath can sound simple, but once you try to do it you realize it's nearly impossible. When we try, we come quickly to see that we really are not in control of our own minds – a truth that sufferers of depression know all too well. In my view that's the most important truth in the Buddhist view of non-self: the self is not a unified whole, it's a set of fragments often working at cross-purposes. And your attention is going to keep zooming in different directions whether you want it to or not. But what you can learn to do, with practice, is noticing that zooming – and then returning your focus to the object of concentration. The point is not to strengthen your focus itself, to keep focused on the object without being distracted – it's to learn to notice the loss of focus, and return.

Because once you learn to do that – to notice your mind's distractions as they happen – then you can also do that noticing when you're not meditating. When you mean to be writing a project proposal or eating dinner or just walking, your mind will flit to that person who wronged you or your worries about the future or that person you're really lusting after, thus putting your mind in a harmful state of anger or fear or craving that it wasn't in before. If you notice that as it happens, you reduce the power it all has over you. You can look at the anger arising, say "oh yeah, there's the anger", and return to whatever else you were doing – which may well be something considerably more pleasant.

Sit in a corner and don't think about this monkey. Go on, try. (Image copyright Susan Flashman, Adobe Stock.)

This practice, of noticing undesired thoughts and feelings and turning one's attention back away from them, seems to me the most effective way of getting one's harmful emotions under control. Fighting those harmful emotions only seems to strengthen them. Likewise with thoughts. My family had the expression "it's like sitting in a corner not thinking of a white monkey" – as in, the moment you try to not think of a white monkey, you will wind up thinking of one way more often. You can't make yourself not have certain thoughts or emotions. But what you can do is notice them, calmly, with an "oh yeah, there it is" or other non-judgemental observation – which greatly diminishes their hold. It doesn't necessarily get rid of them! But it's remarkable how much their intensity diminishes when you are able to just look at them, like a scientist or other detached observer, and say "oh yeah, there it is." That makes your life a lot better; it's definitely done so for mine. And that, as far as I can tell, is what mindfulness meditation is really about.