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How to Adjust Your Default Setting

Read an excerpt from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners and learn how shifting to mindfulness can lead to happier, healthier living.
What is unfolding when nothing much of anything is going on with you?

I encourage you to check out for yourself what is going on at such times. For most of us, usually it is thinking. Thinking is going on. It takes lots of different forms.

Thinking seems to constitute our "default setting" rather than awareness.

It is a good thing to notice, because in this way, we might slowly shift from this automatic reverting to thinking over and over again to another mode of mind that may stand us in far better stead, namely awareness itself. Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought.

As soon as you take your seat or lie down to meditate, the first thing you will notice is that the mind has a life of its own. It just goes on and on and on: thinking, musing, fantasizing, planning, anticipating, worrying, liking, disliking, remembering, forgetting, evaluating, reacting, telling itself stories—a seemingly endless stream of activity that you may not have ever noticed in quite this way until you put out the welcome mat for a few moments of non-doing, of just being.

And what is more, now that you have decided to cultivate greater mindfulness in your life, your mind is at risk for filling up with a host of new ideas and opinions—about meditation, about mindfulness, about how well you're doing or not doing, about whether you are doing it right—in addition to all the other ideas and opinions swirling around in the mind.

It is a bit like television sports commentary. There is what is actually going on in the game, and then there is the endless commentary. When you begin a formal meditation practice, it is almost inevitable that you will now be subject to meditation commentary to one degree or another. It can fill the space of the mind. Yet it is not the meditation any more than the play-by-play is the game itself.

Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way—a first-order, first-person experience—rather than filtered through the mind of another. In the case of meditation it is the same, except your own thoughts are doing the broadcast commentary, turning a first-order direct experience of the moment into a second-order story about it: how hard it is, how great it is, and on and on and on.

On some occasions your thoughts might tell you how boring meditation is, how silly you were for thinking that this non-doing approach might be of any value, given that it seems to bring up a good deal of discomfort, tension, boredom, and impatience. You might find yourself questioning the value of awareness, wondering, for instance, how awareness of how uncomfortable you are could possibly "liberate" you, or reduce your stress and anxiety, or help you in any way at all above and beyond just wasting time and succumbing to endless tedium.

This is what the thought-stream does, and that is precisely why we need to become intimate with our minds through careful observation. Otherwise, thinking completely dominates our lives and colors everything we feel and do and care about. And you are not special in this regard. Everybody has a similar thought-stream running 24/7, often without realizing it at all.

How to Adjust Your Default Setting

Read an excerpt from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners and learn how shifting to mindfulness can lead to happier, healthier living.
Woman meditating
What is unfolding when nothing much of anything is going on with you?

I encourage you to check out for yourself what is going on at such times. For most of us, usually it is thinking. Thinking is going on. It takes lots of different forms.

Thinking seems to constitute our "default setting" rather than awareness.

It is a good thing to notice, because in this way, we might slowly shift from this automatic reverting to thinking over and over again to another mode of mind that may stand us in far better stead, namely awareness itself. Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought.

As soon as you take your seat or lie down to meditate, the first thing you will notice is that the mind has a life of its own. It just goes on and on and on: thinking, musing, fantasizing, planning, anticipating, worrying, liking, disliking, remembering, forgetting, evaluating, reacting, telling itself stories—a seemingly endless stream of activity that you may not have ever noticed in quite this way until you put out the welcome mat for a few moments of non-doing, of just being.

And what is more, now that you have decided to cultivate greater mindfulness in your life, your mind is at risk for filling up with a host of new ideas and opinions—about meditation, about mindfulness, about how well you're doing or not doing, about whether you are doing it right—in addition to all the other ideas and opinions swirling around in the mind.

It is a bit like television sports commentary. There is what is actually going on in the game, and then there is the endless commentary. When you begin a formal meditation practice, it is almost inevitable that you will now be subject to meditation commentary to one degree or another. It can fill the space of the mind. Yet it is not the meditation any more than the play-by-play is the game itself.

Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way—a first-order, first-person experience—rather than filtered through the mind of another. In the case of meditation it is the same, except your own thoughts are doing the broadcast commentary, turning a first-order direct experience of the moment into a second-order story about it: how hard it is, how great it is, and on and on and on.

On some occasions your thoughts might tell you how boring meditation is, how silly you were for thinking that this non-doing approach might be of any value, given that it seems to bring up a good deal of discomfort, tension, boredom, and impatience. You might find yourself questioning the value of awareness, wondering, for instance, how awareness of how uncomfortable you are could possibly "liberate" you, or reduce your stress and anxiety, or help you in any way at all above and beyond just wasting time and succumbing to endless tedium.

This is what the thought-stream does, and that is precisely why we need to become intimate with our minds through careful observation. Otherwise, thinking completely dominates our lives and colors everything we feel and do and care about. And you are not special in this regard. Everybody has a similar thought-stream running 24/7, often without realizing it at all.
Woman meditating
As we learn how to stabilize our paying attention and how to allow objects in the field of awareness to become more vivid—to see them with greater clarity, to drop beneath the surface of appearances—we are actually learning how to inhabit and how to rest in this capacity for awareness that is already ours. It can accompany us moment by moment by moment as we journey through our lives as they unfold through thick and thin. Each one of us can learn to rely on that awareness, on the power of mindfulness, to live our lives as if how we live them in the only moment we are ever alive really matters. As you will find out more and more through continued practice, it does matter.

We are very much in the habit of thinking of ourselves in small, contracted ways—and of identifying with the content of our thoughts, emotions, and the narrative we build about ourselves—based on how much we like or dislike what is happening to us. This is our default mode. The power of mindfulness is the power to examine those self-identifications and their consequences and the power to examine the views and perspectives we adopt so reflexively and automatically and then proceed to think are us. The power of mindfulness lies in paying attention in a different, larger way to the actuality of life unfolding moment by moment by moment. It allows us to shift from mindlessness to mindfulness.

In the end, the healing and transformative power of mindfulness lies in paying attention to the miracle and beauty of our very being and in the expanded possibilities for being, knowing, and doing within a life that is lived and met and held in awareness and deep kindness in each unfolding moment. So as you continue with the cultivation of mindfulness in your life, may you, as the Navajo blessing goes, "walk in beauty."

And may you realize that you already do

Excerpted from Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life. By Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD. Copyright © 2012 Jon Kabat-Zinn. Published by Sounds True.

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