The benefits of being intentional
By Randy Chittum, Ph.D.
Mindfulness and meditation are now being taught at Google, General Mills and Target — among others. Though corporate America may have just discovered this, it has been taught and practiced for thousands of years. The power of mindfulness is in its simplicity. It is basically the ability to bring and hold your attention where you want it. Seems easy enough? Try it for 30 seconds. For example, try paying attention to your breath for just that long. What do you notice? It is the very definition of something that is simple but not easy. So why bother?
We have become more distracted and overwhelmed. It has been suggested that 95 percent of our actions are not a result of conscious thought. Let that sink in for a minute. This would mean that the vast majority of what we do is a result of unconscious drivers, motivators and habits. This makes a lot of sense as a survival strategy. Once we have figured it out, why assign any more mental capacity to it? Autopilot seems like a good idea. With my newfound habits that keep me from being eaten by the tiger, I can focus on developing better food foraging techniques.
But what happens when the habits to avoid being eaten are no longer effective? What happens when my new world calls on me to do more than survive? The problem isn’t that we have habits; it is that we don’t have transparency into our habits. Because they are unconscious, we lose the ability to see them — and thus to evaluate whether they are working for us.
Switching from narrative to direct
Mindfulness is a way of bringing awareness and insight to our mostly unconsidered behaviors. It requires that we learn to switch from the narrative network to our direct network. Think of the narrative network as the way the world looks through our many filters and interpretations. Think of the direct network as the world actually is. Thanks to the research of brain scientist Norman Farb, we know that these two networks actually exist and that with practice we can learn to more easily notice which one is in operation and switch from one to the other.
The great news is that we know that practice pays off. We also know that you can practice this at any place at any time. Just learning to bring your attention to something, to anything, is beneficial. It can be a body-scan where you bring your attention to different parts of your body and notice what is there. It can be a breathing exercise where you simply notice the quality of your breathing. It can be practicing attentiveness to external events, minus the immediate judgment you would normally have. Or if you do have judgments notice what narrative you have that informs those judgments.
We live in a world of increasing complexity. The future will belong to those who can pause in the midst of the chaos and through intention gain new and bigger perspective.