On Mindfulness: Being Still and Being Awake

Mindfulness practice has been a staple of psychological interventions since Jon Kabat-Zinn popularized the method decades ago. In the field of pain recovery, this is no different. People will regularly use the words ‘be mindful.’ About anything. Even in PRT and somatic tracking we say just observe the sensation, notice your thoughts without judgment – and for a person in pain, this well-meant instruction can quietly become one more task to perform and one more thing to fail at. Am I doing it right? Why can’t I stop judging? Often the practice of ‘mindfulness,’ when handed over as a technique, produces the very striving it was supposed to dissolve.

I want to offer a different definition, and it comes out of practice rather than theory.

The popular definition

In modern psychology, mindfulness has come to mean something close to nonjudgmental attention: the bare observing of experience as it arises. As a description this is accurate. Bare, nonjudgmental attention really is what the mind does in certain moments. However, it seems to me that nonjudgmental attention is frequently administered more broadly, with an instrumental viewpoint. It has become an instruction, a little like telling someone ‘Just relax.’ Moreover, I often hear people using the term in ways that suggest a muted form of vigilance.

People state things like ‘We need to be mindful of our impact on the environment, of our biases, of x, y, z.’ And I often wonder when the pop-culture turn occurred where mindfulness became operationalized as a type of moralistic performance-enhancement tool. Quietly, over time, the meaning of mindfulness has changed. There has been some concept creep in the common lexicon that strays beyond its nonjudgmental roots. Mindfulness has somehow shifted away from nonjudgmentally observing what is into a subtle directive to be better.

It is no surprise then that many people who have tried mindfulness to help relieve pain and other symptoms can experience discouragement in its process. When it is deployed with an implicit directive to be better, (mindful) attention becomes another means for training the nervous system to remain vigilant: exactly the opposite of what a sensitized nervous system requires to find a way out of pain.

In this reflection I consider an alternative drawn from my near thirty years of meditation. Mindfulness is better understood as a consequence of two conditions of meditative practice: (1) being still; and (2) being awake. Taken this way, nonjudgmental attention is one thread of a richer texture of meditative practice. And while it is often deployed as a tool for modern life – especially among mental health practitioners – I wish to hint here at what I believe is its deeper context.

Thirty years of sitting: a brief phenomenology

I have practiced meditation for about thirty years, in a system that includes a practice called ‘oblivion sitting.’ The practice is remarkably simple: you sit in a stable posture – ideally the lotus position – and remain still with the eyes open anywhere from ten to forty minutes. That is all. Stillness, and open eyes.

What happens as a consequence is equally remarkable. At the beginning of a session the mind is anything but still. Thoughts flutter and dart; the body buzzes with habituated micro-movements; the imagination casts projections, replays patterns, and throws triggers and fragmented thoughts in waves. But in time as the practice develops – when the body settles into the ground, eyes open, awake – the content of the mind begins to slow. It calms. And eventually the fluttering thins out into something like emptiness. Bare attention. Bare awareness.

The Tibetan Buddhist Bön tradition describes something close to this: ‘the clear light.’ A state where the content of thought clears and there is nothing to attach to. And yet there is no blankness either – just an empty luminosity. No striving for solutions. No casting about from past to future. No turbulence. And no place for judgment to even occur.

The consequence in ordinary life

The most interesting part comes after the session, not during it. Depending on the day, there is an aftereffect: a stillness that carries into everyday life. Ordinary activities – attending to the dishes, conversing with others, or working on some writing – carry an echo of the same clear light running underneath, the same bare awareness. If you wanted to, you could call it nonjudgmental attention. But it is crucial to see that it is not being performed. No one is standing over the moment reminding themselves to be nonjudgmental. It is simply there, as a consequence.

Life becomes more intimately linked with what Jaak Panksepp would label as PLAY circuitry: a primary mammalian emotional system associated with well-being. Whatever the senses land on, there is a lightness, a buoyancy, and sometimes something close to awe. One begins to play with the sensory world rather than brace against it, and each moment of ordinary existence takes on a quality of shimmering delight. Stillness and wakefulness, when practiced, open effortlessly into play.

Why this matters if you are in pain

For someone living with persistent pain, this reframing is not academic. If mindfulness is a task, then it is one more arena in which to strive, to grade yourself, to fall short – and striving is precisely what an overreactive nervous system does not need more of. Worse, the instruction to observe the pain can collapse into exactly the kind of anxious self-monitoring that keeps pain amplified: the vigilant, minute-by-minute checking of how bad is it right now.

But if mindfulness is a consequence, everything changes. You are no longer responsible for producing the state. You are only responsible for taking up its two conditions – being still, being awake – and letting the rest follow.

How, then, does one practice mindfulness in this sense? Well, my first suggestion is to actually practice the act of stillness and wakefulness in a type of formal sitting meditation. No one is expecting the lotus position here, or forty minutes. One or two minutes sitting in an upright position on a solid chair is manageable. The benefits accrued over time for even this bit of training are well worth it. There are many good books out there about meditation. The one I still recommend is Katsuki Sekida’s Zen Training.

But if two minutes is still unmanageable, then I suggest practicing the conditions in everyday life. Rather than telling yourself to be nonjudgmental, just turn toward your pain and/or symptom, and feel it. Be still with it for a few moments. And then wakefully notice what you feel. Perhaps thoughts emerge, or other sensations, or an increase in intensity, or a decrease, or an emotion. Whatever it is, simply be still with it and wakefully notice what happens. That’s it. Be still and contact the sensation. Be awake and follow what occurs next.

In both of these practices, rather than striving for the ‘mindful destination,’ you simply contact sensations and wakefully follow along. No pressure to perform anything. As you do, the self-monitoring loop can release. And with the release a new foundation opens, on a good day, to a deepening feeling of love, care, and play.

A note on method – this is a phenomenological piece: it describes the practice from the inside, drawn from experience, rather than making claims from the research literature.