Nonjudgement as an Element of Mindfulness
Mindfulness is about the present moment; Not what you think of the present moment.
Try this: Pull up a famous piece of art on your phone or computer. (You can also do the exercise with a piece of music if you prefer). As you look at it notice that your mind wants to make judgements about it. You start to decide if you “like it” or not. You start to evaluate the talents of the artist and maybe start to wonder abstractly about her life or what the inspiration for the piece was. You stop perceiving the shapes and colors before you and you start judging. With a little practice you can start to notice how these processes of the brain “feel” different than simply noticing the colors and textures. The seeing is one part. The judgments are another part.
In my humble opinion, this is the most challenging part of practicing mindfulness. To be Human is to Judge. It comes as naturally as breathing. And for the record it’s not necessarily bad. However, where practicing mindfulness can serve us is to take us off autopilot and help us learn that our judgments are not “fact”, they are not “what is”. Instead, they are our version of reality pasted over what actually is. The challenge of mindfulness is not to necessarily completely overcome judgment but to remain eternally curious about how our mind does it and to discern “The Truth” from our perception of The Truth. This is a journey that is practiced for a lifetime.
In Mindfulness in Plain English Bhante Henepola Gunaratana writes:
“When you first become aware of something, there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it. That is a state of awareness. Ordinarily, this state is short-lived. It is that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just before you objectify it, clamp down on it mentally, and segregate it from the rest of existence. It takes place just before you start thinking about it—before your mind says, “Oh, it’s a dog.” That flowing, soft-focused moment of pure awareness is mindfulness. In that brief flashing mind-moment you experience a thing as an un-thing. You experience a softly flowing moment of pure experience that is interlocked with the rest of reality, not separate from it...In the process of ordinary perception, the mindfulness step is so fleeting as to be unobservable. We have developed the habit of squandering our attention on all the remaining steps, focusing on the perception, cognizing the perception, labeling it, and most of all, getting involved in a long string of symbolic thought about it. That original moment of mindfulness is rapidly passed over. It is the purpose of vipassana meditation to train us to prolong that moment of awareness.”
To get started with some mindfulness ideas click here!
Comments