Mindfulness: Has Your Ego Slipped Inside Your Witness?

Orange was the new black. Now mindfulness has trumped orange and is indeed, the newest black. Talk in social media is that everyone is practicing it, "doing" mindfulness, becoming spiritual people. Sounds good!  Becoming aware and conscious of what is happening in the present moment, both inside and outside our body, is a powerful and life changing skill. Mindfulness involves learning to witness our own thoughts and feelings, to observe them as they pass by, like weather or clouds moving through an open sky. The process of becoming aware of the words that our mind rattles out, as well as the feelings and sensations it belches up, frees us to be able to see our internal conditions without having to react to or be controlled by them. Mindfulness offers us a seat in the audience to the show that is our own mind. Or, put another way, a calm shore from which to watch the wild ocean that is the human mind. 

The point of mindfulness, ultimately, is to get free from the tyranny of ego mind, to unhook our being and our identity from the unstable mind. The goal is to be able to see what is happening inside ourselves, without ownership, judgment or reaction. And simultaneously, to lose our great belief in and reverence for the productions of our mind. When we are identified with mind, that is, believe that we are only our mind, we are constantly being dragged around by it, having to respond to and interact with each thought and feeling it generates, regardless of whether it is interesting, important or serves us in any way. Mindfulness gives us a seat from which to watch the movements of mind, its carnival of cravings, complaints and opinions. Without the need to react to everything the mind suggests, we are then free to choose where to place our attention, and consequently, how to live our life. Mindfulness allows us to use mind for the incredible tool that it is, but without needing to be the mind. Mindfulness helps us to discover the awareness to which our mind’s play appears. I think even our minds would agree to such an opportunity, at least as a concept.

While any toe dipped in the practice of awareness is beneficial, there is a trend in mindfulness, a habit if you will, which can interfere with and obstruct the full power of the practice. Without awareness of this habit, we can spend many years lost and asleep in yet another ego prison, another trap of the mind, and as a result miss out on the real gifts of mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is trendy; it’s hip. This is good news. But we must be careful that like other trends, this one does not get swallowed up in the next stream of orange, girls, yoga, tats and the like. With mindfulness on the radar, let’s not miss the chance to change what this powerful practice can change, namely, who and how we are.

The dangerous habit is this: The mindful witness itself is becoming yet another form of ego, a new identity, a new somebody that we wear with pride. That said, we must be mindful that the one who is becoming aware of the mind is not also being kidnapped by the mind. Take the following scenario… You become aware (through your mindfulness practice) that certain thoughts are arising within you, let’s say worry thoughts. This is a good step; there is a little space between you and your mind and you are witnessing what your mind is up to. But don’t rest yet… and don’t congratulate yourself yet either. What you may not be aware of is that the witness who noticed those worried thoughts has her own ideas about what she observed. For example, she may not like that such thoughts are arising inside you. She may judge and reject you as the person responsible for thinking such worried thoughts. Or, perhaps, she may feel pride and arrogance at being able to notice such thoughts, She may identify you as someone spiritual whose "got" awareness practice down. In either case, the mindful witness here is not a mindful witness at all, but rather ego mind hiding inside a new costume. This presence masquerading as mindful witness is not actually willing to observe mind as separate and autonomous from you, with its own random happenings-inside your awareness. This mind in a costume of mindfulness blames or congratulates you for its own output, and in so doing, surreptitiously merges you again with itself. The witness in this case is not an impartial witness, not true awareness, not a path to freedom. Rather, this witness is just a sub-structure of the very ego mind you are trying to observe, and liberate from. This witness will lead you down the same rabbit hole of mind and waste your time in the process, creating a whole new spiritual ego. The mind in its cleverness puts itself everywhere. It just does this; it is not your failing but rather something else to simply notice.

In our practices to observe the ego mind, we must remember and be ever conscious of the mind’s sheer brilliance and fierce survival skills. It doesn’t want to be watched. The ego mind will camouflage itself in infinite hiding places in an effort to avoid direct light upon it. It will mask itself as awareness, compassion, spirituality, wisdom and all the best places, all in order to keep from being seen, from becoming the object and no longer the subject. The mind will take on whatever traits it needs to in order to avoid a status demotion from our identity and the captain of the self-ship to just a worker bee, a tool that awareness can use when needed. Ego mind will take up residence in any location that is not watched vigilantly. So be vigilant. Don’t lose the chance that mindfulness practice offers, don’t go back to sleep inside another incarnation of mind itself.

In order to prevent the mind from posing inside the mindful witness, ask yourself a simple question again and again… and again. With each observation, each witnessing of something happening inside you, a thought, feeling or sensation, ask the following: Is there a feeling about the feeling, a thought about the thought? Observe this. And furthermore, Who or what identity is here now? Who is there witnessing what is being witnessed now? After some practice this way, you may realize that the mind is a bit like one of those Russian dolls, each one inside another. Behind each thought sits another thought, a thought about the thought, and another, and another, each a little harder perhaps to catch sight of. Behind each identity sits another identity, and another… and another. The place where they no longer come, where what is observed is no longer observed by an ego someone or something, when we are just eyes seeing, without reaction, without good or bad… this is the place towards which we practice. This is what warrants the buzz at the water cooler.

Mindfulness is an ancient and powerful practice and well deserving of all the attention it is receiving of late. Careful though, mindfulness is more than a social media trend, more that just an “About” entry on a Facebook page. True mindfulness is a challenge that requires the fierceness of an awareness warrior, but it is a challenge that is well worth the effort. Mindfulness practice requires not only becoming aware of what the mind is saying at any moment, but also of how that very same mind seeks to inhabit the ears of the one who listens. Simply put, don’t take your eyes or ears off your mind, not even for a moment—not even if it says it’s napping, it isn’t. When you become aware of the way the mind sneaks its way behind the eyes of the witness, and steals the seat of the one who is observing, then, you are indeed free—free to watch and experience yourself and your life radically change. This is mindfulness in its fullness.

Stop Hating Yourself For Hating Vacation

I have a confession: I am really bad at vacation. More to the point, I am really bad at doing nothing. When I say doing nothing, I don't mean not having an activity or a plan, at that I am quite skilled. Rather, the doing nothing that is so hard is that of not being engaged in some kind of purposeful endeavor: creating, learning, developing, figuring out, etc.

On a positive note, being really bad at doing nothing has served me well in life. While I am curious and energetic by nature, still, the anxiety that accompanies not being engaged in something has contributed immensely to my productivity. Not being able to do nothing has condemned me to a fate of continual learning, creating, and ultimately, accomplishing. You could say that not being able to do nothing has made me quite an achiever.

While it feels good to be productive, it doesn't feel good to not know how to NOT be productive. Being disengaged can feel like a death sentence, and yet, it is a part of life. We cannot be engaged all the time; we cannot outrun downtime. Knowing that there is a part of life that I'm really bad at, that feels like a death sentence, has always loomed menacingly in the background of my consciousness. It moved to the foreground this last week on the yearly family beach holiday. While reading, dialogue and just plain thinking are always available, for the most part family beach vacations are a time when we are purposefully not engaging our minds, but rather hanging out doing a whole lot of nothing (unless you consider sipping frozen drinks a something). We are on holiday, to some degree, with the precise intention of disengaging our minds. What to do then when your mind doesn't disengage but there is nowhere to put it. Herein lies the problem.

For years I have berated myself for having such a hard time on vacation, and felt disappointed in the fact that for the first five days of holiday I feel like a trapped animal pacing the bars of a too small cage. Why is it so hard for me to relax and do nothing, create nothing, think about nothing, just be here in the nothingness? I have asked myself this question on innumerable occasions (in a not very compassionate tone). Why must I always have a bone for my mind to chew on? After all these years of spiritual practice and meditation, am I really just as unable to sit still in the open, undirected space, to be awareness without an object of that awareness?

And then something amazing happened on this holiday. It seems that all the years of spiritual practice kind of kicked in. What changed wasn't so much "me" or "my" experience of doing nothing, but rather my relationship with that "me" and "my" experience. On the third day of this year's beach holiday I woke up edgy and uncomfortable, the way I usually do on vacation, but with the profound realization that this IS the way I experience beach holidays. I do feel caged in and claustrophobic with an underlying “get me out of here” anxiety—at least for the first four or five days, just in time to enjoy one or two days and then go home again. I woke up that third morning to the realization that this simply is the way I'm wired. My experience is not supposed to be another way, better or more peaceful. I am not supposed to be another way. To know this was so simple, but oh so life changing!

What changed on this holiday was not how I experience vacation but my struggle against that experience. Instead of trying to will or berate myself into enjoying the holiday, I started observing myself as that edgy trapped animal. So too, I started compassionately allowing myself the right to do whatever I needed to do to feel less trapped. I gave myself more time to meditate and run. While I had always offered myself this in the past, I now gave it to myself without guilt or remorse, as one would offer insulin to a diabetic. I, the larger awareness, could then be okay while my mind frantically burned, struggling against having nothing to sink its teeth into.

It is not so much the difficulty that we experience that causes the worst pain but rather, the way we struggle against that difficulty, as if we are not supposed to have it. Finally, after many years of vacationing in agitation, I let go of this belief, that it could be any other way, and that I could or should be someone who can transition out of her engaged life at home and immediately start enjoying nothingness, simply because it's warm, I'm with family, and most of all, it's vacation—the very time I am supposed to be having fun. Finally, I welcomed the mind that actually lives in this body, the one that doesn't enjoy the first few days of really…anything. With this acceptance, I became kind of okay.

When I stopped judging myself for the experience I was having, stopped hating myself for hating vacation, I discovered two wonderful things: humor and compassion. Humor, in that I could suddenly laugh at my persistent irritation and overwhelming restlessness, and my complete inability to land in the loveliest of places. And, that after all the effort that it took to get there, all the waiting for it come, all the counting down of the days, the truth is I really wanted to be anywhere else. Compassion, in that I could feel loving kindness toward my own mind, my own self. I certainly don't want this to be the way that I experience holidays, and yet it is. At last, I could laugh and empathize with my own uncomfortable nature, a part I had long rejected. What a different place I had discovered simply as a result of dropping the fight against what is happening. We believe that suffering will end when we remove the experiences that are difficult and unlikable. That would certainly make sense. But the truth is counter-intuitive. We remove the primary cause of suffering when we stop criticizing and trying to change our experience as it actually is. We find equanimity when we surrender to the chaos. We find peace and self-love when we agree to meet and welcome the parts of ourselves that we enjoy and even more importantly, the parts we don't.