On habits, thinking and noticing in everyday life
Mindfulness is a term that turns up everywhere today.
In books, in conversations, in psychotherapy.
That it is so present is, to begin with, a good thing — and at the same time the term has become blurrier for it.
Mindfulness is nothing new.
It was recognised as helpful a very long time ago — and it touches something fundamental in being human.
At the same time the term now often seems out of focus.
And it is not always clear what is actually meant by it.
Put simply: mindfulness means noticing what is happening — while it is happening.
That sounds obvious.
It is not.
Of course we know that we are walking, speaking or reading.
But often that happens more or less in passing.
Attention is tied up — in thoughts about what has been,
in ideas about what is to come,
in inner conversations that keep repeating.
Looked at soberly, many people spend a large part of their lives this way.
Not in the direct experience of what is happening — but in thoughts about it.
Thinking is not the problem at all.
On the contrary: it is a fundamental capacity.
It gets more difficult where thoughts take on a life of their own.
Where they run along the same tracks again and again.
And we no longer notice that we are following them.
Exercises can support us in recognising that.
What matters, though, is not whether a technique is carried out correctly,
but whether we notice what is happening.
We know it from everyday life:
you read a text — and suddenly notice you have not really taken in the last few sentences.
Or you listen to someone — and your mind is somewhere else entirely.
That is nothing special.
It is rather the normal state.
It is not harmless, however.
Because it means that a large part of what we do we do not really register at all.
Another misunderstanding lies in confusing mindfulness with a particular kind of “looking after yourself” —
that is, with taking more room for yourself or asserting your own needs.
That has little to do with what is meant here.
Noticing what is happening can be very plain.
Feeling that you are breathing.
Noticing that you are sitting. Registering that thoughts turn up — and go again, if you do not get entangled in them.
In doing so something can become visible that otherwise stays in the background.
Not as a special insight or as a result.
But as a first recognition of what we do most of the time without noticing it.
What develops out of that cannot be manufactured.
But without this noticing it does not begin.