Session Ten

Embracing Impermanence

Objective:
Unlearn happy-talk indoctrination that breeds mindlessness.

Pivot toward mindfulness.

Nothing in the world is permanent,
and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last,
but surely we’re still more foolish not to take
delight in it while we have it.”

—W. Somerset Maugham

J
ackie drops her kindergartener Lexi at school, where the five-year-old starts her day on her mat, listening to her teacher read Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids. Jackie heads to work, where the lunch-and-learn session of the day is Mindfulness: How to Cultivate Presence Amidst Your Busy Workday. Later that day, her wife, Peggy, comes home gushing over NPR’s story on Buddhist monk Haemin Sunin’s promotion of peace and mindfulness via Twitter, of all places. As she curls up into bed, she flips through the special “Mindfulness” edition of TIME magazine she bought a few months back but had been too busy to read. Maybe there was something to all this.

Mindfulness seems to have become an overnight sensation, even though it has been around for more than 2,600 years, originating within Buddhist teachings. Ever since molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn introduced it in the late 1970s as an antidote to stress, it’s been gaining traction. At first, it seemed to draw a radical type of New Age crowd, but soon became accessible even to those who wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to walk across burning coals or drink Kombucha, but would still welcome a little Zen in their crazy, busy lives.

Mindfulness has become as mainstream as sushi and acupuncture. Thank you, East, for all these wonders of life. Zinn defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

Mindfulness

Academic Definition

Mindfulness, a state of active consciousness and conscientiousness, is defined in a wide variety of ways across the scholarly literature and therapeutic realms. Mindfulness helps us observe, acknowledge, and accept feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations without judgment.

Street Definition

Mindfulness is like a first cousin to consciousness. It helps us step out of the ring from our thoughts and feelings, and watch them from afar, without having to declare them as winners or losers, but just calling the shots in real time. It steers us away from overreacting to difficulty, but not in a way that forces us into pretending to be shiny, happy people. Mindfulness helps us better appreciate positive circumstances and tolerate unpleasant ones. #observe #acceptance #nonjudgmental

Ironically, mindfulness—the very thing that’s supposed to help us empty out and breathe a little deeper—seems to be for sale. You wonder what the Buddha would think about it becoming a white-hot commodity, generating over $4 billion in sales in 2016. There is palpable enthusiasm for everything from the 12 million adult coloring books sold in 2015 to the 100,000 mindfulness books sold, to the 700-plus apps emerging to help us eat, walk, commute, and work a little more mindfully. The “new” antidote for modern living is everywhere we turn.

Entrepreneurs are experimenting with mindfulness as a success hack, using it to improve instincts. Companies eager to boost employee productivity are paying a fortune to set up quiet spaces and teach employees to “focus on regulating breath” and “notice sensations without judgment.” Schools are bringing in peace teachers and building mindful moments into classroom routines, eager to improve student performance and behavior.

Embrace Your Periphery

Mindfulness doesn’t come as fast as marketers trying to sell it would like us to believe, but it can be put into place without a lot of fanfare. The term itself often gets used interchangeably with the activities that help us corral ourselves toward a more neutral, observant state. The most well-known pathway is meditation, which helps bring mental processes into greater focus. Like metacognition and critical thinking, mindfulness practices help us check in on our thinking, bringing us to awareness that allows us to make needed tweaks and build agility. We enhance our calmness, clarity, and concentration.

While mindfulness has certainly had a lot of help from entities eager to sell it or improve their bottom lines, it’s not just another gimmicky self-help intervention or way to line someone’s pockets. Science backs it.

Not only has the concept originating from Buddhism become a great source of fascination in the popular press, but mindfulness is rocking it across the academic and scientific literature. Researchers have put in overtime mining for the reasons behind its benefits to our well-being. They seem to have struck oil—demonstrating that mindfulness practices can rewire the brain’s responses, helping with learning, memory, rational thinking, empathy, and compassion. No wonder it’s selling like hotcakes.

Know the Science Behind Mindfulness

Mindfulness isn’t just the latest fad. It has empirically supported benefits. Research affirms its power in helping reduce rumination through meta-awareness. It helps us shift from unproductive thinking to new states of attention and awareness that aid in keeping our emotions in check—aka emotional regulation.

In 2008, for example, researchers Richard Chambers, Barbara Chuen Yee Lo, and Nicolas Allen took twenty new meditators to a ten-day intensive mindfulness meditation retreat. After all was said and done, the retreat participants reported fewer depressive symptoms, the ability to stick with tasks longer, and improved affect.

In addition, Hoffman and colleagues meta-analysis (for them, this meant analyzing the findings of twenty-nine studies) exploring the use of mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy affirmed its benefits in improving affective and cognitive processes that commonly accompany anxiety and depression symptoms.

Another line of research suggests that in addition to helping people become less reactive, mindfulness meditation may also give them greater cognitive flexibility and agility. One study found that people who practice mindfulness meditation appear to develop the skill of self-observation, which neurologically disengages the automatic pathways that were created by prior learning and enables present-
moment input to be integrated in a new way. It also helps spur on adaptive responses to stressful situations.

Mindfulness is like medicine for the brain—and our weary souls. It helps us take pause from our shopping, running around, and overworking. It helps us to simply notice what’s happening, almost like we are a fly on the wall of our brains. When something stimulates us, we don’t immediately rush to conclusions. Instead we take stock of what thoughts are percolating and what sensations are bubbling up, and we simply observe, rather than try to immediately appraise or solve it.

Mindfulness helps us avoid disproportionate extremes in positivity and negativity. In other words, we don’t have to be all hunky-dory when things are off-kilter, sugarcoating the hard stuff. We don’t have to take the bait of our racing hearts and raging emotions when we’re raw and uncut either. We can ride out the disruptions happening in the periphery, outside the realms of our control—the ones that are harder to manage because we rarely bring them up in our happy talk.

As we improve in our abilities to experience this on-the-spot full-picture neutrality, we can transfer it into a variety of areas of our lives. We can hang out in the periphery without totally freaking out. It helps us remain present even in precarious situations, seeing through a more holistic and realistic lens. It doesn’t happen magically, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist either. It starts with revamping the way we talk about life.

Make Room for Grief and Praise

Happy-talk indoctrination floods our consciousness from an early age. There’s an endless plethora of self-help accolades: “You can do it. You can do anything. Just put your mind to it.” We’re always taught there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but skip over the dark forces of the tunnel. We’re told “keep typing yellow smiley faces and things will get better. Everything is going to be fine.” We long for these messages to be true, to be able to soften life’s blows with expedient relief and simple strategies.

It’s not just the strains of modern living that we’re dealing with. A tremendous amount of conscious and subconscious work is required to come to terms with deeper life cycles, ones that are hard to reconcile, ones that do not resolve even when Tony Robbins shows up at your house for a private motivational session, or that Leslie Knope and all her binders couldn’t fix. The kind of cycles can keep you from laughing even after binge watching Ellen DeGeneres for days.

Humor and motivation help us through dark moments, for sure. Sometimes we take life way too seriously and make things more complicated than we need to. A strong dose of fun and positivity can work wonders, contributing powerfully to coping and resilience.

At the same time, overreliance on trite sayings can become dysfunctional, too. We explain complexity with simple slogans. We try to avoid confronting realities of the human condition that even the Great Houdini couldn’t escape, the kind that make even the most agile of us want to numb out: unwanted change, oppression, discrimination, war, poverty, losing people we love, aging, our own imminent death. Deep cycles of generational suffering permeate our lives.

Glennon Doyle, author of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Beautiful, Messy Life, calls life “brutiful,” saying that both the beauty and brutality of life need to be embraced to live and love fully. She says, “Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They’re sacred. They are part of each person’s journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That’s the one fear you can alleviate.”

When we rely on too much happy talk we turn our backs on the chance to embrace life’s “brutiful” nature, to offer the simultaneous grief and praise that Martín Prechtel writes about in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. He calls grief the “art behind all real art,” explaining the connections between both processes—praise being an expression of grieving what we love but know will eventually lose; the grief a form of praise for love that is lost. He emphasizes the interconnected presence of both in our lives:

Grief permeates life and can take many forms, but grief can never be outrun or simply thought away, transcended or meditated into non-existence. Necessary grief when shunned or unattended can easily hide for years, even generations in the skeletal structure of the family collective psyche. Like light, matter, sound, and energy, grief will eventually manifest even among those who did not consciously experience the loss.

I first learned about Prechtel’s work at an intimate coffeehouse show featuring American musician Glen Phillips, who was mourning the loss of his twenty-plus-year marriage. I’ve followed Glen closely his entire career, a committed if not obsessed fan of his melancholic music since my friend Karen Porter handed me half her Walkman muff pumping out a “Fear” cassette at our high school lunch table.

That table was the sacred place where we joked, sang, grumbled about our teachers, and planned our futures. Margo wanted to be a flight attendant so that she could see the world. Karen wanted to be a vet because every time she saw a dog she freaked out, in a good way. Gina wanted to be a fashion model. It didn’t matter that she was five-foot-two; she was gonna rock the runway. Ashley wanted to do it with every guy in our grade, and she was making good progress. We were committed. A lot of guys in our class sported mullets, so I let Ashley do her thing, and instead I wanted to be the first female president, or own a Harley.1 It was the time of life to entertain our tangential fantasies with the full bravado of seventeen-year-olds ready to take the world on by storm.

We sang along with Glen Phillips and his band Toad the Wet Sprocket’s (love those ’90s band names) “All I Want,” like the unstoppables we thought we were.

We didn’t know that just a few weeks later things would never be the same. Margo, along with our guy friend Jamie, were our most hyped classmates. Pretty much every kid in the school had a crush on them. They were our little high school’s version of Brad and Angelina, the pair voted Best Looking in our yearbook superlatives, and that made us all swoon. Three days before graduation they were killed. It was so classic high school tragedy it was almost cliché: graduation party–meets 100-mile-an-hour car into tree–meets hospital–meets cemetery. “All I want is to feel this way” was over.

We’d all come of age together, and this was supposed to be the happiest time of our lives. The joy we’d had was directly proportionate to our grief. Best moments turned to worst. The grief and praise were inseparable, just like we had all been. We didn’t know when we first started listening to that “Fear” tape at the lunch table how much we would come to rely on it to help us process and grieve in the spaces ahead.

At the coffeehouse, Glen belted out his song “Grief and Praise,” and I was touched by how his words resembled the very same themes of not only my research but my own personal soul excavation. At the time, I was experiencing several losses and transitions, and finding it excruciating to integrate my own grief and praise. The lyrics reminded us that even though all we love is eventually taken, the reason we hurt is because we had something good to be thankful for in the first place.

Glen must have known that I was having trouble because he followed with Toad’s best-known hit, “All I Want,” the same one that kept our 1992 lunch table rocking out.

There I stood, grieving and praising with full gusto, acknowledging the pain but still singing. I started accepting the contradictions that were burdening me at this stage in life. It’s not easy being immersed in such an intense research process over so many years. I was living and breathing human analysis. Working to understand my students’ psyches was forcing me to rethink every emotional crevice of my own life, at a time when I already felt entirely overloaded and unhinged.

After my own breakdown—err, mindful moment—in the middle of the concert, I didn’t necessarily leave elated, but did find a new sense of resolve and peace I hadn’t experienced for a while. I paid homage to my pain, knowing it was deeply connected to the many blessings I’d also experienced. It was a lesson I had begun learning after traumatically losing Margo and Jamie, and one that continues to teach me as I make my way through life’s inevitable losses and changes.

Like my students, my ability to integrate and remain agile was under serious test. Thanks to Glen, and as only music can do, I had a new way to process some of the messiness. “Grief and Praise” became part of my new playlist, and I ordered a copy of Prechtel’s book, too, since, besides music, reading is my air.

Put an End to Happy Talk

Happy talk to avoid pain ended up being an entire code in my research. My students repeatedly revealed their abandonment of it in favor of confronting life’s hard realities. At first unsettling for them, it eventually helped them come to accept and embrace impermanence. Many of them named it as the turning point in their healing process. My students were recovering happy talkers. As Seema put it,

I’ve probably read every self-help book out there. My colleagues even call me the Queen of Positivity. I watch motivational speakers like Tony Robbins like it’s church. I even was addicted to watching Joel Osteen for a while. But then I dug in and learned about “prosperity teaching” and really started to analyze the messages. It felt like they were trying to sell happiness—if you believe, then good things will be a given. It was almost superstitious. This went directly against my experiences. I’ve always been the kind of person who gives a lot and does everything by the book. But I’ve never really seen that kind of luck come in. I’ve actually had terrible luck when I really think about it. I wish I could have all that time back where I was frustrated with myself because I couldn’t just magically will big things into existence. It totally stalled me out. I sat around. I even gained weight—food became my crutch. Then I went from a glass of wine a night to three or four. No one would’ve guessed how numb I was becoming to life—and it wasn’t like I was going through some big catastrophe. I think I kinda gave up just because I hadn’t been delivered some mystical prize the sky was supposed to open up and deliver. Reality wasn’t even that bad, but I think that all that happy, you-can-have-anything-you-want talk was making me think it was. When I started to see through it all, I turned things around. I was able to accept that things weren’t going to rain from the sky, but my outlook was still decent.

Stephen also had his misgivings about happy talk:

I’m not a negative person, per se, but I think that a lot of the self-help movement tells us what we want to hear, and isn’t really that helpful. I don’t think you have to be all happy-go-lucky 24/7 to be okay. . . . I’ve been through a lot in life, and at first I was so ashamed of my story. I didn’t want people to think bad of me. But I honestly think that most of my best relationships have come by being honest with people—and myself. Life is a shit show. Everyone has their cross to bear. I just know myself better now and think I’m stronger because I’ve been able to face stuff more head on. And when things go well, I feel like I appreciate it more. I try to remember that things will get better, and things also get worse. It helps me get through the bad times and try to enjoy the good ones, instead of thinking it’s gonna last forever.

Seema and Stephen were just two of my students who had worked at rethinking happy-talk indoctrination. It meant different things to everyone, but one theme that consistently presented was working to disengage from the opposite of happy talk: crippling negative self-talk. At first, many of my students were drawn to happy talk because what was going on in their lives was so dark and difficult. In a world where shaming is blood sport, my students were eager to get into a new arena, ready for respite from the heinous cut-throat competition. But they also found that the hatch-door happy talk provided only led them to places of numbing and more despair. They realized that either extreme would interfere with progress.

After the Glen Phillips concert, I went back to the data to reexamine my students’ shifts from self-crucifying to happy talk to more mindful practices. There was a lot to weed through—hundreds of students from across the world over years of teaching. This was the biggest research project I’d worked on, and I had to get it right. I found several summarizing passages toward the end of my research journal that captured their progression:

Their process was strikingly similar to the work I had helped my own patients move through over the years. It also closely resembled my process with Lyla, my own therapist, who has earned more than a few stripes working with me. Therapists are not the easiest breed to work with. We think we know everything, but we can only apply our skills to our own lives so much. The idea of “holding space”—not feeling like we have to fork over the Kleenex or break out the magic wand for someone who is grieving—is a big antidote to happy talk. That kind of presence is the exact embodiment of mindfulness that can help us undo the indoctrination and human tendency to keep “All I Want” on repeat, instead of integrating “Grief and Praise” on our playlists, too.

“Once we know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult.”

—M. Scott Peck