Mindfulness is the aspect of the Eightfold Path that has received the most attention in the West. It is the distinctive attentional strategy of Buddhism and has found acceptance in a variety of fields ranging from business to basketball to psychotherapy. Rather than restricting one’s attention one-pointedly to a single object of awareness as in most other forms of meditation, mindfulness encourages a dispassionate knowing of thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, and physical sensations as they come and go in the mind and body. The general idea is that it is possible to empower the observing self so that one does not have to be swayed by habits and impulses or taken over by one’s inner critic. One learns to dwell in an enlivened awareness rather than being hijacked, sidetracked, or seduced by the usual array of thoughts and feelings.
What is not usually emphasized in the excitement over mindfulness in the West is that, from a Buddhist perspective, mindfulness is an introductory technique. It is an entry-level practice whose purpose is to open doors to insight. Contrary to many people’s preconceptions, being mindful is not the be-all and end-all of meditation. The Buddha, in a famous parable, compared it to a raft made of grass, sticks, and leaves that helps someone cross a great water. “What should be done with the raft once you have gotten across?” he asked rhetorically. “Should you carry it with you for the rest of your life or put it down by the side of the riverbank?” In making this comparison, he was trying to stop people from becoming overly attached to his method. While his warning was powerful, it has not prevented many over the years from fetishizing their technique.
The trick to Right Mindfulness is not to turn it into another method of self-improvement. As with Right Effort, it is possible to try too hard and override the subtlety and simplicity of what mindfulness is. In the traditional Buddhist texts, mindfulness is compared to a cowherd who, at first, has to be actively involved in corralling his flock in order to protect his newly planted crops from being devoured. After the crops have been harvested, however, the cowherd can sit in the shade and rest, maybe watch with one eye open, barely doing a thing. His cows have only to stay within the perimeter of his awareness; there is no longer any danger to the produce that has been brought indoors. If he is too enamored of his role as cowherd, however, or if he has an immature view of what it involves, he might continue to poke and pester his animals, agitating them unnecessarily. Right Mindfulness is similar. At the beginning, one has to actively deal with the distracted mind, paying attention whenever it wanders in order not to be carried away by its usual inclinations. After a time, however, mindfulness is just there. It becomes second nature. It sees the distractions but does not get swept up in them. That is why the comparison to the cowherd who rests under a tree is so apt. Mindfulness, once established, continues on its own steam. It hacks into the mind to see what is there, and, out of this self-observation, interesting, unexpected, and sometimes uncomfortable things can emerge.
I have long been sensitive to how easy it is to become fixated on mindfulness. The ego cannot help but try to co-opt the process. Early Buddhist texts warn of this danger. Some amount of striving is important at the beginning, but a shepherd who is too actively trying to control his flock can sabotage the entire effort. “With excessive thinking and pondering I might tire my body, and when the body is tired, the mind becomes disturbed, and when the mind is disturbed, it is far from concentration,” reads an ancient discourse entitled “Two Kinds of Thought.”
When I apprenticed with the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan physician while on a research grant in India during my final year of medical school, I learned of a whole class of anxiety disorders unknown at the time in the West. I had done a number of silent retreats by this point and was well aware of how anxious some people become when trying to quiet their minds. I was able to spend about six weeks with the Dalai Lama’s physician, and, knowing that I was heading to a career in psychiatry, I was eager to find out whether this kind of nervousness happened in Buddhist cultures as well as in our own. It turns out that meditation-induced anxiety is very familiar to Buddhist monks and was well cataloged in medieval Tibetan medical texts. Meditators who try too hard to be mindful make themselves agitated and depressed. Their minds rear up like angry horses determined not to be brought under control by their riders. Instead of lightness of being, forced meditation brings only anxiety and a grim determination to proceed no matter what. Tibetan doctors have such afflicted patients do simple tasks like sweeping the temple halls or chopping vegetables in the kitchen rather than prescribing more meditation. They know that the treatment for meditation-induced anxiety disorders is less meditation, not more.
The wisdom of the Tibetan physicians is important to keep in mind as mindfulness takes root in the West. Much of our culture is built on striving, and many people have trouble leaving this mind-set behind. The very word “mindfulness” tends to encourage this overly aggressive approach. It can sound admonishing at times, carrying with it the injunction, “Be Mindful!” There is a ring of the Protestant ethic to it. This is not accidental. First used in an English translation of a Buddhist text in 1881 at the height of the British colonization of South Asia, the term “mindfulness” came into general acceptance in the Western world thereafter. But the term is a Western invention. The original word in the language of the Buddha’s time was sati. Sati means remembering. Right Mindfulness—or Right Sati—means remembering to keep an eye on oneself. Its opposite is forgetting—or absentmindedness—the kind of forgetting that happens all of the time when one is lost in thought. The distinctive quality of mindfulness is that it remembers. Once established in the mind, it remembers itself. A clearer description of what is meant by sati might be presence of mind.
I was reminded of this when lecturing in Oklahoma City about the relevance of the Buddhist approach for the treatment of trauma. There was surprising interest in the clinical applications of mindfulness there. A big veterans’ hospital with many patients with post-traumatic stress disorder was nearby and its staff was open to new approaches to its treatment. One of the counselors at my talk was a fifty-year-old man with a long white ponytail. He came up to me at a break; I had only a second to form an impression of him. A large, healthy-looking man, he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt open at the collar. He was well put together, stood up straight, and had a very confident demeanor. I could see him driving a pickup truck.
“You know,” he confided, “I never use the word ‘mindfulness’ with a man in Oklahoma. People just don’t like the sound of it.”
“What do you say to them instead, then?” I inquired. I thought maybe he had figured out a whole new vocabulary.
“I just tell them, ‘Go outside and close the door. Stand there and listen.’ That’s enough.”
His comment went to the heart of Right Mindfulness. Rather than reducing it to another therapeutic modality handed out by the mental health authorities, his recommendation hinted at what is most compelling about it: the possibility of discovering something unexpected by paying relaxed attention to one’s everyday world. By letting his initial instructions be about dropping one’s guard and opening one’s senses, this therapist was heading off a very common misunderstanding. While it is true that we spend much of our time needlessly dwelling in thoughts of the past or the future, the ability to stay focused in the present does not, by itself, guarantee any kind of personal transformation. Being in the moment is pleasant enough, but it is just a jumping-off place. I have encountered many people who, in making mindfulness their ultimate goal, congratulate themselves on being able to keep their attention on their breath or in the soles of their feet for extended periods of time, as if such abilities, by themselves, make them a better person. A friend of mine confided that he tries to stay mindful when eating dinner with his wife, for example, but that this did not seem to lessen the tension between them. I pointed out that he would do better to engage her in conversation rather than hiding behind mindfulness as if it were the newspaper. He saw my point, but it had not occurred to him on his own.
Right Mindfulness opens up interesting opportunities for honest self-reflection, but there is no built-in guarantee that these openings will be used productively. The self does not give up its grip easily—all of the same defense mechanisms that Freud outlined are still operative even when mindfulness is strong. It is possible to overvalue mindfulness, to remain attached to its form rather than working directly with what it reveals. That is why the intervention of the therapist in Oklahoma was so skillful. Rather than dwelling on the method, he was trying to inculcate a state of mind.
I have tried to remember this with my own patients. Instead of teaching mindfulness to them directly, I have preferred to create an interpersonal environment in which they can listen in a new way, trusting that this mode of listening is what allows insights to come. I want the visit to my office to be like going outside and closing the door. I want it to offer a fresh perspective on things without my having to give overly specific advice or guidance. Even in therapy, people are stubbornly lost in their thoughts and imprisoned within the stories they repeat to themselves. They try to use therapy the way many people try to use meditation: powering through to get to an imagined place of cure. Right Mindfulness, like a successful psychotherapy, slows people down. It pokes holes in the facades we unwittingly hide behind. When we stand outside and listen, we have a chance to eavesdrop on the ego’s endlessly obsessive self-preoccupation. With the senses aroused in a new way—if people are willing—they can step outside of themselves as well.
—
A chance encounter at a dinner party on the eve of Rosh Hashanah while I was writing this book drove this point home. Toward the end of the evening, I was talking with a retired attorney in his early sixties who had finished a successful career representing and running insurance companies. He was smart, engaging, and voluble. I liked him, but I did not think he would be particularly interested in my work. I told him a bit about the book I was writing, and about how for a long time I had been wary of giving overt Buddhist advice to my patients. When he heard about my Buddhist leanings, he surprised me by telling me how he had twice been to Massachusetts for intensive workshops in mindfulness-based stress reduction. These workshops, modeled after the retreats I was familiar with but stripped of their Buddhist language and theory, had helped him a lot, he said. He did not know much about Buddhism, but the practice of mindfulness, as he had been taught, had already been of great benefit to him.
I told him how impressed I was that he had given mindfulness a chance. To me, it was a sign of how it was infiltrating the popular consciousness and losing some of its esoteric aura. The fact that an Upper East Side attorney in the first flush of his retirement was seeking out mindfulness rather than golf said something of its new level of acceptance.
I actually knew a lot about the program he had been to. It was begun by an old friend of mine, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who had been a fellow student on the first meditation retreat I had ever been to back in 1974. I remembered his heavy black hiking boots gliding back and forth over an outdoor stretch of ground as we did our walking meditations together. Even then, Jon, who had a graduate degree in molecular biology from MIT, was conscious of how alienating Buddhist language or concepts might be for people in the West. In developing his program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center not long after this retreat, he presented mindfulness as a strategy of stress reduction rather than as a branch of the Eightfold Path. Jon surprised everyone at the medical center. His patients responded to the treatment. Workshops like the one my new friend had attended sprouted up throughout the country.
“Let me tell you a story,” the attorney interrupted. “Here’s what happened to me there.
“In the midst of my second workshop in one of those nondescript hotels outside Boston, after a couple of days of mostly silent meditation, I was coming downstairs for a small-group discussion one morning, and as I was opening the door I heard a voice. No one from the outside world was talking to me, though; the voice was coming from inside my head.
“‘It’s time to forgive your mother,’ the voice said.
“I have never heard voices,” the lawyer assured me with a smile. “This was the only time anything like this has ever happened to me.
“My mother had been dead for fifteen years, but she was one of those super controlling, intrusive Germanic mothers who knew me better than I knew myself and used her knowledge to get inside and manipulate me. There was no escape from her when I was young and my self-confidence was terribly undermined. I did a lot of therapy in my thirties but I remained angry with her and mad at my father, whom I blamed for not standing up to her and protecting me. Even at my father’s seventy-fifth birthday, when I gave a speech (which I am very good at) praising his accomplishments, I was conscious of how false I was being and it made me sad and uncomfortable.
“But when I heard the voice saying it was time to forgive her, I knew it was right. Mindfulness had shown me I could.”
I was very moved by the lawyer’s account. There was something incredibly affirming about it. An Upper East Side attorney learning a hospital-based mindfulness technique in a generic Massachusetts hotel conference center had a life-changing spiritual and psychological experience. He had heard a voice, but he was not insane. He had gone outside of his usual routines and stopped and listened and heard something unexpected. And he was able to let go of one of the long-standing pillars of his identity, his resentment at his domineering mother. His reporting was so sincere and refreshing, I could feel how light the forgiving of his mother had made him. Mindfulness, even when abstracted from its original Buddhist context, had surprised and opened him. Where had the voice come from? How could it be explained? What did attention to the moment have to do with forgiving his mother? There is mystery to Right Mindfulness even when it is experienced in a Marriott ballroom.
Often, as mindfulness has become a technique of stress management, it is presented in such a way as to emphasize its rational, objective, and scientific precision. While it certainly has this dimension, there is more to it than that. While mindfulness encourages a clear-eyed view of oneself and one’s direct sensory experience, it also has a hidden agenda. Its mission is to put the ego into perspective so that empathy is no longer obstructed. The insights it encourages all head in this direction. In the ancient teachings, these insights are framed around basic principles like impermanence. How can we stay attached to things in the same way when we directly perceive that everything is constantly changing? Why cling to wealth, sex, pleasure, or opinions when one understands that nothing lasts? While it does not necessarily make the painful aspects of impermanence welcome—the Buddha did not call old age, sickness, separation, and death suffering for no reason—it does help people become more accepting of that which they cannot control. Mindfulness brings transience into the foreground; it makes it incontrovertible. It gives a ringside seat on something we all know to be true but do our best to ignore. There is no escaping impermanence when practicing mindfulness. Resistance, as they say, is futile.
In confronting people with the reality of impermanence, mindfulness also acts as an agent of change. This is where its hidden agenda becomes relevant. In rubbing up against the underlying fabric of impermanence, in seeing it in both the outside world and the inside of the mind, one thing becomes increasingly apparent. Muttering under our breath is a grown-up version of the child we used to be, and one of its main refrains seems to be something on the order of, “What about me?” This self-important—and vociferously insecure—internal cry is a superficial manifestation of our most primal attempt to both control and avoid the way things are. As infants, we are lucky if there is one person in the world—our mother—who treats us as though we are the center of the universe. But even if we are given this essential luxury, it cannot last. Disillusionment comes quickly. While one’s internal protests and manipulations are generally not successful, they do not necessarily go away. As the self develops, the need to maximize the feeling of self-importance persists. There are competing demands, of course—we are social creatures and selfish motivations are not the only ones we are capable of—but even very well-adjusted people harbor a self-centeredness that becomes obvious once one pays attention to the mind. Right Mindfulness takes great delight in bringing this self-centeredness to the surface. Egotism starts to feel painful and one discovers that one can step away from it. In a world in which nothing is as fixed as it seems, it comes as a great relief to discover that even the ego is impermanent. One’s defensive posture does not have to be etched in stone.
Forgiving of one’s mother does not show up on the traditional list of liberating insights, but if the list were being compiled in this day and age it would be near the top. Classical descriptions of mindfulness are derived from a tradition thousands of years old, but there are no reliable first-person accounts of the inner life of a person in the Buddha’s time to refer to. We are living in a different time and culture from the Buddha’s. Personal psychology is a reality for us. Insights, when they come now, while rooted in the reality of impermanence, are often of a psychological and emotional nature. The unfolding of mindfulness, while often presented as an orderly process, is different for everyone. Those who are not attuned to this truth risk missing out. The psychological aspect of Right Mindfulness is essential to a real appreciation of it.
Developing mindfulness is like learning to ride a bicycle or walk a tightrope, only much more frustrating. One keeps falling, even after years and years of effort. Right Mindfulness means having a light touch. It means being able to forgive yourself, time after time, while at the same time not giving in to your worst impulses. I remember being in Colorado one summer with Jack Kornfield, who had already had years of intensive meditation experience. Jack came to dinner on his birthday after spending the day in meditation, cursing himself for not being able to follow his breath for any substantial time that day.
“Even on my birthday!” I remember him complaining ruefully.
There was a hint of self-mockery in his comments, but he was serious. I was touched by his honesty. It helped me with my own practice, with my own tendency to be unforgiving. It helped me understand that Right Mindfulness means being willing to bring the mind back whenever one notices that it has wandered. It is the ability to bring the mind back, to let go of one’s personal commentary, that is the real accomplishment. Thinking selfishly is one of the things the mind does best; even when it becomes very still, this tendency is still latent. But the ego does not have to define us, any more than my friend’s resentment at his mother needed to define him. One reason he was able to forgive her was because, in learning mindfulness, he had practiced forgiving himself over and over again.
—
I have experienced my own version of this throughout the course of my involvement with mindfulness. Since my early twenties I have been practicing in a series of silent retreats of several weeks’ duration. These retreats limit the amount of outside stimulation and distraction and are structured so that it is possible to make every basic activity—from walking, eating, and sitting, to caring for one’s bodily functions—an opportunity for mindful attention. As difficult as this can be for the first several days—the mind rebels and wants to go its own way—after a while the act of remembering becomes more natural. One’s self-awareness grows, or expands, so that one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, present and very alive. Awareness, which we generally take for granted and which is usually transparent or invisible, starts to become something intriguing in its own right. At times it seems to glow. While thoughts, memories, and associations still continue unabated, one is less likely to be swept away for long periods of time by them. It is much more intriguing, and pleasurable, to abide in the unfolding present than to slip back into habitual trains of thought.
These retreats have almost always been interesting, even though, when one tries to talk about them, they sound rather boring. From one perspective, almost nothing to speak of happens. The day comes and goes. Meals are served. The sounds of nature fill the meditation hall. People sit on their cushions, shift, cough and stretch, or walk slowly back and forth in a straight line, eyes downcast, going nowhere. No one makes eye contact or speaks. But from another perspective, there is a lot going on, much of it personal and psychological in content.
On my most recent retreat, for example, I had the vivid sensation, some days into it, of my name imprisoning me. It is difficult to describe the actual feeling because it took place in an instant and reverberated in several directions at once.
“Mark.”
Its sound was so hard. In the relative quiet of the retreat, it felt like the blow from a hammer or like an industrial stamp coming down on me from above. I imagined my parents saying “Mark” when I was an infant and me rising to meet their voices, willingly but with a reluctant whiff, the name gathering around me, a little stiff, closing me in. It made me sad, that sense of being oppressed by my own name; I felt how unyielding its tireless walls had been.
Almost simultaneously, though, I felt the possibility, or the memory (I am not sure which), of my name having nothing to do with me. It was just a glimmer, a stirring, like hearing a breeze in the distance and wondering if I was imagining it. Mark was my name but I was not Mark—that seemed to be the point. All around me, stretching in every direction, humming ceaselessly, was something alive and open. With the subtlest of effort, I toggled back and forth between the two feelings: “Mark,” the feeling I knew by heart but felt aversion to, and “not-Mark,” a new (or was it old?) sensation I could not quite put my finger on. I had several epiphanies on this retreat, but this one lasted for a fairly long spell. I remember it was interrupted when I checked my cell phone to see if I had any messages.
I am in the habit of keeping my phone with me on retreat, although it is frowned upon. If my children or my wife or my patients need to get ahold of me in an emergency, they can reach me directly. I was also planning, since I was bringing my phone anyway, to ring my mother on Sunday at four thirty as I always do. She finds Sundays particularly wearisome and looks forward to hearing from me. I had just called her on my drive there and told her I was heading to the retreat.
“I don’t understand why you do those things,” she had said with a hint of exasperation.
They have a soundproof room at the meditation center for calls like this.
I planned to keep my phone in a drawer, but I ended up keeping it on my desk. I did not carry it with me. That is the main thing. I did not even wear pants with a pocket most of the time. I am in the habit of checking my phone when I go to the bathroom—I don’t know how common this is, but it is definitely something I have noticed I do. On the retreat I would find myself, at least for the first five or six days, reaching for it whenever I peed.
“Reaching, reaching,” I would say to myself, trying to bring mindfulness to every moment of the day, noting the little blip of anticipatory excitement when the thought came of checking the phone and then the calm of restraint when I realized it was not there.
It was a relief to be unplugged from my phone, even this much, although I did miss it, especially when I went to the bathroom. They say there is a burst of serotonin in the brain when one gets ready to check one’s phone, the anticipation of a reward, like M&M’s in a classic behavioral experiment or the rice crackers and peanut butter at teatime, making the neurons leak their precious fluid. Based on my own experience on the retreat, I can believe it. The urge runs very deep.
I managed to keep my phone under reasonable control throughout the ten days. I checked it only three times a day, as often as I ate, and the calls I received were minimal. But I did allow myself one indulgence. Every afternoon after lunch I would curl up on my bed with my phone and check the weather. There were three major snowstorms during my time there and the temperatures were regularly below zero. I went out walking around a frozen lake every morning dressed in six layers of clothing, and tracking the weather seemed like a vital, if harmless, activity. It was harmless, I’m sure, but my enjoyment of it made me wonder if I was cheating.
But did I need to beat myself up over this? Could I back off the judgment a little? I was in a tussle with myself around such a superficial infraction, if it was even an infraction at all.
Shortly thereafter, I was doing walking meditation in the basement gymnasium beneath the meditation hall. I was alone in the gym, or at least I thought I was, and my mind was fairly still after days of practicing mindfulness. I often resist the walking meditation; it involves little more than pacing slowly back and forth in a straight line. “Lifting, moving, placing,” one repeats to oneself as one directs the mind’s attention to the bottom of the feet. I find it difficult to keep this up for more than fifteen minutes or so; my back often starts to hurt and I stop and stretch and look for excuses to do something else. On this occasion, however, I was less restless than usual and was aware of a certain ease creeping into the exercise. The walking felt a bit like swimming laps. It was smooth and rather effortless.
Then, out of nowhere, came a loud slap. I jumped, turned around, and saw that a wooden or bamboo Chinese screen had clattered to the ground behind me. The screen had been walling off a small area set aside for the practice of tai chi. I had never noticed it, nor had I ever entered the space behind it; the screen was simply, for me, part of the immovable furniture of the rather drab room. But now it was lying flat upon the ground; someone must have brushed past and knocked it over. The interesting moment came next. Because my mindfulness was strong, my immediate mental reaction was very apparent.
“Who did that?”
This was not an incidental and curious thought. It was a vengeful one, my mind immediately wanting to reproach someone. Right away, I needed someone to blame. The thought shot up like a rocket but stopped short. It actually froze in midair. I saw it visually. It was like a firework that took off very quickly but could find no traction. It did not take hold—it just died there in inner space. I do not usually see my thoughts as pictures, but in this case I did. I saw the spaciousness of my mind and the incidental nature of the thought. It was like seeing a match being struck but then fizzling out. I laughed to myself. It was absurd to be casting about for someone to blame. What did it matter? What was I trying to prove?
There was a severity in me, I realized, a severity I had not completely owned. It showed itself vividly when the screen toppled over, but it was there when I felt the oppression of my name and when I judged the checking of my cell phone. With respect to my name, I wanted to hold someone responsible in much the same way as when the screen fell. Who did this to me? I did not like it. It must be someone’s fault.
This need to blame is of course a very common one. I come up against it all the time in my work as a therapist—in myself and in my patients—and I am often aware both of how alluring it can be and of how people are better off without it. But this moment on retreat had a special power. I actually saw the impulse to blame come into being and then saw it cease. Right Mindfulness allowed me to see it in the same way that it allowed my attorney friend to forgive his mother. In seeing how instinctive the need to blame was for me, I was chastened. But in seeing that it did not need to take hold, I was released. Events like the clattering of the fallen screen happen all the time in my life. Someone drops something, spills something, bumps into me. I wait on the phone to speak to a representative and then get cut off. My credit card bill is incorrect; someone has charged things on my account. My friend says to meet him at six thirty for dinner and shows up forty-five minutes late. Someone leaves garbage in front of my building and we get a ticket from the sanitation department. There is always something.
This single experience in the gymnasium beneath the meditation hall changed things for me. I relaxed about my cell phone. I stopped chafing at my name. I called my mother the following Sunday from the soundproof room. I still had three days left in my stay. We had a good conversation, for maybe ten minutes or so. She seemed to have forgotten that I was at the retreat; maybe I hadn’t made it totally clear to her that I was going for ten whole days. As our talk was winding down, though, she suddenly asked me where I was.
“Are you in the country?” she said.
I often called her from our house in the Hudson Valley, so her question was not unusual.
But she quickly added, “I don’t know why I’m asking; it doesn’t really matter.”
I prevaricated. I did not want to remind her that I was still at the retreat, and I quickly told myself that since the retreat was in the countryside, I could say yes without feeling too guilty.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m in the country.”
I felt bad for not telling my mother the whole truth, but I forgave myself quickly. I understood why I said what I said. While I was protecting myself from her judgment, I also did not want to make her worry. The important thing was that I’d called when I said I would. My inner critic did not have to use this against me. As I realized when the screen fell in the empty room, my need to find fault did not always have to have precedence.
Revelations on retreat come incidentally and poke holes indiscriminately. As in therapy, progress cannot always be predicted. My name, my speech, my phone, my bed, my moments of reaching in the bathroom for what was not there, my instant of clarity in the walking room. Each one of these situations let me see myself in more relief and brought the threads of my identity more into focus. The practice of Right Mindfulness helped direct my attention to these little bits of experience. I might well have overlooked them were it not for the Buddha’s insistence that the mind was worth watching, even when doing nothing. There was an unexpected dividend to all of this heightened attention. Maybe, in the future, I would not have to let my severity drive me so much. Maybe I could stop looking for someone to blame, let my flaws settle and meld with the rest of me, stop taking my name—and my self—so seriously.
Right Mindfulness, and the self-scrutiny it engenders, builds a mental muscle. It is a muscle of nonjudgmental self-observation, but it can become much more than that. It is also a precursor of insight. The form such insight takes is different for everyone, but the flavor is similar. Mindfulness makes use of all of those throwaway thoughts that harken back to our childhoods, the ones we adopted to cope with the pressures of growing up. In asking us to pay attention to their repetitive nature, mindfulness also encourages us to recognize their childish quality. My moment in the walking room, in which I saw my need to blame, was another version of the voice in the lawyer’s head that showed him how unforgiving he had been. In both cases, we were stopped in our tracks and made aware of how unnecessary such self-protective responses could be. Given the freedom to act differently, we both made a similar choice. Mindfulness showed us how.