This Is How Mindfulness Meditation Changes The Way People See You
In the movie, Limitless, Bradley Cooper takes a pill that makes him infinitely smarter. He changes from a despised, hapless slacker to a brilliant, popular financial success.
It’s science fiction of course, but one scene in that movie reminded me of how it is to experience mindfulness meditation.
In that scene, moments after taking the first pill, Bradley Cooper’s landlady catches him trying to avoid her because he hasn’t paid the rent in months. Grabbing him as he enters the building, she screams relentlessly. During her tirade, she accuses him of laziness, carelessness, and stupidity while demanding the rent payment.
As the effect of the pill kicks in, Bradley Cooper’s character watches the landlady rant and scream. The sound becomes muted and he is just observing the movement of her mouth, the sweat on her brow, and the spit coming out of her mouth. He observes her in slow motion. Filtering out the words, he starts noticing other things about her tell him she is under great stress. He doesn’t respond and starts seeing more, waiting for her to finish. Then he calmly addresses her. What happens next changes the way you’d expect that scene to end.
That landlady’s raging tirade is like the thoughts going through your head.
When you practice mindfulness, you learn to notice all the critical, hysterical, worrying, thoughts that pass through your mind all the time. You observe the dreams, fantasies, and memories, that float to the surface of your mind, even though they aren’t happening at the moment.
Practicing mindfulness meditation, you learn to observe all the stuff in your mind and just sit there, taking notes.
What you learn is that it is possible to interact with another person, from the wise point of view of an observer. You start asking yourself, “What is happening here?” It isn’t necessarily about the “you” that is part of the scene.
Practicing mindfulness is simple but not easy. You sit quietly and focus on your breath while noticing your thoughts and feelings. It doesn’t seem like it would have much of an effect, but, if you do consistently, over months and years, like exercise, it builds a certain kind of ability.
That ability is to be able to see what is going on right in front of you. To see more because you are becoming a practiced observer.
We go about our day reacting to what’s happening. We react to the way people treat us. We react to the thoughts in our heads. And those thoughts are relentless.
If you want to find out how relentless your own self-talk is, meditating will show you, and believe me, without meditation, you won’t know the tenth of it.
I know this because I’ve practiced mindfulness on and off for over twenty years. I was fascinated with mindfulness at first and read everything that I could get my hands on. Living in New York City I was also able to attend many lectures and group meditations with some of the most well-known meditation teachers in the world.
Then I started working on an anthology of writing about mindfulness. I asked Jon Kabat-Zinn, the author and teacher who popularized mindfulness in the West, to write a forward. He agreed to do it on one condition — that I practice mindfulness myself every day for a year. He told me that reading about it wouldn’t teach me much; practicing was the only way to understand how mindfulness works.
When Jon Kabat Zinn taught classes in mindfulness to patients at Massachusettes Medical Center, he didn’t start with a lesson in meditation. He started with giving each person one raisin. The exercise was to observe the raisin in every possible way, seeing what it looks like, then slowly tasting it for a long time, noticing the feel of the wrinkles, and describing the taste.
Most peoples’ prior experience with eating raisins was to grab a handful of and stuff them in their mouth. Experiencing one raisin at a time is like meditating. Instead of a jumble of unrecognizable thoughts in your head, you see them individually, with curiosity, and discover more about what they are.
With the goal of having this renowned teacher write a forward to my book, I promised to meditate every day for a year. At first, it was difficult, if not painful, to sit still and focus on my breathing. I had the urge to do almost anything else from cleaning my closets to washing the dishes.
Then, one day during that year of mindfulness, I was at work. I was in a meeting with a vendor who I had recommended, and the meeting was not going well. People on our team were challenging the vendor’s claims and he wasn’t taking the challenge in stride. One executive, who tended to be aggressive, went on the attack. . After a while, the vendor’s face reddened and he walked out of the room.
The executive felt guilty and the vendor felt demoralized.
I followed the vendor out of the room and was able to calm him down enough so that he could rejoin us. I realized we wouldn’t be able to work with him, but at least he could leave with some dignity.
I told our team that he was o.k. and they felt better. Rather than feeling threatened because this was a vendor that I had brought to the table, I didn’t take it personally. I was able to look at the scene, consider that peoples’ feelings were out of control, and diffuse the emotional explosion that had occurred. One of my teammates looked at me wide-eyed. She told me later that she couldn’t believe how I was able to defuse the situation.
Practicing mindfulness teaches you that there is an intelligence in you that is able to see clearly. That part of yourself is smarter than the part of you that gets offended, gets elated, or gets impressed with what other people say or do.
That part of you can observe without constantly reacting. That part of you knows that not everything that happens in the world is about you. But it allows you to see more clearly when you have to move away from a bad situation, rather than engaging in it.
Mindfulness isn’t a magic pill. It’s a practice that trains your brain. Like exercising, you have to do it consistently to have an effect. When I practiced inconsistently, I lost the benefits. But with continuous practice, I notice that occasionally I can think and act from a smarter place.
This is a smarter place available to everyone. It is the brilliant part of you. When you learn to use that intelligence, you feel better about how you handle things every day. People will notice the difference.
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