How to Transform Oneself With Mindfulness

Recognize unconscious patterns of thought and feeling

What you are is primarily a collection of habits and beliefs that shape your thoughts and actions. It follows then, that to bring about any meaningful transformation, you need to review your current habits and beliefs and eliminate the ones that lead you astray.

Now, a habit is the brain’s way of carrying out certain routine functions on autopilot so that you can focus on bigger tasks that require your conscious attention. Most of your daily activities such as brushing your teeth, showering, walking to the train station, or driving to your office is handled by the autopilot which mindlessly runs operations in the background while you’re involved in more important tasks such as solving life’s big challenges or experiencing new things. “Autopilot’s genius is its very mindlessness. Its quiet efficiency ensures that you have adequate mental capacity to meet challenges in professional and personal life,” says Caroline Arnold, author of Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently.

But the problem is that your brain’s autopilot is not equipped to discern the good from the bad. As a result, you often end up engaging its capacities to develop undesirable programs — unconscious patterns — that become your prison.

“So, how do I break free from this prison?” you might ask.

Becoming aware is the first step

Mindfulness is an ancient but powerful practice that helps you detect where your autopilot is causing trouble and leading to unintended consequences.

Simply put, mindfulness is being fully aware of, and involved in, the present moment. By giving your full attention to whatever it is that you are engaged in, you ensure that the autopilot doesn’t take over and you don’t act out mindlessly. In time, the autopilot “unlearns” the self-defeating pattern and you successfully break the undesirable habit.

Take the example of habitual overeating, which is often a result of a “mindless program” that makes you disregard the satiety signal. The unconscious pattern could be the result of any number of factors including childhood trauma, poor self-image, a way of escaping an emotional issue, scarcity consciousness, and so on. Whatever the cause of the old habit, mindfulness helps you become aware of the pattern, thus helping you retrain your brain to recognize hunger and satiety cues so that you never overeat again. The same goes with the habit of smoking — once you are mindful, you don’t automatically reach out for a cigarette every time you feel bored or anxious. And knowing the health hazard of smoking, I bet there aren’t many who smoke consciously.

Of course, deeply ingrained patterns may need much more conscious effort on your part, but becoming aware of them is always the first and more important step towards becoming free of them.

Cultivate the practice of mindfulness

Before we move ahead, you ought to understand that you can’t be mindful in fragments. In other words, you need to cultivate a mindful disposition such that you remain highly alert, sensitive and aware in the present moment, no matter what you’re doing. In doing so, you will begin to overcome habits and thought patterns that are no longer serving you. Of course, the autopilot will still work efficiently—though it will now be restricted only to those activities and aspects that don’t need your conscious attention.

Becoming mindful can be hard, especially in the beginning. It brings to surface rather unpleasant aspects of you that you never knew existed. In fact, if you are being brutally honest, you may have shocking revelations about your tendencies and behavior, your long-held beliefs and thought-patterns. But once you get past that initial discomfort, it becomes easy for you to overcome your old undesirable patterns. With mindfulness, not only do you break up with your bad habits but you also begin to rediscover simple joys of everyday living; you find a richness of being that was previously inaccessible to you; you feel more alive and sensitive than ever. And most importantly, you don’t form new unconscious patterns.

Kick-start your journey to transform yourself

If the idea of living mindfully resonates with you, there are many wonderful resources available on the internet. Here’s one simple practice that can help you kick-start your journey to transform yourself through mindfulness: Set an alarm on your phone that goes off every 2 -3 hours to remind you to breath consciously. When the reminder comes, just stop whatever it is you’re doing and breathe slowly and deeply three times. This will not take more than a minute but it is a powerful technique to bring you back to here and now.

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The splendour of a spotlight lies in its ability to highlight a single person, object or a group on stage while keeping the rest more or less dark and therefore out of focus.

Each of us has a built-in spotlight in our conscious minds. It is called attention. The trouble is we almost always train our spotlight on what’s wrong in our life, while keeping everything that’s OK [not wrong] “in the dark”.

Problem mindset

We inherit this deep-rooted problem mindset from our problem-oriented society. Everywhere you look, the spotlight is on all that is not right—the newspapers are predominantly filled with stories on inflation, corruption, crime and terrorism; there are serious discussions on prime-time television about the troubled conditions in various parts of the world.

On a personal level too, we are preoccupied with those aspects of our life that are not going well for us at the moment. Students are worried about their academics. Young men and women are worried about their careers, their relationships, or their finances. And older people are bothered about their health.

There’s one thing common though: whatever your problem area, it is a good bet that your attention is on the ‘gravest’ problem you are currently facing.

It is also a good bet that if a bigger or graver problem surfaces, you will turn your attention to it. So what happened to the ‘grave’ problem you were struggling with earlier?

Your attention holds the key

You might think that giving our problems all the attention is natural…how else would we solve them? But no problem has ever been solved by giving it all the attention.

What works is to understand the problem and then turn your attention away from it so that you can create space in your mind [and in your life] to receive the solution.

There are so many things that are going well for you. How about turning your mental spotlight on those happy occurrences or joyful events?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are feeling troubled with chronic diabetes. You must stop dwelling on it or discussing it with everyone. By all means, give it the attention it deserves—but stop at that. Visit your doctor, take that dose of medicine on time, exercise and do whatever you can…Then, wait for the healing to take place. After that, if diabetes calls for any more of your attention, don’t entertain it. Instead, aim your spotlight at your properly functioning heart, kidneys, bones and other body parts that are healthy and kicking.

Problems will call for your attention from time to time. The trick is to know when to turn the spotlight away from them—and onto something good. As they say, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” There is merit in the old adage, after all.

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