But Why is Mindfulness So Hard to Practice?

I understand mindfulness as living in the present moment, with all my attention to what is. Being mindful implies being fully aware of your thoughts, feelings and actions.

There are a couple of good reasons why being mindful is so difficult to practise. Let me share them as I have understood.

1. We are all creatures of habit

First, we are all creatures of habit, which has its pros and cons. Being mindful means we  need to become aware of those psychological habits that are detrimental to our wellbeing. Being aware at all times requires a tremendous amount of alertness, which is difficult. What’s more, I have learned that this alertness is not possible to achieve with effort or practice—in other words, we can’t make a habit out of it. It comes only by allowing, by letting it be, whatever it is.

Related » How to Transform Oneself With Mindfulness

2. Busting the myth of our goodness

The second reason why mindfulness is so hard has to do with our belief in our own inherent goodness. I have learned that mindfulness requires shifting my attention from the outer world to my inner world. It means looking within, noticing my thoughts, actions and reactions. When I am mindful, the light of awareness puts the spotlight on those aspects of mine that I don’t want to accept and don’t want anyone else to see—not even myself. Little surprise then, that I find mindfulness difficult. It busts the myth of my ‘goodness’. Being mindful means confronting my own demons, coming face-to-face with my pet monsters. And that is unnerving. It exposes to me my subtle neuroses—my prejudices, my arrogance, my righteousness, my narrow-mindedness, my angst, my aggression—there’s so much about me that my ego camouflages under the guise of being busy, good and right. When I am living unmindfully, I push these aspects under the carpet of my mind, as if they don’t exist.

In being mindful, the facade of being better than others falls away and you realize that, at the core, we’re all the same. You notice that we are all ridden, to a greater or lesser extent, by human frailties of guilt, fear, envy, complexes, prejudices, insecurity and intolerance. And underneath the shell of our egos, we all have same needs and wants—to love and be loved, to feel joy, to express kindness, to know the self and to be at peace.

Why mindfulness is worth your while

Because of its revelational nature, being mindful can be quite shocking and unpleasant, especially in the beginning. The ego, of course, doesn’t want you to be mindful. It feels threatened because all its work, the carefully built palace of illusions, gets shattered. But then mindfulness gives rise to something more valuable and rare—courage.

This courage isn’t the kind that is glamorized in the movies. It doesn’t help you win any battles in the outer world. Instead, it helps you conquer something much more difficult—your inner world. With it, you see yourself as you are, and thus also see others as they are, beyond their respective facades. Suddenly, others are not enemies that you must be wary of, but fellow travelers.

Again, what I have gathered from my journey of living mindfully is that it has made me kinder and more tolerant towards others; I am no longer offended by thoughts, words or actions of others. Most of all, I am patient with myself at those times when I am not exactly living from my highest awareness. That is why, even though mindfulness is so hard, I am sticking to it.

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“How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who don’t know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives?” — These hard hitting questions are posed by Dweck to make us think about how we may be unknowingly hurting our children’s prospects.

“Just the words ‘yet’ or ‘not yet,’ we’re finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students’ mindsets,” she says.

About the speaker

Carol Dweck is a pioneering researcher in the field of motivation, why people succeed (or don’t) and how to foster success.

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What is rebellion?

It’s not unthinkingly doing the opposite

One friend is married to a guy who continually lives by his own rules, but it’s rebellion for rebellion’s sake. He’ll go to a restaurant, get seated and then demand another table. He’s highly opinionated, but it’s without thought or consideration. He’s not a true rebel; he’s just annoying.

It’s not “teenage rebellion”

This is a more benign version of the guy above. Teens have a tendency to argue for argument’s sake. The parent says “black”; the teen says “white.” Not because white is correct or even their preference, but because it’s a safe way to engage in anti-parent rebellion.

It’s not just being “against” something

It is impossible to rebel when one only knows what one is against. A woman I knew had doctors for parents. They insisted she be one, too. However, she wanted to be a pianist. They refused to help, and bought her a microscope instead. So, as a teen, she “rebelled” against them by dropping out of high school and getting pregnant. Her next step was to become a secretary and to marry a guy her parents hated. When she came to me for advice, I suggested that all these actions were equivalent to thumbing her nose at her parents; it accomplishes nothing.

I asked her what she was for. She, no surprise, still wanted to be a pianist. We talked; she enrolled in a university to learn music, and became a pianist.

It is impossible to rebel when one only knows what one is against

The act of rebellion begins in the mind

1.  The first step is discovery

Societies prize compliance; the desire to follow the values they promote is embedded in us. Sadly, only about five per cent of the population questions their beliefs. That is why true rebellion is rare; pseudo-rebellion is prevalent, and going along to fit in is dominant. But let’s just say that you’re pulled to question your beliefs. Start by listing your basic beliefs. I call these things “rock beliefs” because they are foundational. Make a list of all of the foundational truths you believe—about yourself and about the world. A hint: think in broad categories. For example, think of people of different nationalities, creeds or races. What comes immediately to your mind? What are the “truths” you know about men, women, business or religion? Carry on from there.

2.  The second step is examination

The best thing you can do for yourself is to find someone [or a group] to help you examine your beliefs. It might be a therapist, a professor, a guru or a rōshi. I’ll use a therapist as an example. A good therapist will help you to challenge your belief system by asking you to examine where your beliefs lead. For example, you might say you want an excellent primary relationship, but have a core belief that women are subservient to men. That belief means you won’t allow a relationship between equals. The therapist will point the contradiction out to you, and ask you to choose. The therapist will not make the choice for you. This is important. For example, many students in college join a particular club and hear endless diatribes about what that group thinks is “wrong.” The student listens, has an emotional reaction, and ends up blindly swapping one set of beliefs for another. You have to choose for yourself. Examination requires patience and trust.

A good therapist will help you to challenge your belief system by asking you to examine where your beliefs lead

3.  The third step is trust

And the person you trust is you. As you start examining each of your beliefs, you will monitor yourself. You will notice both feelings and thoughts arising. The first feeling is often cold fear. You are challenging a deeply held belief—and this triggers the fear of ostracisation. This leads to your mind trying to come up with all of the reasons why you should leave things alone. When this happens, I urge you to persist. Just beneath these two knee-jerk reactions resides a wisdom voice. It will say: “This is who you will be, and how you will be, if you let go of that belief.” Trust that voice. It’s never wrong.

4. The fourth step is to expect external challenges

To continue the pianist’s story, the woman’s rebellion [at 28!] was met with her being cut off by her parents. Then mockery from her husband: “What makes you think you can do this?” It took courage to persevere. Challenges will come from the people and groups that instil or follow the old beliefs. If you change something that others believe can’t be changed, and you succeed, what does that say about them? So they want you to cut it out, and they will tell you they have your best interest at heart, but they don’t. They don’t want their own boat rocked, and believe that bad things will happen to them if you change. Change anyway.

5. The fifth step is to act

Having examined and shifted your beliefs, what could possibly be left to do? Obviously, the doing. An internal shift is nice but useless. True rebellion is active. The good news is that completing the first four steps means you’ve done more self-examination than the vast majority of your peers. The bad news is that most people stop just this side of changing the one thing they can—their behaviour. Complaining about the world does not change the world. Going to rallies and listening to speeches does not change the world. Signing online petitions does not change the world. Acting in keeping with your newly adopted beliefs changes your world. The pianist changed her world at her first public concert, and not a second before.

An internal shift is nice but useless. True rebellion is active

Be the change

Revisit the above points and find a way to be what you want to see. Describe to yourself what you believe and then ask, “How can I live out my belief in the real world?” This is integrity—your actions match what you say you believe in.

The society you and I come from is heavily invested in you behaving yourself, giving lip service to the status quo. And sadly, most of us do exactly that, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the beliefs they hold so dearly are meaningless and useless. So do the work that is necessary to ruthlessly expunge from yourself what does not work, establish a personal belief system that counteracts the ineffective beliefs, and then passionately engage. Make a difference, and start with each of your interactions, because you don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to transform your own world, one step at a time.

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In order for an infant like Paul to receive an audiometric test, I had to sit in the hearing booth with him, and hold him in my lap, while the technicians performed the test.

The way the hearing test works for infants is actually quite ingenious. The technician introduces sounds into the sealed hearing booth at a series of sound frequencies, one at a time, from really low to very high. As each sound frequency is tested, the technician slowly raises the decibel level coming out of speakers located in front of the child in the top right and top left corners of the darkened hearing booth. As the sound is slowly rising from one or the other speaker [never both], the child eventually looks in the direction of the sound, indicating the sound was actually heard. The moment the child indicates hearing the sound, by glancing in the direction of the speaker, the technician flips on a light above that speaker, and a stuffed monkey is revealed, clapping a pair of cymbals in its hands to reward the child for looking in the correct direction. Conditioning of the child is instantaneous as the child now understands and concentrates to hear the sound in order to be rewarded by a monkey clapping its cymbals.

As I think back, I remember sitting there with Paul wishing he would hear any of the sounds so that one of those darn monkeys would clap its cymbals, but nothing happened. At frequency after frequency, the decibel level rose to 100 decibels and beyond. The floor was vibrating under my feet from the intensity of the sound waves, and Paul never reacted to a single sound. It was in that moment that I came to the realisation that Paul was profoundly deaf, and we were devastated.

Sheryl cried for most of the four-and-a-half hour drive back to our home. Miraculously, the next day, she stopped mourning Paul’s hearing loss and immediately started searching for solutions. In the days, weeks and months that followed, Sheryl began her personal quest to become an expert on the issues surrounding deaf education. She identified community resources; she spoke with educators, and she talked with other parents of deaf children. She identified an American Sign Language [ASL] instructor and arranged to have our entire family trained in ASL.

For several years, Sheryl volunteered in a classroom dedicated to the education of the deaf and hard of hearing in order to learn the best techniques for educating Paul. We were determined to do everything possible to help Paul reach his full potential.

Hear no evil

Paul was born into a world that is different from yours and mine. In his world, there is no sound. For that reason, from the time he was an infant, he never learned the negative subtleties of our society that are learned by the children of the hearing world.

Amazingly, in his quiet and naive world:

• He didn’t learn to be afraid of things that there was no need to fear
• He wasn’t taught to cry by parents, who shrieked when he fell, as he learned to walk
• He didn’t hear the barrage of “no’s” each of us hears in a society intent on forcing us to conform
• He wasn’t afraid to play in the basement unaware of the goblins most kids were taught are down there
• He’s not afraid of being judged by others when he expresses himself creatively
• He’s both comfortable and confident when left alone to entertain himself
• He expresses his true feelings even when it may make others uncomfortable
• He doesn’t worry about wearing the right clothes, and saying the right things
• He doesn’t judge those around him based on what they wear or how they look
• He loves to learn and enjoys getting lost in the story of a good book
• He’s not aware of the latest gossip about who is supposed to be cool and who is not
• He doesn’t have an “oh woe is me” outlook in life; he has a “can do” attitude
• He didn’t need to be told to do his homework, and he doesn’t want anyone else’s help
• He does his chores with little fanfare, because he knows that’s his job
• He believes in himself and his ability to overcome obstacles
• He’s an active participant in life, who gets up early, and stays up late, living each day to its fullest
• He is his own person, unencumbered by the peer pressures to fit in that the rest of us experience
• He doesn’t care what others think about him, he is comfortable “in his own skin”
• He’s enabled in a world that views his hearing disability as a handicap
• He experiences the world in a different way than you and I; he hears no evil.

In many ways, Paul’s disability has worked to his advantage, because he wasn’t conditioned by society the same way as the rest of us. He has a unique perspective on many things based on his own untainted interpretation of the facts. You will never win an argument with him by telling him everybody thinks this way or does things that way. He will stand his ground, and he can only be convinced his way of thinking is wrong if the facts you present are undeniable. He makes those around him better thinkers by challenging their often shallow opinions of the issues and poor command of the facts. Paul is an inspiration to others, because it is clear he has refused to let his hearing impairment define him as a person, and he has refused to let it disable him.

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