Mindful living

A few years ago I practised mindfulness for a while. I had heard so much about it, and that it also was accepted - for instance – in the medical world as a form of meditation that is beneficial for body and mind, that I wanted to learn more about it. I bought a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn and started practising. I always want to practise the spiritual paths that I read about, because mere reading doesn't give you the full experience of what it is that you are reading...

I learned to know this wonderful attentiveness in the sense-perception, the being aware of thoughts and feelings. No one could ever want to state that it was not improving the 'being here' in life and the feeling of wellness in the wonderful creation that we call 'world' and 'I'. Mindfulness seems to be an answer to the ever-growing stress of modern life, with all the illnesses that flow from stress. Without this trained attention we become lost in our thoughts about ourselves and our lives, and forget that there is a whole world of beauty around us, a world that needs our attention.

But... While doing these exercises I grasped, of course, the difference from the anthroposophical meditation that I had been practising already for more than thirty years.  Looking at the 'success' of the mindfulness training and the limited interest in genuine anthroposophical meditation, I have to write about this difference, and about why I must conclude that mindfulness meditation is a unilateral, extreme method, which will not only give blessing results, but in the long run will also lead to an important loss.

It is true that we live absorbed in our thoughts and in the extensions of our thoughts (the smartphone in our hands). We forget our surroundings, we forget our body, we even forget that we exist sometimes! So it seems to be the only way to a healing, to finding the way back to the senses, to the mindful ‘being here’ in the world.

In anthroposophy we also want to develop an attentiveness that grows infinitely. But there is a great difference: in this approach it is not pure sense perceptions that are evoked in us, but pure thinking attentiveness. Not simply being absorbed in personal thoughts, but a mindful thinking of perception is what we want to develop. And we do that by getting involved in thinking. We don't look at our thoughts and let them go by, we dive into them and take them as our responsibility; we want to develop them with mindful will.
 
We shouldn’t forget that thinking is half of the whole world. We cannot simply state that ‘being here’ has to do with perception and attention. There is a whole world that is also here, that we forget to perceive: it is the world of our human thinking. And we should recognise that it is not possible to create what our senses perceive -  but that it is indeed possible to create thinking. In perception of thinking we perceive something that we have created, that we are creating ourselves. And it comprises half of the world, all this human thinking - that otherwise slips away from our attention, that slips away from our mindfulness.

So I will start pleading for a mindful thinking, in order that we can create a mindful living that embraces the whole world, including thinking. Then we will not be standing aside, but we will also become active in thinking the sense perceptions.

Mindful living by Mieke Mosmuller