Mindfulness Happens… Even When You Aren’t Trying

by Linda A. Curtis

When mindfulness reveals an intuitive insight, will you pay attention?  

I thought that my life was “fine” when it wasn’t.

I was in my early thirties, married to a good man, working as a trainer at a bank and living the life of a Jehovah’s Witness. That life involved knocking on doors and preaching ‘the Good News.’ I’d been an unquestioning true believer since childhood and was one hundred percent certain that God was on my side.

One day I knocked on the door of a trusted co-worker who I deeply respected. After exchanging the usual pleasantries, I launched into the Witness spiel that I’d uttered a million times. But this time was different.

How Listening to Myself Caused a Meaningful Shift

Something shifted in the way I was listening, as if hearing my words from a few feet away, more as an onlooker than the one talking. Why had I never heard it like this before? I was suddenly shocked by my tone of self-righteousness and reproach. This unwelcome awareness seared through years of certainty. I was condemning someone I knew to be honest, smart and kind. I was shaken to my core.

My face flushed. I felt queasy and off kilter. This was not a lightning bolt “aha” moment, but an internal whisper of “this feels off.” My co-worker frowned and glanced at his watch. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

The Power of Staying Present to the Experience

Not dismissing this experience is what made it mindful. Over the next year, that faint internal whisper amped up into a clamour from my soul that I could not ignore. Light had slipped through the cracks of my certainty.

Life was never the same after that. This experience opened a Pandora’s box of unexpected, unwanted and excruciating reckonings with a belief system I had organized my entire life around. A way of life that once brought me joy, comfort and a sense of belonging was muddied by doubts that I tried to resolve, but to no avail.

Trust me, I wanted to resolve them. Didn’t I say my life was fine? Why shake things up? Why risk certainty for the unknown? I found myself in a full-on existential crisis, unsure of what I believed.

How Mindfulness Expanded

Once I acknowledged this state of uncertainty, the first thing I did was grant myself permission to suspend belief in any one ‘ism or ideology. I had just released myself from a long list of ‘shoulds’ and didn’t want to swap one dogma for another. I dropped my lifelong practices of prayer and preaching because they felt hypocritical. I didn’t know if I still believed in God yet harbored guilt for turning away from Him.

I granted myself wide berth to explore any number of beliefs without drawing any conclusions of right or wrong. I started ‘church-hopping,’ which was a big No-No in my former religion.  A Catholic friend took me to mass, and a co-worker to temple. It was weird and wonderful to feel so free. The ecumenical message at Unity Church touched me to tears; it was there I found a new way to pray. I poured over Taoist teachings and read Eastern views on karma. I asked a Christian Scientist about her faith, but this time with curiosity and a desire to understand, not convert.

John Keats said that  “a healthy mind is a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select few.” I was waking up to new ideas and new possibilities for my life

Discovering the Power of an Open Mind

My therapist invited me to attend her workshop for people in transition. She opened and closed the day with a short meditation. Prior to that I’d avoided the practice, believing what I’d been taught, that an ‘empty mind’ was like putting the welcome mat out for Satan. Now unburdened by that ossified notion, I could see the practice with fresh eyes.

Sitting in silence with other people connected me to a feeling of reverence and community I hadn’t felt in years. Back home I found sitting alone in silence difficult and purchased a set of guided meditation tapes that I would use most mornings before work. I loved the grounded feeling it gave me. At the point, however, meditation was just one of the many things I “tried on,” and after a few months the novelty faded.

Building a Mindfulness Practice

Three years later, I enrolled in a program to be certified as an executive coach. We were encouraged to adopt a daily sitting practice as a way to cultivate presence and connection with ourselves and future clients. I wasn’t sure how I could fit this into my already busy life, but I agreed to try sitting in silence three minutes a day. Then, gradually, in a natural way, my practice somehow built up to twenty minutes a day.

To be honest, I figured I could drop the practice at the end of the course. But that was seventeen years ago and I’ve never stopped practicing. I believe it was this light touch that enabled me to take it on with a new and sustained commitment.

A few other things made this commitment possible. The first was the awareness that I was connecting my practice to something bigger than myself. The second was recognizing that by meditating I was enhancing my ability to contribute to others. I also found that I was able to build my practice into a commitment because I had the support of several classmates who formed a tight-knit sangha, a community of meditators. And I would also attend the occasional one-day meditation retreat.

Now, mindfulness is part of my everyday life. Things just work better when I meditate.

You May Be More Mindful Than You Realize

“Consider the possibility you are already practicing mindfulness and aren’t aware of it.”

That is one of the first things I say when teaching mindfulness to corporate and community leaders. At the outset of the two-day Search Inside Yourself course—before I offer the definition of mindfulness—I’ll ask participants to raise their hand if they have a regular mindfulness practice, like meditation, yoga, or Tai Chi. On average, about a third of the group will raise their hands.

By the end of the course, it is my goal to help people realize the myriad ways they can incorporate mindfulness into their day-to-day life and see all the ways they are already practicing (even if they don’t go to yoga), so they can build on what they already know.

Mindfulness Defined

Simply put, mindfulness is about noticing what is going on moment-to-moment in both our internal and external worlds. Mindfulness inquiries include: “What thoughts, feelings and sensations are alive in me right now?” and “How am I relating to my external circumstances and the people that I encounter?” Answers to these questions provide a way to track your experiences and operate with choice.

Anyone who practices mindfulness knows that along with all the good stuff researchers point to (increased focus, well-being, and improved emotional regulation), we will also grapple with unpleasant, often difficult, realizations about ourselves and our circumstances. It’s the emotional equivalent of gazing into a peaceful gurgling stream and suddenly seeing rusty tin cans and disintegrating gum wrappers buried in silt on the creek bed.

Mindfulness is about waking up to the full range of our experience, where the pleasant and the unpleasant live side-by-side.  And sometimes, the act of turning inward shines a light on things we’d rather not deal with. As happened to me, we might stumble upon the realization that we are unhappy, conflicted, or bored with an important aspect of our life.

Noticing and accepting all of this is part of the practice because it opens the way for us to meet life just as it is, whether we like what is happening or not.

Unless we see things as they really are, we cannot live well.

The Power of Not Looking Away

Mindfulness is the act of staying attentive. We reinforce its true power by not looking away from the rusty tin cans we uncover in our psyche, and by developing the capacity to be with these afflictive experiences.

Mindfulness isn’t just about meditation, being in the moment and practicing non-judgment. It’s about showing up as a human being with acceptance and having compassion for our predicament, no matter how messy and confusing life gets.

My doorstep encounter twenty-five years ago was indeed a threshold experience for me. Many of the things I feared did happen: I ended my nine-year marriage and left my religion. I was officially ex-communicated by my church. This created a rift with my family and broke my mother’s heart. Longtime friendships ended. Several years were spent grieving these losses. Mindfulness helped with that too.

I never joined another church but have happily cultivated a very eclectic spirituality that feels right and true. Along the way I found my chosen family that loves me unconditionally. And now, this transformation has led me to be an advocate for Honorable Closure and to write a memoir about leaving my religion.

So, despite the losses, I’m so glad I paid attention to my hunch.

If you find yourself experiencing some faint yet relentless internal whisper of the soul that is beckoning you to take honest stock of your life—even if that gaze reveals some tough choices ahead—I am very happy for you.

It is your divine right to pursue happiness. Stay with it. And don’t forget to breathe.

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Linda A. Curtis teaches mindfulness internationally with the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute and is the author of “Shunned:  How I Lost My Religion and Found Myself.”  Learn more about her work at lindaAcurtis.com. Find Linda’s book here.