mindfulness for a vuca world
2022.
How’s it going for you… and can mindfulness really make it better?
Our lives have become more VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) than ever. Current events seem to be squeezing us from all sides. Our society demands that we give more, more, more without offering us meaning or purpose in return. According to philosopher Byung Chul Han, we live in a Leistungsgesellschaft, a performance society, in which our lives are measured by our performance and consumption. Our horizon, therefore, is our success, and so, our worth. Who, what can we turn to when our humanity is reduced to our earning or buying power?
Stop tape.
If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that you have value beyond measure in being. Just being.
The engines of our social and economic order drive that fact far from our frontal cortex. We get so caught up in succeeding (or just surviving) that we merge our self-worth with our productivity and income.
Quietly, behind the scenes, most of us have a narrative – our “stress story” – on loop, droning on about our impending catastrophe and eventual failure.
I have affluent friends who pay for an enviable lifestyle. Beneath their pleasures, however, there is an undercurrent of anxiety and tension around their money – how to make it, keep it and multiply it – that reminds me to be grateful for my modest apartment and career. I have the privilege to find fulfilment in what I do, even in its fluctuations.
There is something profoundly satisfying about striving for excellence: to access your full potential and channel your abilities into a result that benefits others.
But doesn’t it usually seem that your best isn’t good enough? Who do you think you are? Quietly, behind the scenes, most of us have a narrative – what I call our “stress story” – on loop, droning on about our impending catastrophe and eventual failure. Often, our jobs exploit our insecurity and we try to compensate by doing more, more, more, until we burn out or break down.
Is “quiet quitting” the solution? It might be, if you don’t care about your job, your project, your colleagues and professional community.
There is another way of avoiding burnout and reducing stress.
Did you read that line above carefully and with self-care: you have value beyond measure in being, just being – ?
This is a core teaching of mindfulness.
You have value beyond measure because in the ultimate reality of things, your consciousness (some traditions call it soul) is more than your performance and your success and all the trappings of your “egoic mind”.
The practice of mindfulness helps us get distance from the noise that causes stress in our lives. By bringing us back to our bodies and our breath, it reminds us quite simply that we are alive, embodied, present. There is something inalienable in that realization, in that moment.
In the moment. Mindfulness practice encourages us to be aware of what is happening now – your hands are resting on your lap, your chest is rising and falling with your breath, a thought comes up and you observe it arising and dissolving. You remain.
Throughout our day, thoughts come up, they form a story: wish fulfillment or end-of-days dread or blah. This is what Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, calls the Narrative Focus: we tell ourselves stories about absent reality – the past or the future – while not noticing the open-ended present.
In mindfulness practice, we let the story come up with nonjudgment, and we let it go. Back to our breath and body: our somatic experience. Kabat-Zinn calls this our Experiential Focus. Scientific studies have been conducted to trace the brain circuity in the two kinds of foci. “These findings suggest that mindfulness practice develops a broader repertoire of ways of experiencing oneself and influences the degree to which we build stories about our experirences that may eclipse or color the experiences themselves,” Kabat-Zinn writes in Mindfulness for Beginners. With mindfulness, we are present in the moment and open to the experience within and without us.
As a student of literature, I know that a truly great story lends itself to interpretation, it is ambiguous, open-ended. When our stress thinking takes over, stories become closed, rigid premonitions of doom. They drastically narrow the “repertoire of ways of experiencing.” A closed story (good or bad) gets us stuck.
Mindfulness gives us a chance to step out of the story and storytelling altogether. It invites us “home” to our consciousness as the starting place for right action. It is at home that thoughts give way to emotions. If we attend without judgment, we open up to what the emotions are seeking to reveal to us about our basic needs, our consciousness. With self-compassion, we find acceptance. With acceptance comes the power to change.
A lot of stress comes from the feeling that we cannot change what is happening to us. Yet we mentally resist anyway, trying to fix reality so that it finally corresponds to our expectations of it. Have you ever successfully changed reality by refusing to accept it? How did that work in the long-term?
Mindfulness sets us on another track. It gives us the invaluable gift of ourselves – our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions and our tranquility – at every moment. It is the center, the starting point, the real. That change in perception changes our engagement with reality, which then changes the way we influence it. The observer influences the experiment. Your reality depends on the way you observe it; and the way you observe it depends on your state of mind. Mindfulness “is an invitation to take up residency in awareness and dwell here in this timeless moment we call ‘now’ that gives us another dimension of being in which to live, in which to be touched by the world, and through which to touch the world and others in their joy and in their pain, in which to come to our senses – all of them – and wake up to the actuality of who we are” (Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners).
It is conscious simplicity that allows us to live fully in this complex world. It is by being aware of ourselves in the now that we activate our wisest decisions for worthwhile endeavour in life and on the job. It is by regarding the present moment that we are able to be authentic and connect with others in their authenticity. Isn’t it good to come home?
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Here is a mindfulness exercise given by Thich Nhat Hanh in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness. There are many others, but this is my favourite.
A slow-motion bath
Allow yourself 30 to 45 minutes to take a bath. Don’t hurry for even one second. From the moment you prepare the bathwater to the moment you put on clean clothes, let every motion be light and slow. Be attentive to every movement. Place your attention to every part of your body, without discrimination or fear. Be mindful of each stream of water on your body. By the time you’re finished, your mind should feel as peaceful and light as your body. Follow your breath. Think of yourself as being in a clean and fragrant lotus pond in the summer.
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For a brief introduction to Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEMsXYcSdPM
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Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart
