Courtesy 1News

One of the most notable New Zealand self-help books of last year was by Auckland-based psychiatrist and sleep specialist Dr Tony Fernando. ‘Life Hacks from the Buddha: How to be calm and content in a chaotic world’ does what it promises, presenting ancient Buddhist wisdom in bite-sized hacks, easily applicable to modern life. The following extract focuses on mindfulness and meditation – practices Fernando has taught to inmates at Mt Eden Correctional Facility.

When in a mindful mode, we can see our irrational thought patterns, emotional reactions, uncontrolled cravings and our desire for things to be different as random, ever changing and impermanent. We see them as reactive brain impulses. We have a choice to just let them pass or invest unnecessary energy in a never-ending rabbit hole of exhausting mental processes.

Mindfulness is one of the best ways to unhook ourselves from the click-baiting mind.

Mindfulness is a superpower because we see everything in our mind arise and pass away. Our thoughts are empty, like soap bubbles that come and go. Yet we still tend to engage with our crazy thoughts and emotions.

The mind sometimes behaves like a deceptive online seller. It employs exaggerated headlines or flashy advertisements that lure customers to its online stores and play on the customer’s fantasies or anxieties, which are often useless or lacking in substance. The mind wants us to click on its various attention-grabbing links. With mindfulness, you are aware that the eye-catching advertisements are there. They look enticing but you know that once you click, you are hooked. Or worse, scammed!

If I am being mindful at this very moment, I observe that I am staring at the laptop screen, noticing my fingers tapping away with a muted clickety clacking of the keys; the amorphous background café music melding with soft conversations of customers; I am smelling the soft scent of some air deodoriser; feeling the pressure of the rolled-up towel on my butt to prop me up on the chair. I am noticing the sleeves of my jacket brushing up on my wrist. A WhatsApp notification pinging. My mind is calm.

If I am not mindful, my mind will wander. That man eating his muesli is slurping … how uncivilised. I cannot believe he was allowed to enter this posh café. Instead of writing, I should be hitting the pool and burning calories because my GP said my blood sugar is a bit high and is prediabetic. Yes, prediabetic! If I don’t lose weight and improve my laboratory numbers, in a few years I will be taking insulin, going blind, losing the feeling in my feet, which will cause nasty infections. Maybe they’ll have to be amputated… That will ruin my swimming. Life is hard. Bloody hell, another message from the clinic! What is it this time?

Mindfulness and meditation

To many people in the west, mindfulness has become synonymous with the word meditation. Meditation is a general term that involves mental practices that result in various mind states including enhanced attention, increased insight, relaxation, stress relief and even sleep.

There are plenty of other types of meditation practice, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, but here I will focus on mindfulness meditation. This is a specific form of meditation developed by the Buddha, and it is the best way to become mindful.

Six-piece musical band

Mindfulness is noticing the moment-by-moment experience of the mind and the body. That sounds complicated, doesn’t it? What does moment-by-moment experience of the mind and body really mean? For me, this part of the mindfulness definition is best felt rather than explained. You might have gathered already that Buddhism emphasises a lot of experiential learning rather than intellectual or philosophical knowledge.

We can subdivide our moment-by-moment experience by what our various sense organs are registering. In Buddhist psychology, we have six senses, which include the traditional five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The sixth sense is the mind, which involves our thoughts, feelings and emotions.

A simple way of conceptualising our conscious moment-by moment experience of the six sense organs is to imagine our awareness as a stage with six musical performers. This metaphor is derived from American Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein’s concept of a 6-piece chamber orchestra. On the stage of our awareness are six performers: a vocalist who represents thoughts and emotions; a drummer who symbolises the sensations in the body; a lead guitarist who represents sight; a bass guitarist who represents hearing; a violinist who represents taste and a flautist who represents smell.

If this line-up isn’t to your musical taste, you can assign the different sense organs to whatever musical performer you prefer. At any one point, these six players are on our stage of awareness. For most of us, the vocalist, who represents thinking and emotions, tends to be the loudest. For the anxious and overthinking people like me, it takes control of the stage, with the rest of the players in the background.

If I have a stomach-ache, the drummer, who represents the body, becomes loudest, with the vocalist singing various scary tunes like, ‘It might be cancer!’ If I am focused on my food, the violinist (taste), lead guitar (sight) and flautist (smell) take centre stage. If I’m judging the food negatively and getting annoyed by the whole experience, the vocalist takes centre stage again: ‘This is not nice, why are they feeding you this?’

When I am quietly mindfully meditating, fully absorbed by the breath, the drummer (body sensations) takes centre stage in a calm way, while the rest of the musicians are quiet. When my cell phone rings, the bass guitar (hearing) is triggered followed by the vocalist (thoughts): ‘Who is ringing me now? I am supposed to be meditating!’

When we are mindful, we are aware and watching what is going on in our moment-by-moment experience. We are alert and not sleepy. We notice the different things going on with the musicians. We are kind to them even if they are unruly and out of control at times. Sometimes, when mindfulness is strong, we see the gaps between the music. We notice space. We eventually see the stage where all the happenings occur. This suggests that our ability to be aware is getting stronger.

Let’s practise

Try the following short exercise to focus on your moment-by-moment mind and body experience.

Notice what is going on with the various musicians in your awareness.

Avoid adding stories or commentaries. Just focus on what you notice.

Pay full attention to what you are seeing.

Avoid making comments on what you see. Just see for a few seconds. Just see.

Pay attention to what are you hearing. Just hear for a few seconds. Just hear.

If it is quiet, just notice the quiet. Pay attention to your sense of smell. Just smell for a few seconds. Just smell. If there is no smell, notice there is no smell.

Pay attention to your sense of taste. Just taste for a few seconds. Just taste. If you cannot taste anything, note the absence of taste.

Pay attention to your body. Notice body sensations, the expansion and relaxation of your chest and abdomen while breathing, your clothes caressing your body, your buttocks pressing on the chair, your feet on the ground. Just feel.

Pay attention to your mind. What are you thinking about? What are your emotions like? Are you calm? Are you annoyed? Are you excited to be learning something new? Notice for a few seconds.

Congratulations! You just engaged in a mindfulness meditation practice.

If you didn’t complete the exercise, notice what are you feeling now. Be aware of your thoughts about why you skipped the instructions. Did you feel bored? If you noticed boredom or sleepiness, that’s being mindful as well. If you noticed that your mind was elsewhere, the fact that you became aware that you were thinking about something else is being mindful too.

Mindfulness is knowing the various characters in your mind.

Expanding the practice

Noticing our experience is an important aspect of mindfulness but it is not enough on its own. Remember the definition of mindfulness is as a state of mind that is:

• aware and alert

• noticing and accepting of moment-by-moment experiences

• leading to kindness and compassion.

Aware and alert

Our quality of noticing is important. We need to be aware and alert. Are we watching with alertness and relaxed vigilance? Or are we watching with dullness, not fully attentive to the experience? The other extreme is to watch with tension and hypervigilance. Like a stringed instrument, mindfulness has to be tuned just right. If the strings are too lax, the instrument will not sing. If the strings are too tight, they will snap.

Kind acceptance

The next component of a mindful practice involves our attitude to our experience. A mindful attitude is peaceful and kindly accepting of the experience. Since whatever is going on at this specific moment is a culmination of multiple causes and conditions, many of which we do not have control over, we cannot do much to change the current situation at this very second. Instead, we have to accept it.

Acceptance, however, does not mean resignation that we cannot do anything about the future. An important aspect of mindfulness is knowing that what we do now, in speech or action, will influence the future. Accepting with kindness is vital in practising mindfulness because when we are kind to the situation, there is an attitude of peace and relaxation to whatever is happening.

I was once flying to London from New Zealand via Los Angeles. The airport in Los Angeles is notorious for having long queues and airport staff who have a penchant for screaming at airline passengers. I had a three-hour layover there, which is tight at the best of times. Our plane arrived an hour late, which meant that my layover was down to two hours.

I was at the back of the plane, so it took a while for me to disembark. As I waited, a sense of dread overcame me, a pit in my stomach, cold clammy hands, throbbing headache, and tightened breathing. My mind went on an overdrive. If I missed my connection, I’d have to deal with long queues at the transfer desk, then I’d have to tell the conference organisers in London that I might not make it to my talk. I worried that this might tarnish my professional reputation and people would think I was unreliable.

Then I had a mindful moment, I noticed that I was close to panic. I consciously watched my breathing, noticed my body tension, noticed the anxious mind. It was pointless getting mad at the airlines or the airport.

The plane being late was a result of multiple variables including a slight delay departing Auckland because of a sick passenger, strong headwinds and the busy air traffic in LA’s airspace. I had a choice to be angry and tense, or to kindly accept that this was the current situation from which I could not escape. I chose the latter and I noticed my chest relax, my back loosen and my breathing ease. I calmly made a contingency plan, which included calling my travel agent to get help organising an alternate connecting flight if I needed it. I called the conference organisers to let them know I might be delayed. I asked airport staff if I could get ahead of the immigration queue in order to make my flight. Surprisingly, I was calm throughout the process. Eventually, I made my flight to London on time, so all that worrying and papañca was not worth it!

Leading to kindness and compassion

The last component of the mindfulness definition is often neglected in western interpretations. In many western and modern definitions, mindfulness is limited to awareness and concentration training without any reference to ethical behaviour.

As such, a sniper could develop high levels of awareness, alertness and focus, which makes him ‘mindful’ and an efficient killing machine. This is totally against the Buddhist definition of mindfulness where ‘with mindfulness as his gatekeeper, the noble disciple abandons the unwholesome and develops the wholesome…’

According to Ajahn Amaro, if so-called mindfulness practice does not involve ethical sensitivity, it cannot be said to be genuine mindfulness.

An important aspect of daily mindfulness practice is cultivating wholesome, kind, generous, compassionate thoughts and actions, while abandoning harmful, hateful and greedy tendencies.

Extracted with permission from Life Hacks from the Buddha: How to be calm and content in a chaotic world, by Dr Tony Fernando (HarperCollins). Available now.