‘The splendour of the moment so dazzles us, our compulsively chattering minds give pause, so as not to mentally whisk us away to a place other than the here and now.’ Russell E. Dicarlo
As a working mother I spend a lot of time planning and thinking about what my family need day to day. What will I make for dinner, what time do I need to pick the kids up from school, who needs new shoes, whilst having in mind to book those dental appointments that come round so quickly. We spend so much of our lives consumed in organising, managing and zooming (excuse the pun) from one place to another. It must be a huge percentage of our time that we spend anxiously worrying about and investing in the future, which may never happen. Alternatively, when we are not running around, we may pass the time wistfully regretting, fretting and bemoaning the things that may not have happened as we wished, in our past. How often are we actually engrossed in the present? How much of our time is actually focused on living in the here and now? And even when we are faced with a spectacular moment like our recent family trip to the Victoria Falls everyone is obsessively trying to capture the moment on their camera in order to ‘share’ it or post it instead of appreciating the moment.
I admit that I was also one of those people trying to capture the breathtaking magnificence of the waterfalls on video. But then I stopped and stood quietly and took in the awesome spectacle of the longest waterfalls in the world. It was a truly spiritual experience for me and I even took out a Siddur (prayer book) and was moved to pray because I felt the presence of the Almighty Creator there.I also experienced this deeply spiritual moment of inspiration when I stood at the top of the peaks of the Californian mountains of Yosemite national park at sunset. The vastness of the universe astounded me. I was literally stunned into a state of presence and awe. There was no need to worry about the next hour or fret about the past. The moment was all that existed. However perhaps it is easy to be mindful of the present when faced with an awesome sight of natural beauty. Perhaps being in the here and now is infinitely much harder to practice in our hectic, often mundane lives when we are not faced with a breathtaking view of nature. In the highly acclaimed book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle alleges that we are trapped in time imprisoned in an ‘endless preoccupation with past and future.’ He says we seem to refuse to honour or even acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. We do not know how to live in the now. We seem to have tremendous anxiety about time and managing our lives. And the irony is that in actual fact all we ever have is the present moment!
Mindfulness has become a word that gets banded about and has become rather over-used in recent years. People are becoming more invested in meditations and yoga retreats in a desperate attempt to counteract the manic habits they have developed in their every-day lives.It seems that the ability to switch on the calm mode is a skill that we have lost over the centuries, as the pace of life has become increasingly frenetic and a huge effort is needed to re acquire it. I myself gained a glimpse of it a few weeks ago. I was frantically busy setting up meetings for a new communal therapy-based project that I am trying to launch (watch this space) and fitting those meetings in to my already busy schedule. I found myself cramming ordinary activities into five minute slots into my calendar to accommodate everything and not drop any balls. I desperately needed time out or rather time in – to go inside myself. Thank Gd for Shabbos. I decided to take Shabbos morning “off” and sit in my garden. The cold weather had broken and the sun was shining. It took a certain amount of energy to stop doing, thinking and using my brain and to pause, to go inside to that place of tranquility.
In those brief moments of stopping, closing my eyes and listening to the different sounds around me - the birds, the cars going by and the dogs barking in the distance, my whole body calmed down. I noticed that my breathing slowed and it was as if my nervous system had relaxed. For a few moments my flighty mind was still. Feeling the warmth of the sun on my face, I felt the energy of the universe pulsating in harmony with the sounds of nature and my own body. It was an awesome experience as once again I felt a Divine embrace. It was a powerful moment, not dissimilar from the sunset or waterfall moment and it felt really good. I believe that I was beginning to get closer to the concept of mindfulness.
So what actually is mindfulness? Originally brought into the limelight by a new interest in traditional Eastern meditative practice, mindfulness is the capacity to pay attention, nonjudgmentally, to the present moment; it is about living the moment, experiencing one’s emotions and senses fully, yet with perspective which means as an observer. By focusing on the breath, the idea is to cultivate attention on the body and mind as it is moment to moment and so help with pain, both physical and emotional. People are normally largely unaware of their moment-to-moment experience, often operating in an ‘‘automatic pilot’’ mode which leads to frustration and too often overly emotional responses. By focusing on something concrete in the present such as one’s senses or one’s breath one can more easily harness the here and now. Mindfulness may also help individuals to accept and tolerate powerful emotions they may feel when challenging their habits or exposing themselves to upsetting situations.This has proven to be highly effective in the context of anxiety since as I said previously focusing on the past or the future tends to be stressful.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist and a pioneer in bringing mindfulness to the Western world. He is the founder of Mindfulness Stress Based Reduction. According to Kabat-Zinn it is about living your life, moment to moment and being here for it. It is about being in your body, being aware of the thoughts in your mind and that they are not the reality of things, they are subjective. Most of all, mindfulness is about freedom and optimising a sense of well-being. He claims that when people practise a daily meditation or mindfulness practice, their medical and psychological symptoms are reduced. It changes one’s health. (Of course, ideally the goal is to practice this before one gets ill or is living with stress.) It brings a sense of clarity, composure and mental flexibility into one’s life. I have read studies that claim doing a ten minute meditation everyday makes your brain quicker and improves concentration. Developing this ability is gradual, takes time and requires regular practice. He recommends starting to practice by just spending a few moments when you wake up in the morning or before you go to sleep at night. Sound familiar..?
It occurred to me that Shema is exactly the kind of meditation that he would recommend. Twice a day, we cover our eyes, we focus internally on the Creator of the Universe and we declare His Oneness with a purely mindful mantra.
There are many other mitzvos I could draw on which demonstrate the concept of mindfulness, however I will only mention one which is particularly close to my heart and exemplifies this idea beautifully - hearing the shofar. There is nothing else to do other than stand still, pause, close your eyes and be present to listen to the piercing, engaging sound of the shofar as it washes over you and your senses.
It is an opportunity given to us to be present, focused (with kavana) and to connect deeply within ourselves and to Gd or to the Universe. And as we do so we may come to realise that each of these individual powerful moments of clarity that we are blessed to experience is connected to a deeper, greater reality of one whole collective consciousness, rooted in the here and now.
Or in other words, shechehiyanu vekiyamanu vehigiyanu bzman hazeh.
Written by Maria Beider