Mindfulness is Not a Fad

It Changed My Life and It Can Change Yours

Hello. This is Shy Guy Meets the Buddha, and I’m Don Boivin. Thanks for being here. If you like what you are about to read, or hear, please consider a small token of appreciation; a tip or paid subscription would be so generous and so helpful. Thank you! 🙏

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This isn’t a story of esoteric knowledge, elite states of consciousness, or spontaneous enlightenment. It’s a much more accessible story than that; one of simply learning how to live with oneself and to accept the world as it is. It’s a story of becoming aware, of practicing something called “mindfulness.”

You may say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody’s talking about mindfulness. Surely, it’s just another fad. Remember the big aerobics wave of the eighties? Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons? Everyone was jumping on that train, too. I even signed up, and I don’t sign up for anything.

I still remember the bubbly blond-haired aerobics instructor; he was such a delight. I was a private in the Army at the time, stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. Of course, I didn’t need the exercise; I got plenty of that on base. Physical Training was pretty much all we did, when we weren’t hanging out in the motor pool, polishing the lug nuts on our Armored Personnel Carriers (we didn’t really do that—I don’t think APCs had lug nuts—but we certainly wasted lots of time in redundant activities). I wanted to connect with some non-military people, so I joined a gym in town and signed up for aerobics. I don’t remember the instructor’s name, but we became friends for a while. The Army was a pretty bad fit for me, and I wasn’t making a lot of close friends there, so it was nice to socialize with another sensitive soul.

But the gyms and the country moved on—without me—to jazzercise, Pilates, Zumba, yoga. Pole dancing...

We’re a fickle bunch.

Photo by Kaylee Garrett on Unsplash

The Army wasn’t the only life-sized mistake I made. After my discharge I made a few more profound blunders, without ever really understanding what I was doing. That’s why I think mindfulness is different, not just a fad. Because if you don’t understand yourself, you’re going to be wandering around blind and not ever really maximizing your capacity to make some good in this world.

Mindfulness is exactly what it sounds like: paying attention. Being mindful of what’s going on around you and what’s going on inside you. And sustaining that attention, so that eventually you start to see how one thought or action leads to another. And you begin to understand yourself. And understanding oneself—objectively; with honesty, courage, and humility—is what maturity is made of.

Being mindful does takes courage, because you’re going to be doing pretty much the opposite of what everyone expects you to do. Which is to say; slowing things way down. People don’t like it when you just sit around doing nothing; it makes them nervous.* Ambition makes sense to our society; sitting still and embracing the moment does not. So, the first thing you have to do is get some courage.

I didn’t have a lot of courage when I was young. I married the wrong person because I was afraid to be alone. I dropped out of college because I was afraid of the feelings of homesickness, doubt, and insecurity I was experiencing. I joined the Army because I was afraid to do what I really wanted to do—put on a backpack and travel around the world.

Fear is almost always of the unknown. Mindfulness is a willingness to finally turn toward that unknown fear instead of running from it; to see and accept the truth of the self. To know oneself. When you know yourself, the unknown can no longer have its way with you.

For most of my life, though thoughtful and sensitive, I wasn’t very mindful. I didn’t know myself. It takes courage to face yourself squarely, because you’ve got to be willing to see the ugly truth; the fears and insecurities, the jealousy and malice, the temper, the cowardice, the fact that you’ll do just about anything, hurt anyone, to maintain your belief that you’re a good person, a smart person, a special and lovable person.

Mindfulness is not for the faint-hearted. You must be willing to let go of your best illusions.

So where do you get that courage? Where do you get humility? Well, I’ll tell you one place to find it. When you hit rock bottom, when you’ve got nowhere left to turn, courage and humility can be found there. Because it’s either that or, you know, put an end to things. I admit I thought of it a few times. (See my essay, “Walking Away.”)

But it doesn’t have to be life or death. It can just be profound dissatisfaction with one’s life. People don’t usually start a spiritual practice when things are going well. It’s when the doubts slip in, when they begin to feel that the path they’re on isn’t leading to the place they thought it would.

Of course, that nagging dissatisfaction can last for years and you can just keep on ignoring it, pushing it down out of sight. You can continue plowing forward, making decisions out of ignorance, out of an inflated ego, out of fear, and basically contributing to your own unhappiness. And not exactly spreading any good vibes in the world, either.

Or you can just stop.

Just stop.

I stopped.

It didn’t happen all at once. I made a few attempts that didn’t fully transform my life. Baby steps. Like when I quit the Army after two years. Like when I got divorced. And, this one action that probably marks the beginning of my final awakening: when I ran away from the escalating and uncontrollable conflagration that was my custody and visitation battle.

I’m still not ready to tell that story in its entirety. I’ll just say that choosing to end the battle meant not seeing my children for a while and it was the hardest, most shameful thing I’ve ever done.

I can tell you this, though: the hardest things are always the most transformative.

This is actually from a recent trip to Santa Fe, with my partner, Jennifer. My beard wasn’t nearly this gray during that first transformative visit!

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is where I ended up when my car broke down during that impulsive escape, I experienced a different world. One where people take time for themselves, where they meditate and write in journals and pursue “spiritual” things, where they pay attention to the landscape, to the sky, to one another. I met so many thoughtful people living according to their inner callings rather than according to others’ demands or expectations. In New Mexico I met people who live by a whole different set of values than the ones I grew up with in my insular New England town.

This place opened my eyes to a world of options that I did not know existed. And that gave me strength. Somehow, New Mexico—or perhaps it was just my break from who I thought I was supposed to be—brought vividly to the forefront of my psyche this question, so succinctly stated by Victoria Chin in her recent Substack article, “Mind the Gap. Build a Bridge”:

“Am I the architect of my own experience?”

I knew the answer, and I resolved not to default to others ever again.

I returned to my home state to re-join the fight for my rights to my children but with an expanded frame of reference. Things didn’t get much better because I couldn’t change my children’s mother’s attitude, only my own, but I found myself feeling a little less... dire. A little more self-confident. A little more willing to live with things as they are without falling apart over them.

So, you see, I was discovering mindfulness on my own without having heard about it as a “practice.” Years later, books like The Miracle of Mindfulness, When Things Fall Apart, and other Dharma teachings further cemented my attention. My earliest meditation attempts didn’t really take because I thought it was a matter of disciplining myself to not think. That’s difficult; probably not even possible. Then I read The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching in 2020 and I learned how mindfulness and meditation go together. Not only have I practiced meditation every day since, mindfulness has become a way of life.

Today, I’m still, on the one hand, the same old guy: sensitive, emotional, anxious, human. I’m physically tired, and I often complain that I still have to worry about making money after a lifetime of working with my hands. I still make mistakes (thankfully, not life-sized ones), I still get my feelings hurt, I still judge. But on the other hand, I’m aware of who I am. When I get irritated or take things personally, I remember that it’s because I have a mind that continues to cling to conditioned and habitual beliefs and expectations. Those expectations are not representative of what’s real in the world, they’re just thought processes in my head. If those thoughts are causing me to suffer, then I look at that, and I see that I don’t have to think that way anymore.

Each time I go through this process of reacting and then looking at that reaction to understand it more deeply, I get better at seeing the truth—that everything I think of as “self” is flexible and changeable—and I find myself returning to a state of equilibrium more quickly.

That’s mindfulness. Mindfulness is not a fad; it works.

*The goal of mindfulness is actually to maintain an attentive awareness throughout the day, even when you’re very busy, but for starters, meditation—“just sitting”—is the best way to learn to pay close attention to the subtleties of one’s true nature.

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BOOKS MENTIONED

Thich Nhat Hanh. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Beacon Press: 1999
~ The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. Harmony: 1999
Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart. Shambhala: 2016

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