A New Everyday Intensity Series: Mindfulness

Are You Ready to “Drop Bare Bones into the Present Moment Experience”?

Now seems as good a time as any to launch another series of posts that touch on a common theme. In the spring, we dabbled in and dusted off our Hobbies. In July, we dove headfirst into the Intensity Project. Today, we will begin a series on Mindfulness and stay right with it until it comes to a natural conclusion.

When our son was about seven or eight, I was fortunate to find in our library the book Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla Kabat-Zinn and Jon Kabat-Zinn. The book was one of several voices that helped to shape my experience as a parent:

To parent consciously requires that we engage in an inner work on ourselves as well as in the outer work of nurturing and caring for our children. The “how-to” advice that we can draw upon from books to help us with the outer work has to be complemented by an inner authority that we can only cultivate within ourselves through our own experience. Such inner authority only develops when we realize that, in spite of all of the things that happen to us that are outside of our control, through our choices in response to such events and through what we initiate ourselves, we are still, in large measure, “authoring” our own lives. In the process, we find our own ways to be in this world, drawing on what is deepest and best and most creative in us. Realizing this, we may come to see the importance for our children and for ourselves of taking responsibility for the ways in which we live our lives and for the consequences of the choices we make. (p. 14)

Since having read that book, our son has grown into a young man. He is now in his second year of college, and I am realizing that much of the mindfulness work I had done when he was young is asking to be revisited, not from the perspective of a parent this time, but as… well, I guess that’s what I hope to discover.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning…

~ T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (“Little Gidding”)

Please join me in exploring through readings, videos, reflections and questions what Jon Kabat-Zinn describes in the following short video as “intimacy with ourselves, with who we actually are and not with what our thoughts about who we are or our fears about what’s going to happen to us… It involves dropping into the bare bones of our present moment experience.”

Mindfulness is perhaps particularly important—and difficult—for those with intellectual intensity or overexcitability, whose skill or even near obsession with analysis and thinking for its own sake can get in the way of (or become a convenient escape from) truly experiencing the present moment.

Are you ready?