Mindfulness: A software development kit for your brain
Finding out what you’re up to inside your head
Mindfulness is a big buzz word right now, especially in places like SF. I think this word is a bit overloaded at this point, as it means a lot of different things to different people. Here are a few of my favorite short descriptions:
Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the now widespread MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) programs across 1000s of hospitals and clinics, describes mindfulness at its simplest as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
Sam Harris, who’s meditation app Waking Up I highly recommend, sums it up as “simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and non-discursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.”
Jim Dethmer of the Conscious Leadership Group describes mindful presence as “being here now, in a non-reactive, non-triggered way.”
My personal take is that as far as we know, we are the only species that is aware that it is aware. That is, we have the ability to engage in meta-cognition and think about what we’re thinking reflexively, to turn attention and awareness back on itself. This is a powerful multi edged sword that we can choose to engage or not, and in ways that are healthy and unhealthy.
We have the option to flex or not flex that muscle. When we’re not aware or conscious of what we’re thinking/doing/feeling, we’re living on a sort of autopilot, mindlessly moving from one thought or activity to another. This has some advantages! We can perform complex tasks like driving a car while zoning out and thinking about something else, getting lost in our heads. It’s also evolutionarily advantageous as it allows us to filter vast amounts of incoming sensory data and ignore much of it in order to signal process only the relevant information.
The downside of autopilot is that it’s all too easy to live your life on autopilot and watch it fly by without any deliberate conscious intentionality to how you want to actually spend it. The biggest shortcoming of autopilot mode is that it tends to execute subconscious routines & habits that we learned along the way from our observations of and interactions with others, regardless of whether they still serve us or not. Sometimes this can lead to disconnects between our higher aspirational self and our actual results (e.g. we think we want to change X or Y, but we still find ourselves in the same worn habits and patterns). Mindfulness provides an opportunity to inspect our own patterns and habits: what is it that you do inside? Let’s find out!
That said, engaging in thinking about your thinking itself is a double edged sword. It can be a powerful debugging exercise to understand your operating system and programmed applications, or it can be a a negative feedback loop of self criticism for thinking certain thoughts or feeling certain emotions. That’s why it’s important to pair mindful awareness with self compassion and love. Without accepting ourselves fully for who we are, we cannot hope to change anything.
Mindfulness is a tool to debug your operating system and self installed applications.
Software development provides some fantastic analogies for how to think about mindfulness, consciousness, and understanding yourself more deeply.
Think of yourself as a software stack. You have a kernel, your BIOS, that is shared with all human beings: universal wants, desires, and fears that come with being human. Then you have your base operating system, like Windows or Linux. Your base OS is comprised of the things that were installed in you in from a young age: the beliefs and ways of being in the world that you learned from your parents, your siblings, your church, your friends, your community, your schooling, etc. You can overhaul them, but it requires more of a complex reformatting operation.
Then you have your installed applications, like Word or Photoshop. These are the skills you picked up later in life, the experiences you got at jobs and relationships, the things that you needed to get good at in order to get where you are now.
Mindfulness is akin to running yourself in debug mode and setting a breakpoint. It offers you the option to pause in the space between trigger and automatic reaction and make a choice about how to proceed. Let’s take an example where you get triggered when your spouse does or says something. Ordinarily when you experience that particular input stimulus, you automatically execute a certain subroutine - this is our unconscious automatic autopilot in action.
Mindfulness allows us to say “I want to set a breakpoint at line 23 and pause and inspect the contents of my consciousness before I run that subroutine.” We can pause in the space between the input stimulus and our conditioned automatic response and do a stack dump. There we find the transitory contents of consciousness are a sort of working memory at that particular point in our personal code’s execution, the state of our global variables like thoughts, emotions, and sensations arising in awareness. E.g. I can set a breakpoint for when my kid says or does something that triggers me and before reacting automatically, I can inspect my thoughts, emotions and sensations. For example, playing the my kid triggered me scenario:
Thoughts: “I don’t like this behavior. This is wrong.”
Sensations: heat in chest, contracted breathing.
Emotions associated: anger.
Just working with this analogy can be a fabulous place to start. Simply place some conscious attention on cultivating your desire to set breakpoints for key areas where you know you get triggered, and work on reacting to those situations in debug mode.
When you’re ready to go deeper, it can be helpful to cultivate awareness about where in your stack you are actually throwing an exception and what the root cause is. For example, on first inspection, you might think that it is the way your spouse is being in the world that is causing you to be triggered. On further inspection, you might realize that it is actually something inside of you that is core to your fundamental desires as a human being that is actually the source of your upset.
Mindfulness can illuminate the kernel, or BIOS, that all humans share
The best articulation of the base code all humans share is one I learned from Jim Dethmer at the Conscious Leadership Group, who adapted much of it from Hale Dwoskin and The Sedona Method. It reinforces and articulates what Joseph Campbell illuminated by using comparative mythology to find commonalities across world cultures and religions, and it experientially rings true for me when I go into debug mode. It goes like this:
At the great risk of oversimplifying, all great spiritual traditions start off with the basic idea that oneness is all there is; it’s all that’s going on. And then, something happens such that there is a dislocation, or a separation, from that oneness. This happened both literally and figuratively very early in each of our journeys: at the very beginning of my conscious existence, I became physically separate from my mother at birth, and then I developed an ego structure to define who my separate self is and deal with that newfound separation. My ego identity formed to allow me to experience what it is I think I lost in the disconnection from oneness. I adopted the belief that I am a separate self, disconnected from the ‘other.’
Once I believe that I am a separate self, there are two great diseases of thought at the root of all fear, suffering, and unhealthy conflict in the world: "not enough - ness" and ”out there - ness.”
"Not enough - ness":
The belief that I don’t have enough X (I don’t have enough time, energy, love, money or any other forms of security, approval, and control)
The belief that I am not Y enough (I am not smart enough, handsome enough, funny enough, capable enough, etc.)
This experience of lack leads to a never-ending process of compare & compete whereby I compare myself to others and judge how much X I don’t have and how lacking I am against others at Y.
"Out there - ness”:
Once I believe I don’t have enough X or that I am not Y enough, I go 'out there' to get what it is I believe I lack ‘in here':
I seek the security, safety, and survival of my ego identity
I seek approval from others
I seek to control other people, situations, circumstances, and conditions
I seek a return to the oneness I lost in my separation
Once I believe that I am a separate self, I become vulnerable, and therefore security becomes my paramount concern. As a separate being, I can be killed or destroyed, and I have an inherent need for the security and survival of my ego and body. This can be evolutionarily helpful! It can cause me to pay attention when crossing the street or not engage in other life threatening behaviors. But it can also lead to a state of fear or even paranoia. It also means that death can be a real problem for me. What’s going to happen to this self identity that I’ve been trying to secure all these years?
This need for security can also manifest as a pursuance of safety: locking my doors or fearing other people when I think they represent a threat to my security. The news cycle runs off this fear of the other as a threat to fundamental security and safety.
As a parent, I believe that one of my jobs is to guarantee the safety of my children (and it is for a while). But when I get activated, I not only get triggered about my own security but paranoid about my kids security as well, because I am deeply attached to the belief that they too are surviving as separate beings. And increasingly so are they - which is why young children experience such severe separation anxiety when mom leaves the room or we turn the lights out for bedtime.
The second fundamental want of my separate self is that of approval. My ego feels better if you approve of me, like me, and love me. Approval of others is really just an externally validating extension to my desire for security and safety, a mechanism for ensuring that my sense of self is approved of. When a simple facial expression or a few words or absence of words gives me the message that I’m not approved of, it feels like a massive threat to my sense of security and safety. If you don’t give me the approval I want, I go into personality strategies to try to get it. I might become really nice or helpful, to try to earn your praise and appreciation. Or I might try to be the smartest person in the room, to achieve your accolades and recognition for my intelligence.
If I can’t get you to approve of me, I go to control. Once I’ve lost connection with the essential oneness, believing I am a separate identity that needs to survive, I go looking outside of myself for safety. When my security feels at risk, I try to manipulate the world around me to be as I want it to be. I try to control my kids, my coworkers, my spouse. I try to change myself and others in order to make myself feel more secure. I try to control my bank account or my time or my energy or my team or the market or my business.
In summary: at the beginning of my conscious existence, I experienced a dislocation or separation from the oneness. I formed an ego identity to make sense of this seemingly separate self. As long as I am identified as a separate self, I will never have enough or be enough. From that place, I will forever go out there to try to get the security and approval of my identity and control of my environment as a way to return to that oneness. Every time I go out there to get what it is I want in here, I am looking to those around me to give me the experience of what it is I felt I lost, which inherently sets those relationships up for drama.
Introspecting how separation, security, approval, and control are showing up in your life
Knowing that all of this is just how I’m wired at the deepest levels helps inform how I apply mindfulness to everyday upsets and triggers. My debug mode then becomes something like this: What’s here now? What thoughts, sensations, or feelings are present? Is this fundamentally a desire for security, approval, or control? Could I welcome that? Could I allow it? Resisting what is is the cause of all suffering. Could I just take a breath and rest as that which is beyond all wanting? The space there is a crack of freedom.
