Anne Truitt Zelenka

When I talk about mindfulness, I mean more than just noticing what’s happening at a given moment. When I seek mindfulness, I’m seeking the following qualities of attention:

• Present moment focus
• Sensory awareness
• Nonjudgment
• Process orientation
• Acceptance

Here is a real-life example of mindfulness in action. I suffer from migraines. Every few weeks, I feel a stirring inside my head. I know then that for the next two to three days I will be fighting the beast within. Though the prescription vasoconstrictor Imitrex is occasionally helpful, more often than not the migraine outruns the medication.

If I try to ignore the migraine symptoms (nausea, pounding on one side of my head, sensitivity to light and especially the sound of my children), I can hardly function. Paradoxically, the best way to handle it is to attend to it, to focus on it, to be mindful of the migraine:

• Present moment focus — I don’t think of how this migraine is going to last the next two or three days. That would be terribly upsetting. I keep focused on this moment. At each moment, I can handle the migraine, so if my mind starts to look ahead, I gently bring it back to the present.
• Sensory awareness — I focus on the sensations, especially the feel of the pressure as it changes in my head. Attending carefully to the actual sensations makes me realize they are bearable in each moment, as my attention pulses along with the blood flow.
• Nonjudgment — Instead of thinking how awful it is I have a migraine, I try to refrain from labelling it good or bad. It just is.
• Process orientation — I don’t think of trying to rid myself of the migraine. I live with the migraine as it progresses.
• Acceptance – I accept that I have a migraine, that I am susceptible to migraines, and that this migraine will last as long as it lasts. I still do what I can to ameliorate the symptoms, because mindfulness is not an excuse for inaction. I take my medication, drink extra coffee (caffeine is a powerful vasoconstrictor), turn down the lights, and ask my children to quiet down.

You can see how these various facets of mindfulness work together and support each other. Refraining from judgment promotes acceptance. A present moment focus and process orientation work together hand in hand, like conjoined twins. Bare sensory awareness provides a ground to return to after each distraction or wandering of the mind.

If you would like to learn more about mindfulness but aren’t interested in a Buddhist treatment, check out Ellen Langer’s book Mindfulness or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. Both take an empirically-grounded, Western, and nonspiritual approach. Kabat-Zinn also sells mindfulness practice CDs and tapes online; my favorite is Series 2, which includes sitting and lying-down meditations of varying lengths and formats.