[Neurons] 2014 "Neurons" --- Meta Reflections #46

Mon Nov 17 12:54:49 EST 2014

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2014 #46

November 17, 2014

THE NEURO-SEMANTICS OF 

MINDFULNESS

It is not uncommon for people who experience the Meta-States Training that
we call Accessing Personal Genius (APG) to come away from it telling others
that it is a training in mindfulness.  I have heard this many, many times.
Others may not describe APG in those words, but will say that in learning
the Meta-States Model, they have added so much to their understanding and
competency in being mindful.  Recently I have had several people write and
ask where I got the information about mindfulness that they were exposed to
in APG.  And a few others have asked that I write more about mindfulness.
So here we go.

What do we mean by mindfulness?  To be mindful is to be present to your
current situation, aware, appreciative, and in sensory-awareness.  It is to
be here-and-now in your awareness.  It is to be conscious of what you are
experiencing- present, and not lost in thought about some other time and
place.  When a person is not mindful, he or she is somewhere else or worse,
may be mindlessly responding in an automatic way from old programs that may
or may not be appropriate or useful for today.

Mindfulness fulfills the oft-quoted phrase from Fritz Perls when he said,
"Lose your mind and come to your senses."  The "mind" here is the
chatter-box mind where we talk and talk and chatter to ourselves about all
kinds of things while experiencing something- chatter that all-too-often
causes us to miss the moment.  NLP took this phrase as Perls' call for
coming into sensory-awareness so that a person sees, hears, feels, smells,
and tastes one's present moment.

The opposite is mindlessness.  Mindlessness speaks about a state of mind
wherein we are not present, not conscious of the richness of the moment and
so we miss out on the present.  Mindlessness occurs when we use our previous
learnings in our ongoing experience of the world.  So instead of
experiencing the world in a fresh way, we see it through our categories,
judgments, and ideologies.  We then  dismiss things with a flip of the mind,
"Oh, that's X."  "Oh that's success."  "That's failure."  "That's old stuff,
I already know that."  Then, using these constructs we become blind to what
is actually available to us.  Korzybski would say that this is seeing and
experiencing the world intensionally rather than extensionally (note, it is
intensionally, not intentionally).

By way of contrast to the automatic, robotic, and unconscious style of
mindlessness, being mindful is responding with our full senses ("mind"),
fully conscious of the here-and-now.  Instead of the blind and dull
repetition of being mindless, in being mindful we see everything as fresh
and new.  We see what we have seen a thousand times as if for the first
time.  Maslow described self-actualizing people in this way.  He said they
are able to see the thousandth sunrise as if it was the first one ever seen.

Another contrast is that in being mindless we use previous cognitive
frameworks (judgments, evaluations, conclusions) rather than being open to
the moment-that is, being mindful.  The mindless see but do not really see.
"Eyes they have and see not; ears they have and hear not."  Ellen Langer
describes their mindset is that of being "motivated-not-knowing."  Having
decided that one already knows, one turns consciousness off and then dismiss
whatever is present, paying it no attention.

Numerous problems can arise from that way of orienting oneself in the world.
Langer also describes mindless as being trapped in one's categories.  When a
person lives by one's labels, categories, classifications, etc. one loses
the real world and lives solely in a world of constructs.

"Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness
means the continual creation of new ones." (Langer, 1989, p. 63).

Being mindful means making distinctions.  This is especially what we train
in Coaching Mastery -how to make refined distinctions so that a person can
listen so actively and intensely, one seems to enter into an entirely new
world.  Whereas being mindless turns off one's sensory awareness of the
present, in mindfulness you come to your senses in a heightened way.  This
explains why being mindful and living life from a state of continuous
appreciation are so highly correlated.  

Being mindful also entails continually creating and trying out new
categories for things.  This means being able to re-experience situations
and contexts in new ways thereby making the world  that is well-known new
and fresh.  In other words, playfulness isn't just for children.  As an
adult you take continue to play and to be playful as you move through life.
You can mindfully play with ideas and categories.  Yet to do so requires an
openness that reveals a mental receptivity to new possibilities.

In being mindful, your previous frames for understanding and interpreting a
situation are not rigid or static.  You can frame things in ever-new ways.
As you learn to reframe in playful and unexpected ways new meanings emerge.
Maybe this explains why framing and reframing belong to the mindful- to
those with an open and active mind.  The mindful can playfully re-interpret
things to their benefit and to the benefit of others.

Being mindful means that you can stay aware of the process of making real
choices as you move through the world.  This requires a process orientation,
that is, an orientation to reality as a dynamic process, and not a static
one.   Being mindful means we are alert to the variables within any decision
so that we then think-through our decisions rather than deciding in a
reactive mindless way.

In the APG training that presents the Meta-States Model, mindfulness also
shows up in terms of the ability to step back, expand one's perspective, and
reflexively move up the psycho-logical levels.  More about that next week. 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net

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