The Vitamin of Mindfulness

Mindlessness equates what is with what is expected to be: when on auto-pilot, the mind rounds up and approximates reality into already-familiar patterns and categories. Hence, the “if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck,” conclusion. The result is what Buddhists refer to as samsara, a situation in which the mind substitutes illusion for reality. Instead of responding to what actually is, we respond to our projections of what should be. When mindless, our mind is a closed system on a feedback loop. Starved for input, we recycle and regurgitate our own consciousness and feed ourselves the empty informational calories of our expectations. Gurdjieff referred to this as a “perceptual deficiency disease,” a kind of “vitamin” deficiency of the mind (Tart, 1994, p. 28). He talked about the need to feed the mind the “food of impressions,” a regimen of mindfully savored sensations to “nourish” the mind that has been starved on a regimen of abstractions and ideas (p. 29). Mindfulness offers a taste of what is, a taste of being present, an existential highlight, a time-tag in consciousness to refer back to. Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)nnwww.eatingthemoment.comnncopyright 2009