Mindfulness in problems

Problems impact us in different ways depending upon our emotional investment in them. Some problems have huge emotional weight to them, and some don’t. When a problem has no negative emotional component, then we aren’t carrying any thoughts of “right” and “wrong.” Perhaps common activities such as assembling a jigsaw puzzle or building a house or changing the doing the dishes could fall into this category. It’s not wrong, for example, that the dishes need to be scrubbed with steel wool. If we don’t have a story about it – for example: why it shouldn’t be necessary to scrub the dishes with steel wool because your son shouldn’t have left them out overnight— then the problem just is, and we do what needs to be done.
When was the last time you engaged in solving a problem without a story of right and wrong associated with it? Chop wood, carry water: the Zen Buddhist practices of mindfulness are the same before enlightenment as they are afterwards, but when we lose the story, our work becomes joyful, simple, easy, inspired.

For my part, there have been a few times in my life when I have engaged whole-heartedly in working on something – like my first job in High School, when I bagged groceries. I loved to bag groceries and would become transcendentally immersed in the activity. The world would fall away, and there would be nothing left but the bag, the bread, the eggs, the milk, the conveyor belt.

Our problems, when engaged truly without emotional investment in what happens, and with the egotistical mind released from the outcome, can turn into a “flow,” where action and reaction can become so intermingled that cause and effect blur. People, when moving to the height of execution in technical problems become one with the subject of their work and can lose themselves in the practice and workmanship of what they are doing. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first proposed this concept of flow, and he identified the following characteristics of this experience:

1. Clear goals, no confusion about what you’re supposed to do.
2. A high degree of concentration and focus on a limited field, not having to switch your attention between a large number of different things.
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are obvious, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. The activity is neither too easy nor too difficult.
7. The activity is intrinsically rewarding
8. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975. p.72).

People enter into this feeling of flow when they stop emotionally resisting the activity, when they are able to get their questioning, judging mind out of the process and just accept the activity with love and gratitude. But Csikszentmihalyi’s eight steps are not necessary for this experience, they are merely conducive to a mental state of non-judgment. They are conducive to “storylessness.” When you have a clear goal, it is easy to avoid the story of “I should know what I’m doing,” or “She should have told me that was what was expected.” When you have a limited number of things to deal with, it is easier to avoid the story of “I am overwhelmed,” and “I’m not good enough.” In effect, the eight conditions highlighted above allow us to focus on and—more importantly–to accept ownership of all problems that occur in our field of consciousness.

When we can do this, we have entered a mindfulness practice. For people like me, whose minds can easily wander off into judgment if not watched closely, it may be best to try to set up our problems so that they fall into the classical definition of flow. However, these eight steps can themselves be a barrier to an open mind: can you imagine trying to set up every problem in your life so that you have clear goals, simple tasks, so that you don’t feel self-conscious, so that it’s just the right difficulty, etc.? You will drive yourself mad.

If these experiences of open-minded acceptance to problems which lead to a feeling of flow in our lives are important to us, then we can take one of two practical approaches: (1) radically simplify our lives that that we have fewer tasks, less overwhelming responsibilities, and an in general an easier set of problems with which to work, or (2) begin to open your mind and develop a sense of radical forgiveness about your problems so that even if you are dealing with problems on many different levels that you can accept in faith that there is a clear solution, you are open to finding it without anger and attack.