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“Mindfulness” is an oxymoron. The goal of mindfulness is to escape your mind, to escape, as much as you can, the thoughts that clutter your mind. So maybe we should call it mindfreeness, mindemptiness or even mindlessness, though that one has negative social connotations.
Of course, we need our minds to think up all the good stuff we want to think up: poems, solutions to the climate crisis, song titles.… But with mindfreeness, we can think those helpful thoughts when it is helpful to do so, and avoid obscuring them with thoughts about whether the plumber ripped us off two years ago, or whether we spoke too long to the barista.
Mindfreeness (or do you prefer “mindemptiness”?) is about returning as often as possible to the real moment that is happening and focusing your attention on that moment. Maybe that moment involves planning the future or imagining the plot of your novel. That’s fine as long as you retain the ability to return to what is really happening, what is real in the moment.
An advantage to bringing your attention back to the present moment is that you are concentrating energy that had been diluted in a million directions back to what’s going on, where your energy can be useful. It’s like the difference between scattering light all around and focusing a flashlight on something right in front of you.
I am a consummate daydreamer. I have always defended my daydreaming, but, as they say, there is a time and a place for everything. When I am with a lover, I don’t want to be imagining what I would do as the president of a country; that would be stealing some of the light I want to shine on my relationship with my lover.
What can steal the most light from the present moment is obsessive compulsive disorder. The black hole of OCD sucks energy away from real life into a useless abyss of anxiety. So how can mindfreeness practices help to reduce OCD symptoms?
One way that mindfreeness can help is to cut off the cycle of catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is when you spiral into thoughts and emotions about bad things that could happen; you make up scenarios based on resentments or fears and then you are no longer present–you are living in an imaginary world of anger and conflict. If you are prone to OCD, you might incorporate repetitive mental rituals into your…
