Mini Self Check-in: How am I Feeling?

At first, I felt a bit skeptical about setting alarms for mindfulness. Is it really mindfulness if I need a device to remind me to be mindful?

It brought to mind the smartphone app “Calm” which I had used when I first started dabbling in meditation. I had downloaded it and spent some time with the guided meditations, but since I was so focused on getting immediate, measurable results, I got pretty frustrated with the whole meditation thing very quickly.

I kept the “Calm” application, however, and returned to it as a meditation timer after attending a week-long meditation retreat about a year later. The instructions given at the retreat had given me enough context to better understand the idea isn’t so much about goals (the future) as it is about learning to connect with and inhabit the eternal present.

In the year since I had used “Calm,” the developers had added elements of gamification: meditation “stats” to post on social media (how many sessions you’ve done, how many total hours you’ve meditated, your longest “streak” of meditations…). It also tells me from time to time that I should really allow the application to send me “mindfulness alerts.” Needless to say, I don’t use any of these features of the application, and never plan to. Something just seems terribly off about an application called “Calm” alerting me to be more mindful.

All of that to say that I felt a bit annoyed at the suggestion to set alarms for check-in periods throughout the day.

However, I decided to play along because, hey, if I’m taking the course, it’s to learn something, so let’s go for it!

I understood the value of these mindfulness reminders at the close of the first day. The first one went off while I was a passenger in a car. It was morning. I felt calm, optimistic about the day, and my posture was ok as far as car posture goes. The next reminder happened after a coffee break. I felt the caffeine rushing through me, my mind rushing into the future, and my neck and back muscles tightening up. The last one happened while I was watching a TV show and my thought was “ugh I don’t have time for this mindfulness nonsense now – I’m busy!”

These thoughts and sensations were quite surprising and valuable to me. Usually, throughout my day, thanks to my mindfulness practice, I enjoy several moments of clarity and calm. I hadn’t really given it thought, but it turns out that these moments arise out of pretty specific conditions and not just periodically throughout the day as I had previously thought. Buddhist dharma talks usually emphasize three different qualities of experience: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. My experience of mindfulness arises naturally during neutral experience: riding in a car, walking to work, washing the dishes, hanging up laundry, etc. It also arises, but to a lesser extent, with pleasant experience: the taste of hot chocolate, the feel of a warm hug, etc. But unpleasant is almost completely absent from my mindfulness practice because it’s hard to remember to be mindful in unpleasant situations.

My experience with the TV show was also quite revealing. The course lecture by Dr. Rick Hanson mentioning that “we are what we attend to” comes to mind here. My mind was so engulfed in the fictional world that it couldn’t be bothered to attend to the here and now. And it wasn’t like it was some live event that I could only see at one specific time. It was a Netflix show that I could have easily paused for a moment of mindfulness to reflect on how the TV show was affecting me.

Although I’m happy to now be free of the mindfulness alarms, this experience has showed me that there are many areas of my experience that I can turn my attention to. Setting a mindfulness reminder from time to time can help attract attention to experiences that I most certainly would otherwise miss.