My first encounter with mindfulness

Setting the Stage for Experiencing Mindfulness

On September 8, 2001, three days before the planes flew into the World Trade Center Towers, I had another jet of sorts crash into my head, presenting a way of being that I’d never quite experienced before.

Grant you, the experience was far more localized than what would unfold in New York.  There I was, standing in the kitchen of the former home of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche (I kid you not) in Ojai, California, watching my friend, William Okin, a person whom I’d known all my life, prepare a smoothie.

Now again, this was by no means a dramatic situation: it was sunny out, we were in beautiful home, and I’d had plenty of rest. We weren’t being chased by the mafia, nor the paparazzi for that matter. Across the boards, the situation was extraordinarily ordinary.

And yet, the way in which William was making the smoothie planted a seed in my awareness that would change my life.

Back then I had no language for what I was experiencing. What I did experience is that he was focused, engaged, and taking his time.  He wasn’t distracted, he wasn’t all over the place, and he felt no need to rush the process.

He was exhibiting what one might refer to as “mindfulness”.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness has become an extremely popular word.  And there are a lot of definitions for mindfulness floating around right now.  One of my favorites comes from Harvard Psychologist Ellen Langer who says, “Mindfulness is the simple process of noticing new things.”

We can see how that would be helpful in fulfilling traditional definitions of creativity, definitions that define creativity as the production of new and useful things.

Though simple on the surface, I think Langer’s definition goes much deeper.  The process of noticing new things enriches our lives, even if that noticing never present any new and useful ideas, services, or products.

Furthermore, tasks we do everyday, or even over and over again throughout the day, can be portals to enrichment simply by paying attention and experiencing them as new.

As it would turn out, the mindfulness that William was exhibiting was stemming from his commitment, over two years at that point, to meditating daily.  The practice of meditating, of focusing on the breath and bringing awareness over and over again for a set time each day, was spilling over into the rest of William life.

Watching him make that smoothie “mindfully” planted a seed in my own mind that would, eventually lead to my own meditation practice and, ultimately, a more mindful and creative way of being in the world.

As I started my own mediation practice in the summer of 2002, mindfulness had a very specific understanding in the context of the Buddha dharma: During mediation, mindfulness was the capacity to recognize that we are indeed distracted from the focal object, so that we could return our awareness back to the focal object.

In the context of meditation, mindfulness is awareness’s amazing ability to recognize itself, to step outside the flow of thoughts and sensations and say, “oh, I’m super distracted right now! Wow!”

Mindfulness and Creativity

Mindfulness isn’t the only route to living a creative live.  But practices that increase awareness, and thereby bring attention to what was once unconscious or habitual, can be powerful.  They can help us stop experience our life as a series of knee jerk reactions, and start dropping into the luminous amazement that is available in each and every moment.

Three days after that experience, two planes would indeed slam into the World Trade Center, setting off a very different series of events, eventually leading to the United States declaring wars on both Afghanistan and Iraq.

But for me, that first experience of mindfulness began a series of events that I am eternally grateful for.

It helped me to begin the process of reclaiming my own humanity and fully stepping into my role as a creator.

What type of creator are you? Take the Creativity Quiz and find out!