This article makes a case for thinking about mindfulness in the context of interaction. It describes how our perceptions are inherently relational: our brain is wired to make stories out of situations. These stories are not necessarily accurate, but we can do something about that.
Understanding our biases helps us act more appropriately
You see somebody frowning. What is your reaction? You might assume that this person is angry at you. Another story you could tell yourself is that things are not going well for this person today.
The stories we make up might or might not be true. The point is that our brain automatically makes up stories to make sense of what we see. It is similar to what happens when we see two dots: we “see” a line between them even though there is no such line.
We automatically infer the pattern, the relationship, and the arc of the story. That story feels true. It feels so true that we are not even aware that it is just an assumption, not something that would be considered as a fact in a court of law or a scientific context.
The story is not always an accurate representation of reality. Does this mean that our mind, our brain, and our nervous system are inadequate? We might legitimately consider them defective if they had been instruments designed to provide accurate, objective information. For instance, a scale would be flawed if it did not measure weights accurately.
Our brain did not evolve to produce factual information
The evolutionary need was to help our remote ancestors survive by making instant decisions in difficult situations. Hence, the development of our ability to ‘see’ patterns. Our mind fills in the line between the dots. We experience any given situation as part of an unfolding story. We get a sense of the arc of the story and a sense of what’s next. We experience this as gut-level feelings, with a sense of absolute certainty, just like we ‘know’ beyond the shadow of a doubt that the earth is flat.
Why is that? We are not detached observers, but we are in constant interaction with the natural world and the social world. We experience situations as stories because stories are what it takes to capture the dynamic quality of life as interaction.
Relational mindfulness
So, relational mindfulness involves being aware that:
Life is interaction.
We experience situations as stories.
While these stories feel authentic, they are not necessarily objectively true.
Relational mindfulness also involves having a sense of how to deal with the limitations of the relatively crude processing that occurs in pattern recognition and story-making.
It is helpful to put these limitations in context. Often enough, the threat that our forebears reacted to was real. In any case, responding made sense even if the danger was not real. If you ignore a real threat, you die and don’t reproduce. You might be wrong if you react to a false alarm, but you live to reproduce.
So, the sense of absolute certainty we have about what we perceive makes sense when we place it within the context of how we evolved. We are alive today because our ancestors had absolute certainty about the truth of their perceptions. We inherited that from them.
A different environment
However, the environment we live in is no longer the environment in which our ancestors evolved. We no longer live in tiny tribes of hunter-gatherers. For millennia, we have been living in complex societies. The type of dangers that threaten us has changed. And so has the value of the automatic threat reactions that evolved in earlier times.
In some cases, these reactions may be beneficial. But, often enough, they put us into more trouble. So we need to override our reactivity to have an appropriate response to what is actually around us.
Reactivity has to do with the more basic brain and nervous system structures that evolved early for survival. In a dangerous situation, these parts of the nervous system activate into “fight or flight” mode. That is, our organism reconfigures itself to channel all available energy into fighting or running away from danger. Resources that are not in service of ‘fight or flight’ shut down to prioritize survival.
Peripheral vision does not have an essential survival benefit, and it shuts down. I mean this in a literal sense and in the sense of having a broader mental perspective. The more we are under pressure, the less we can access our mindfulness circuits. So, our ability to see nuances is curtailed.
Shifting from reactive to responsive
In other words, the shift from reactive to responsive, from mindless to mindful, involves shifting into our mindfulness circuit. We cannot turn off the “fight or flight” circuit, which is hard-wired and essential. However, we can lessen its intensity by engaging another part of the nervous system that is less primitive. This circuit evolved in conjunction with our becoming more and more of a social animal. The mindfulness circuit is the social engagement circuit. It is involved in regulating our moods and interactions and processing more complex information.
When the mindfulness and social engagement circuit is engaged, we can do due diligence to derive a response appropriate to the situation at hand. And frantic energy transforms into poised energy, which can be more precisely modulated and much more effective in civilized life.
Whether we are reactive or more mindfully responsive, we are engaged in interacting with our environment. But there is a big difference. When we are mindfully responding, we are using our most sophisticated brain resources. Therefore, the quality of our response is better than if we were only relying on our more primitive equipment.
Unlike animals or our very distant ancestors, we do not just operate on instinct. We can make choices moment by moment. It takes intentionality to engage the mindful circuit that has to do with social engagement. We need to remember that we can influence the stories that our mind keeps creating.