The lower triangle: attitude, action, and impact (02)
A complete mindfulness practice extends the “training” of attention, intention and attitude to complementary life activities, such as eating or walking. The key insight that will deeply help you in the outcome of your practice is to recognize that, by doing it, you are also training action and impact.
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A complete mindfulness practice includes extending the “training” to complementary activities such as eating or walking. “The training of what?” you may be wondering. The “training” of the three characteristics we do train with mindfulness practice and meditation: attention, intention, and attitude.
In the English-speaking world, we speak of “mindful eating” or “mindful walking” to refer to these complementary practices. Other times, however, we name them with the adjective “conscious” and identify them as “conscious eating” or “conscious walking”.
An example may help to deep understanding, so let’s deep into the practice of “mindful eating “or “conscious eating”, a practice that we offer in some workshops. The proposal is presented in two parts as described below. If by chance you have a nut close enough, I invite you to take it now and follow the practice as you read. Any case, just reading will be ok to understand the process.
The first part invites you to take that nut with delicacy and visualize all those people who have contributed so that you have the nut in your hands. While you proceed, allow for a sense of appreciation for their effort.
· the farmers who plowed the fields, planted the seeds, took care of the growth, and collected the fruit;
· the transporters who took the fruit in boxes from the field to the distribution warehouses;
· the merchants who received the fruits and exposed them for sale;
· the person who bought them and prepared them so that they reach your hand.
The second part of the practice invites to eat the nut, as slowly as you can, while putting all your attention in the process. While you proceed, allow for a sense of gratitude for each of the senses that you keep active.
· pay attention to the color, shape, and small details that you observe with your eyes such as spots, cracks or shadow areas;
· pay attention to size, weight and small details that manifest themselves to the touch such as smooth surfaces, roughness, or small lumps;
· pay attention to the smell they give off;
· pay attention to breaking the nut with the teeth and the small pieces that are formed; in taste, with its subtleties and changes; in moving the small pieces with the tongue and palate.
· pay attention to the small noises that eating causes.
· pay attention to salivating, swallowing, and descending nuts on their way to the stomach.
We can easily notice that this practice trains, by doing differently, the three key elements to which we referred: attention, intention, and attitude.
· the focus attention on the nut, the supply chain and the senses;
· the intention offered as gratitude and appreciation;
· the attitude of curiosity and care.
Additionally, this proposal helps us to identify the two other additional elements that complement and complete the previous three: action and impact.
The “action” is “eating”. The proposal invites us to make different and expand the “action” of eating, so that we stop eating on “autopilot” mode and we eat “noticing” everything that surrounds the action of eating.
The “impact” presents in two of the three possible levels and has led us to notice the effects of our actions: first, on ourselves by feeding itself; then, on others, that big “other” of those who have been affected by our “eating of a nut” without them being here.
My own experience shows me that “impact” is the great forgotten, the lost piece of many of the proposals of mindfulness and meditation, especially when embracing impact on three levels:
1. the impact that my being and my doing causes “on my own life experience”;
2. the impact that my being and my doing causes “in the life experience of those with whom I interact and share a life”;
3. the impact that my being and my doing causes “in all that and all those who, being part of life, are not present”.
Playfully, I like to extend meta-attention by choosing to “step into the action”, which is the same as choosing to act, by experiencing a “triple-like” (I like what I do, I like how I do it and I like why I do it), but also by embracing “impact on its three levels”, always looking for a “triple-win” (I win; the one or those with whom I interact win; and whatever is not present wins).
I believe that the main the reason why “impact on its three levels” is always forgotten because of our long tradition of linear thinking, of simple cause and effect. Surely, it is also the case that globalization makes it difficult to anticipate the effects of our actions since they contribute in seemingly infinite chains of causality and they manifest themselves in places and with people which are very distant and fully unknown. At this point, no doubts, the exploration of “systems thinking” will help a lot to understand the causality of our actions in all their complexity.
To facilitate communication from now forward, I will call the attitude, action and impact triad as “the lower triangle”.
This recognition that the complete practice of mindfulness includes the repeated training of the upper triangle and the lower triangle (meaning the training of the five elements: attention, intention, attitude, action, and impact) leads us to understand why we can and should take the practice to all aspects of our lives. This helps to explains also that most of the proposals around are simply different flavors of the same, where each flavor concretizes the care of attention, intention, and attitude in a specific field of action:
· conscious leadership: takes care of the action of “leading” and the “impact” it causes;
· conscious collaboration: takes care of the action of “collaborating” and the “impact” it causes;
· conscious entrepreneurship: takes care of the action of “entrepreneurship” and the “impact” it causes;
· conscious parenting — takes care of the action of “parenting” and the “impact” it causes;
· conscious aging: takes care of the action of “aging” and the “impact” it causes;
· conscious eating: takes care of the action of “eating” and the “impact” it causes;
· conscious sexuality: takes care of the action of “making love” and the “impact” it causes;
· et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Perhaps, and this is how we like to thing, a more beautiful and better world is within our reach. And the way forward has an easy, already identified first step: a better self, which is the same as saying “a better being and a better doing” trained from the practice of meditation and mindfulness.
[Note: If you found this article helpful, you can move forward by reading the next article of this series: “The skeleton of the self “]