Shalini Bahl-Milne is an award-winning researcher, mindfulness teacher, and town councilor. While her work often involves helping clients develop their skills within the contexts of business, education, and politics, she also reminds us that practicing mindfulness doesn’t start in these external circumstances—the journey begins, instead with our relationship to ourselves and then flows outward to every area of our lives. In her recent TEDx Talk, Bahl-Milne shares some of her own experiences with learning to stay grounded and take mindful action despite challenging situations. She offers science-backed tips and wisdom that can help us return more often to our “field within.”
Returning to the Field Within
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
Rumi
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
I always believed in that field, but I didn’t know it was for me. And if it hadn’t been for one difficult decision 23 years ago, I wouldn’t be standing here.
One quiet morning when everyone was asleep in the house, with one suitcase in hand, we tiptoed down the staircase to the car. My husband was dropping off our two-and-a-half-year-old son and me at the Delhi International airport. We were going to Kuwait to visit my family. We did that every year. Except this year was different. I wasn’t planning to come back, and I hadn’t told anyone in the family about it.
I wanted a divorce and that was a really difficult decision. I’d been avoiding it for six years. I remember crying quietly in the bathroom and then stepping out and being a good mom, being a good mother, a wife, a businessperson, and I kept doing that until I numbed out and I couldn’t do it any longer. On that particular day, I walked away from that life.
It wasn’t until many years later, when I came to the United States with my son and experienced mindfulness, that I realized that all my life, I’d been living on autopilot. I wasn’t aware of the choices I was making or why.
Taking Shortcuts—and Getting Lost
How about you? Are you aware of the choices you’re making on autopilot? Are you aware of the decisions you make like your career, your relationships, your choice of school? I used to teach marketing and on the first day of class, I would ask, “Why are you here?” And many students didn’t have an answer for that. Now, if you’re thinking, “That’s not me, I’m deliberate. I know what I’m doing,” stay with me.
Once I started researching mindfulness and consulting people around the world, that’s when I realized it wasn’t just me, we’re all living on autopilot. In fact, there’s a seminal paper called “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” and in it, the authors claim that up to 95% of our decisions are made unconsciously. What that means is that even for big decisions, many of our motivations, judgments, and emotions underlying these decisions, are hidden from us.
Now, there’s a good reason for that. We have limited cognitive resources so our brains try to automate everything, and that’s a good thing because now we don’t have to relearn how to write, how to read, or brush our teeth every day. Except the brain wants to automate everything, including our conversations with our loved ones and how we deal with conflict at work.
We have the capacity to return to that spacious mind that is free from stress, distractions, and judgments. I like to call that spacious mind “our field within.”
We like to create shortcuts for most of our decisions: good, bad; right, wrong. I like to think of the autopilot decisions we make as a treadmill. As we grow up, we tend to spend more and more time on the treadmill. When we were children, we spent more time in the “field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing” that Rumi talks about. We had creative minds, curious minds, that were willing to play with ideas, to connect and in that space, there was imagination, there was creation, connection, and magic. Even as adults we have the capacity to return to that field, to that spacious mind that is free from stress, distractions, and judgments. I like to call that spacious mind “our field within.”
You may have experienced this in a flow activity like skiing, painting, or playing music, and it’s also there in ordinary moments like when we hear the birds sing. I personally love to dance under the stars. We don’t have to do anything special. That capacity is in us—in all of us—right now.
The Way Back to Ourselves
Let’s try this together. If you already have a way to return to your field, I encourage you to do that, otherwise, please join me.
- Take a moment to turn your attention inwards, lowering or closing your eyes, if that’s helpful. Just becoming aware of your breath moving naturally in and out of your body.
- With each in-breath, feeling the spaciousness in your chest. And with each exhale, dropping your shoulders down just a little bit more.
- For this next breath, letting go of your judgments and expectations of how this moment needs to be, and seeing if you can receive the gift of this breath, in this moment.
- When you complete that cycle, opening your eyes.
Were you able to let go of your judgments and distractions and reach your field within? If you didn’t, that’s okay. In fact, that’s the challenge: We are not able to reach that field within when we want to. I’m here to tell you that mindfulness is your capacity to step off the treadmill and return to that field within. Mindfulness is a practice. It disrupts our autopilot thinking and supports us returning to our