Mind(ful) Your Manners

In this episode of the podcast, Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce sits down with Stephanie Domet, editor at Mindful, to talk about “rudeness” from a mindful point of view.

They explore the direct line between mindfulness and manners and explore how we can wake up to the moment.

Stephanie Domet:  Barry, what made you want to write about rudeness?

Barry Boyce: Well as a matter of fact, I have been to several conferences and mindfulness retreats, and I started to notice that the level of impoliteness was as much in evidence there as it was in society at large, so I started to think, what’s wrong with this picture?

Stephanie Domet: What surprised you about that?

Barry Boyce: Well I think the emphasis in mindfulness practice is to pay a lot of attention to what’s happening in your mind and body and around you and with other people, and so it’s just kind of a striking contrast.

Barry Boyce: I want to preface this all by saying that you know the interesting thing about talking about any kind of mindfulness principle is that nobody is an expert, so I don’t want to hold myself up as the paragon of perfect mindfulness because you set yourself up for a fall. So I’m just another guy trying to make his way through the world with a little bit of mindfulness.

Stephanie Domet: So, I love that “paragon of perfect mindfulness,” we’re gonna change your title to that in the masthead. What kinds of things did you observe at conferences or elsewhere in society that made you think that there might be a connection to be drawn between a mindfulness practice and rude behavior.

Barry Boyce: Well I think one of the main things you know something that I guess in the military they call it situational awareness, which means you know the space that your body is taking up in and how you were interacting with your immediate environment. So it involves things like, if some other people are in conversation, how do you engage in that? I found myself being frequently interrupted and I mean at one point I was listening intently to a speaker and somebody grabbed my shoulder and was shaking it and saying, “Hey, you’re from Mindful right, don’t you…?” And you know, I wanted to say what’s wrong with this picture here, you’re interrupting me in the middle of a talk on mindfulness to pitch me a story about mindfulness.

Mindfulness isn’t self-absorption

Stephanie Domet: Now given your earlier assertion that you are not a paragon of perfect mindfulness, is this behavior that you’ve observed in yourself?

Barry Boyce:Oh yes, certainly I can. I mean particularly now around habits with devices, you know when the cell phones were first coming out I thought, I’m never going to have one of those things. And sure enough, three quarters of my life and work are run out of my cell phone now and I can have a tendency to be looking at it and blocking other, people ignoring other people. That kind of thing has a lot to do with just not getting so self-absorbed.

Stephanie Domet: Yeah, self-absorbed, let’s talk about that because that can be a side effect of a practice that is putting you kind of in touch with yourself and what’s going on in your internal landscape. So what do you want to say about self-absorption as it relates to mindfulness.

Barry Boyce: Yeah that’s one of the things that I wanted to draw out there because I’ve definitely noticed it myself that with mindfulness practice there’s the notion that you’re kind of working on yourself. I have some habits I want to change or I want to figure out why I seemed to make things more painful than they need to be. And you know there’s all sorts of reasons that we want to pay more attention and figure out why things are turning out the way they are. However, that kind of project can slowly but surely morph into this big deal of the project of me. How am I going to make me a better me? And in the midst of that you’re not really paying attention to what’s going on immediately, you’re paying attention to building up this idea of you, the better you, so people notice it and they think, oh that’s what mindfulness meditation people are like there. They’re all caught up in themselves. They think that they’re a big deal.

Stephanie Domet: It’s a bit of a tragedy isn’t it.

Barry Boyce: Yes, well I don’t know about tragedy but it certainly, certainly not good for the brand, so to speak. It’s a bit like how let’s say, certain yoga practitioners ostentatiously