We’re all learning all the time. Parents learn to care for children, students learn physics, soldiers learn survival skills, and all of us learn the latest app or how kale will make us healthy. But much of what we call learning isn’t particularly useful: I just “learned” on Facebook that someone I hardly know baked cupcakes today. Riveting!
Mindful learning, on the other hand, cultivates insightful knowing rather than just a brain overloaded with information. Mindfulness creates space to let new information in and to allow us to see how it relates to what we already know. Recent neurological research at Harvard shows how this happens: mindfulness may actually increase the size of your brain.
Mindfulness creates space to let new information in and to allow us to see how it relates to what we already know.
When I learned mindfulness practice in 1970, I felt for the first time in my life that I knew something to be absolutely true. I was breathing in and breathing out—that was really happening. I actually saw thoughts and judgments arise, like “I’m not nearly as good as these other meditators. Look, their backs are straighter than mine. They’re wearing the perfect white clothes. I’m in a funky embroidered shirt.”
Where did those thoughts come from? They arose in my mind, and then, if I wasn’t obsessing about them, they would float or fall away. The important thing was how I saw thoughts arise and disappear. I was beginning to see how my mind worked, and even if I didn’t like what it was doing, I felt more whole, more integrated, more confident. Not really knowing my breath or my mind seemed like not knowing what my face looked like. How could I have missed them? Of course we all know we are breathing and thinking, but it was radically different to experience them directly instead of intellectually. It wasn’t just an idea that I breathe—it was me breathing. I had learned something important in a whole new way.
That led me to look at the other ways we learn, to see whether they could benefit from mindfulness. I wanted to understand ideas, images, skills, and people in an intimate way, with the clarity and confidence I was experiencing as I came to know my own mind and body. I wanted to create space in my mind instead of that crowded carnival of ideas and information and judgments. I wanted to be open to learning something new, to see things with new perspectives and understanding. Mindfulness, with its focus, openness, inquisitiveness, and humility, seemed like the perfect approach.
Here are some of the practices I discovered.
1) Mindful Reading
Reading these days, whether on a screen or on paper, is more often a race to finish the text than a search for meaning. Woody Allen captured it: “I took a speedreading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.”
Mindful reading is radically different. It slows down the reader and the reading—that alone changes the experience. It is a process of quiet reflection that requires mindful attentiveness, letting go of distracting thoughts and opinions to be fully in the moment with the text. It moves the reader into a calm awareness, allowing for a more profound experience and understanding.
Here are some mindful reading exercises:
The Wrap-Around
Before reading, sit quietly for some minutes. Bring your attention to your breath, letting go of thoughts and sensations, returning to the breath again and again. Then read. Notice if you read with more focus and appreciation. When you finish reading, sit again for some minutes, again bringing your mind to your breath. At the end of your practice, notice what you have learned from the reading.
Savoring a Resonant Phrase
Sit quietly and then read a short piece, perhaps a page long. What phrase stands out for you? Return to that phrase and repeat it to yourself, perhaps several times. Just sit with it. What does it evoke? Notice what images or ideas or memories arise. Do any of the words have meaning beyond the obvious? What meaning does this phrase give to the rest of what you’re reading? Hold the phrase in your mind, giving it time to suggest more to you. Now reread the full piece. How is it different? Has your relationship to it changed?
One from Many
Reading doesn’t have to be private. You can do this practice with as few as two people, but the more the merrier. Each person has a copy of the same poem or piece of prose. All sit quietly and focus on the breath. One person reads the entire text aloud. All sit in silence. After a while, one person reads the first line aloud. Out of the silence after that line, the next person who feels moved to read speaks the second line. And so on, until it is finished. Ask yourselves whether hearing the same words in different voices affects the meaning.
Mindful reading is radically different from racing to cram information in. It slows down the reader and the reading—that alone changes the experience.
2) Mindful Writing
Writing benefits from the capacities that mindfulness cultivates: seeing and hearing things just as they are, bearing witness to life; being in the moment, even when remembering the past or imagining the future; not judging others and oneself while still exercising discriminating wisdom; holding multiple perspectives; being open to the new; and practicing kindness, compassion, and patience. Mindful awareness helps us see, in Gerard Manley Hopkins words, “all things…original, spare, strange.”
At the same time, it acknowledges our interconnection. All of us, when we write, are giving something, and we need a reader who will accept our gift. We each write out of our own loneliness to express ourselves to another human being.
Here are some ways to bring mindfulness to your writing:
Journal Writing
Writing in a journal is one of the oldest methods of self-exploration and expression. Although they’re not written for publication and often don’t last longer than their authors, we have extraordinary examples of journals in the work of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Merton, May Sarton, and Anne Frank, among others. As these illustrate, a journal can help one cultivate the ability to live in the present, to become deeply aware and appreciative of life. There are many journal practices. Here are a few:
A journal can help one cultivate the ability to live in the present, to become deeply aware and appreciative of life.
Once a Day : Write something new every day. Add a drawing or a photograph to it. Journals, like mindfulness, help us appreciate the simple fact that every moment in our lives brings something new and different. We only need to notice it.
Be Your Own Researcher : Write each day what you are learning from mindfulness practice—or anything else.
Social Media Practice : Write about your experience of using social media. What s