I find this to be a slightly tricky question, because there’s lots of advice against overly considering either the future or the past. Too much focus on either one means you aren’t present enough in the present. Mindfulness is all about living in the moment, not yearning for something different to have happened or for your situation to be different than its current state.

The History of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has become a mainstream health & wellness focus in the past few years. It came to the West as a practice in the 1970s, via U of MA Professor Kabat-Zinn, who studied with Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh. Kabat-Zinn noticed that patients with chronic illnesses tried to avoid pain, and the difficulty of doing so made them stressed, anxious and increased their pain. He developed MBSR, or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, to teach patients how to observe their physical sensations and emotions, without judging them as good or bad. A very Buddhist notion- just be.

Mindfulness grew from Kabat-Zinn’s approach to become incorporated into CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a more modern form of psychotherapy that has been prevalent for about a decade.

I first heard about mindfulness from two main sources: one, Invisibilia S1:1 episode “The Secret History of Thoughts,” (2015) and two, when I picked up Dan Harris’s 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voices in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works–A True Story.

The Invisibilia Episode is moving, opening with a California surfer describing the violent, intrusive thoughts of harming his wife that he suddenly started having. He was disturbed and upset by the thoughts, concerned that they were somehow suppressed wishes coming to the fore of his consciousness. But he loved his wife, and didn’t want to hurt her, and she completely trusted him not to. Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel, the hosts of Invisibilia, detail the history of psychotherapy, which around 2015 was undergoing a shift.

In 2024, we are still shaking off the Freudian framework which preceded CBT. Freud essentially taught that we are our thoughts. Many people react emotionally to their thoughts, believing that their thoughts are a reflection of who they are as a person, when truthfully, our thoughts are connected to memories, experiences, feelings and the huge amount of data we absorb and process every day through our senses.

In the 1980s, psychotherapy began to change, shifting so that therapists led their patients in challenging their thoughts, rather than accepting them at face value and focusing on determining their source. Mindfulness helped people create some distance between themselves and their thoughts, so that they could more calmly observe the thought, and then choose whether to analyze it, or accept it and let it pass.

Dan Harris’s book, published in 2014, detailed how he worked to pick up the pieces of his life after having a nervous breakdown on broadcast television. Harris had been completely overwhelmed and stressed out by the competitiveness and pace of network news. He’d come to think that being angry and exhausted were status quo, but realized after the breakdown that he didn’t have to live that way. Through mindfulness, he also learned to gain some distance from upsetting experiences, to essentially be 10% happier. The small gains add up, and eventually you’ll have a life shift.

Practicing Mindfulness

Mindfulness takes practice, and meditation is the best way to practice mindfulness. I still try to practice Harris’s beginner steps for mindful meditation, which consists of counting your breaths from 1 to 10, and then repeating. 1: inhale, 2: exhale, 3: inhale, 4: exhale, ::what should I make for dinner tonight? My husband isn’t going to be home, so maybe I’ll make…but I’ll need to go to the grocery store, so I start a mental shopping list. I should ask my mom if she needs anything. I hope her headache went away. Oh, have I been logging my headaches? Why is the dog barking::…>sigh< and then I realize I lost my count. So I start again. The loss of focus is what Harris calls “monkey brain,” and it’s a totally normal, human way for our thoughts to run. But it disrupts mindfulness, the ability to be actively, openly attentive to and focused upon the present. Counting from 1 to 10 is repetitive and can seem boring, but it’s actually quite challenging to do for more than a minute, which is how much time Harris recommends trying to meditate for when you’re just starting out. If I remember correctly, he advises starting at a minute and gradually working your way up to five consecutive minutes of counting. I should go back and re-read Harris’s book, for a refresher on what happens once you’ve managed five minutes of meditation.

In recent years, I’ve had several health issues pop up, and my body has just started to go awol. It started doing this fun new thing where when I need to vomit, (food poisoning, the flu,) I just can’t. I’ve been told that for some people, the part of their brains which initiates the vomit action doesn’t get stimulated well, so you get the nausea, the quick, shallow breathing & queasiness, but it just goes on and on in a feedback loop, rather than initiating expulsion of whatever is making you sick. It’s torture, it is the worst feeling in the world. So in response, my brain has started to short-circuit, skip town and reset- I faint. Then I come to, vomiting. It. is. awful.

Mindfulness in my life

BUT, it is something that keeps happening, so I’ve had to try and learn some ways around it. I *think* I’ve gotten better at working on my breathing, so I’m not exacerbating all the gross feelings by hyperventilating. The calmer, deeper breaths do help make the sensations bearable, and perhaps let me feel like my body isn’t going on a joyride I didn’t authorize, that I have some small shred of control. The other thing that has helped is to realize that I am not going to be stuck in that moment or experience forever, and this is the one instance in which I embrace thinking about the future; reminding myself that there is a tomorrow, and while I may feel a little worn out a few hours from now, I won’t still be queasy and wishing for the nausea to pass.

I haven’t yet tried thinking about the past in these moments of physiological malfunction; I imagine it would be kind of difficult to do. But I’m proud of having some tools to help me through, and mindfulness helps not only when I feel sick, but in all kinds of daily experiences.

I’ve been feeling serene, a word I have rarely used in my life, since the thyroidectomy. I couldn’t feel that way if I wasn’t fully present, appreciating the sunlight, or the walk I’m going on, laughing with my husband. This isn’t to say life has been idyllic either; there have also been unpleasant situations, (other than vomiting, which thank goodness by counter is at 1 month since last episode,) which I wished would end or was impatient to get out of, and there too, the thought that I would soon be experiencing something else eased my feelings. I wouldn’t be able to get that mental perspective on the moment, positive & appreciated or negative & undesirable, without first being mindful of it.

This is my advise to you, and what I will continue to practice myself – our memories are part of what make us who we are, but we don’t need to spend lots of time thinking about them. The future is what gives us something to strive for, but we can’t get there without going through the present. The trip is much better overall if we are fully here for it.

Links:

Invisibilia

Dan Harris: 10% Happier (He has a website & podcast now too.)