Zen and the Art of Monday Morning (Mindfulness 101)

Sundays used to suck. For the longest time, as soon as the possibility of pancakes was over, Sunday became little more than a grim waiting room for Monday morning’s dreaded arrival. I know I’m not alone in this—one of my best friends still recalls that for him, the theme to Sunday evening’s Muppet Show was a death knell to freedom itself.

Throughout much of my life, Monday morning represented the beginning of yet another week of stress and inadequacy. I’d create stories about how I wasn’t cool enough, smart enough, important enough, or worth enough. I’d worry about what kids thought about me at school, and later, what coworkers and bosses thought about me at work. I’d stress about deadlines and meetings (past and future), and create nightmares about what I did or didn’t do that would keep me sleepless forever. My stories were terrible, aching, depressing, and anxious.

. . . but were they true?

The answer turned out to be right in front of me, but it wasn’t until I started to mindfully investigate what I was telling myself that I saw it.

Defined, mindfulness is the practice of seeing the difference between what is actually happening and the stories I tell myself about it. When my stories cause me to feel terrible, mindfulness provides tools that can help me to reorient my thinking from something painful or hurtful to something helpful and useful.

In practicing mindfulness, I learned something critical about what I was experiencing . . . Monday morning wasn’t making me miserable, I was.

These days, mindfulness is often equated with meditation, but in traditional Buddhist practice, the two are distinct—connected—but distinct. While meditation provides many benefits, such as improving concentration, creating a deeper connection with ourselves and others, and hitting the pause button on our own critical inner dialogues, mindfulness is the intentional process of reflecting on the sensations, emotions, and thoughts that we experience (especially when they cause us to suffer), and redirecting them to something that is clearer and more useful. Working together, meditation provides a means for noticing the thoughts that trouble us, while mindfulness provides the tools to free us from these thoughts.

The greatest weapon against stress is the ability to choose one thought over another.

— William James

I certainly don’t say this flippantly or mean to imply that it’s easy to do, especially for those who experience severe forms of suffering or have survived very painful or traumatic events, but the Buddha minced no words about the power that each of us has within us:

All experience is preceded by mind,

led by mind,

made by mind.

— Words of the Buddha from The Dhammapada, Chapter 1, Verse 1

The Buddha is usually credited with discovering the path to enlightenment and freedom from human suffering some 2,600 years ago, but what may be most special about the Buddha is that he wasn’t special at all.

He was anxious, he was sad, he was angry, he was everything each of us is: a human being. The Buddha’s great gift to the world wasn’t the idea that we could someday overcome these feelings and be perfect, but the realization that we can experience profound and lasting inner peace despite not being perfect.

As I grew up, I learned what to believe and how to think, who and what to like, which groups I should belong to, what a good life should look like, etc. I was further conditioned by my life’s biggest events: heartbreak, moving away from home, my first serious job (and losing it), getting married, becoming a parent, and experiencing the illnesses and deaths of people I love. All of these experiences became the stories that I carry with me and when collected together, they:

In Buddhist psychology, this is known as the “cycle of rebirth.” With every new experience, I’m “reborn” to repeat the same patterns based on my conditioning, and when these patterns cause me to suffer, I can feel trapped, overwhelmed, and powerless.

With mindfulness, I’m able to throw off the veil of my conditioning. I learn to notice the emotions that cause me to suffer, to identify the thoughts that are behind these emotions, and to uncover the story that’s driving those thoughts. Most powerfully, when my story isn’t clear or is causing harm to myself or others, I learn how to choose a different story, driving new thought patterns and emotions; ones that are clear, connected, conscious, and compassionate. I’m able to leverage my brain’s neuroplastic ability to change and develop new habits (at any age), transforming my cycle of suffering to one of liberation and peace.

Ultimately, mindfulness practice is the everyday realization that I am in charge—not Monday morning, not my boss, not school, not money, not the government, not Instagram, not anything.

I hold all of the power.

I create my own experience of the world, and I have the power to change it if I so choose.