Life-style and “diet”:

If we practice a wise mindfulness with a sense of heartfulness and loving kindness, we will very likely notice over time that we wish to change our lifestyle to something that is more nourishing and wholesome. We will become more aware of the activities and conditions in our lives that nourish us and those that deplete us. We will begin to want to let go of those things which are unwholesome and take us away from ourselves and to embrace the conditions that support mindful living. Over time, we may find that we naturally choose to bring more simplicity into our lives, and to let go of many things which complicate our lives, including altering our relationship to time, work, material possessions, status and world stress.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a teacher of mindfulness uses the concept of “diet” to refer not only to what we consume in terms of food and drink, but also what we consume with all our senses. He invites us to draw our awareness to the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, and how this impacts upon our sense of well-being and consciousness. We can become aware of “toxins”, not only in what we eat or drink, but also in the things we read, the media, certain television programmes or magazines, films, conversations, and the numerous forms of advertising that invite themselves into our lives.

Through our mindfulness practice, we can become aware of how these things impact upon our state of mind when we digest them, raising the question of what elements of our lifestyle we need to let go of. We may be consuming a daily diet of violence, fear, anger, confusion, hopelessness and despair through a variety of sources, especially when we are open to taking in the bad news stories from around the world, with graphic details, images and sounds, as well as the daily bombardment of advertisements with their jingles, so skilful at getting “inside our heads”. And in this modern age of information technology, we are exposed to phenomenal amounts of information stimulation - fast, flashy and frenetic, which is perhaps conditioning our minds towards what Jon Kabat-Zinn describes as a collective “attention deficit disorder society”.

Certainly a lot of the stresses of modern living are contributed to by the expectation that we are always connected and contactable through a variety of phones, emails and internet connections and that we are expected to keep informed and up to date. We can become addicted to this sensory bombardment, as a form of diversion and possibly a form of escape from ourselves. It trains our minds to become more unsettled with shorter attention spans and an inability to deal with boredom or lack of stimulation. It gives us endless extra things to react to and obsess about, which are not perhaps directly related to the more personal realities of our day to day lives. It can have a detrimental effect upon our communication and relationships with others as well as our relationship with ourselves.

Of course, this stressful way of living, has emerged from and been created by the human mind. In our practice of mindfulness, we are working at training and conditioning the mind in a different way, and through this, we can slowly begin to change our relationship to these stressors and our appetite for them.

NHS Lothian 2017