What is mindfulness?
For Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness is “‘paying attention’ in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, non judgmentally.”
What does it mean to be mindful for myself? How does it feel? What do I think about it?
It started with contemplation. I was nurtured by curious and grateful minds. My mother and my grand-mother have always let me observe - nature, weather, change of seasons, animals, rocks… Anything, everything was a door to open and explore. With curiosity and an open mind.
I never thought about it this way, but the way I was brought up was always mindful. I come from a fisherman village in France, we had a big house and a garden. I lived very closed to my grand-parents family (my grand-mother 8 brothers and sisters lived within driving distance of each others or in the same street). In this family we shared everything, from clothes, to vegetables, to preserves, eggs… even the weekly journals and magazines were passed on from one house to the next! We had a community that was very tight, we shared the worst and best moments with the same sense of generosity and openness. We didn’t consume more than what we needed, we reused bags, even the paper bags given by the farmer at the weekly Sunday market. We had fish directly from the boats, vegetables from the family gardens, fruits from the markets or from the wanders we had in the woods.
I am so lucky to have grown up in such a loving and caring environment. I am so lucky to have felt boredom, the long days without anything to do apart from watching the rain fall down on the windows and look at the fire cracking in the chimney. No fake distractions, almost no access to screens but unlimited access to books and music. How I loved our old vinyl hifi and the days spent in the public library trying to find books I hadn’t read yet!
Why am I sharing all this… Because those are the roots of meditation. As a teenager, I became restless and would grow frustrated and impatient with this way of living. I wanted more movement, more food for thoughts, more of everything. I remember my grand-mother - every single week - coming to pick me up at school, and again, every single week (empathise on every!) would drive and stop randomly in the middle of our journey and say ‘look at this tree’, ‘look at those flowers’, or simply ‘look at the change of colours of the sunset on the beach’, ‘look at the light in the street’, ‘look how this window shop, isn’t it nice and tidy?’. To be honest, it drove me nuts. I never knew where she would stop, it would mostly be in unexpected places and potentially dangerous (she didn’t care if people were behind us). She would just randomly pause and make me observe. I now cherish those moments as absurd as they might have felt then, I love them for the sense of surprise and forever curiosity it has generated inside me.
Meditations has many forms - contemplation, devotional, deep concentration on one particular subject, awareness of the body while doing, or not doing something, repetition of sound. And being aware of all the forms it can take made me aware that I have been very fortunate to experiment many of them while not putting the words ‘meditation practice’ on them. Practicing my instrument, getting in the flow of sound, concentrating on one task, developing body and mind awareness through music, contemplating everything and observing everyone has been my way through life. I am feeling very happy to be putting a word on my own path so far.
I am simply meditating through life to try and understand why I am here and what I could contribute to our wider society.
