Describe...

In part two of a three part series on the “what” skills of mindfulness we come to description. While we first must learn to observe ourselves and our environment, we then want to be able to put words to our observation; we want to be able to recreate the present moment in words.

What does it look like to describe a thought or feeling or action in simple words? How do we take something as complex as the feeling of grief and boil it down into a simple word? Just like it sounds, simply. We often strive to make the simple complex and, in turn, the complex simple. Here is your chance.

Imagine you are walking down the block and you see a dog playing. It’s a vision of happiness yet instead it brings up feelings of loss and abandonment from a missed pet. You feel confused and start to mentally punish yourself for not being able to see joy in the little things. Stop. Observe. Now describe.

“I feel a flood of sadness. Of loss. Of grief. There’s a knot in my stomach and my eyes are welling up.” That’s all. No judgement. No qualifiers. Just describe.

Next we want to label our description. Name a feeling a feeling, a thought a thought, an action an action. Delineate between the mental, emotional, and physical reaction.

We only want to describe the facts. No opinions. No interpretations. Just the facts. This separation is paramount to developing mindfulness as it helps us to move out of judgement. Learning to separate our bias from factual information may be one of our most difficult and important skills.

Last, we can only describe that which we have observed. If we cannot observe it we cannot describe it. Practicing mindfulness is very much about developing our senses.

The practice of describing is the practice of better understanding our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Physical feelings (such as a hunger pang) may be confused with a contextual situation (a job interview) and may lead to dysfunctional thoughts (I’m going to blow the interview). These dysfunctional thoughts can then lead us to believe them as facts; thoughts and emotions are often confused with facts.

By separating and getting “granular” with our description we can better understand the connections and complexities that arise when we make logical jumps based on emotional bias. We begin to better see fact from feeling. We can move from extremes to a middle path.

Work to describe your observations without emotion or judgement. Get granular. And begin to understand how we forecast the future on faulty data.