'The Only Way To Be Free' - Oren Jay Sofer on Why Mindfulness Is More Than Just Paying Attention

“Life is made of moments. If we are not present, they slip by as in a dream.”

– Oren Jay Sofer
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In his book Freedom from the Known, Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Freedom is a state of mind—not freedom from something but a sense of freedom, a freedom to doubt and question everything and therefore so intense, active and vigorous that it throws away every form of dependence, slavery, conformity and acceptance.’ This kind of radical, personal freedom is at the heart of Oren Jay Sofer’s practice of mindfulness – the continuing awareness that is ‘a prerequisite for transformation.’ In this excerpt from his new book, Your Heart Was Made For This, Sofer writes about the impact of mindfulness practice and meditation on his life, and the often challenging journey it has had him on.

While living at the Buddhist meditation center in Massachusetts, I struggled with angst. Consumed by repetitive thoughts, I ruminated about how best to contribute in life. I still recall clearly the moment I finally recognized what I’d been feeling for months. I was meditating, mindfully feeling my breathing, when all of a sudden it became apparent: “Oh, I’m afraid.” In that moment of complete recognition, a weight was lifted. Instead of pushing the fear away or trying to think my way out of it in an endless cycle of oppressive thoughts, I faced it directly. Being mindful helped me slow down enough to see beyond the planning and worrying to how I truly felt. I stayed mindful of the fear, feeling it in my body, and it began to unravel instead of surreptitiously driving my thoughts all day.

Research on mindfulness has confirmed what meditators have known for centuries: the untrained, wandering mind tends to ruminate on things that make us unhappy. Without mindfulness, we move through the world on automatic pilot, a prisoner to habitual thoughts, feelings, and impulses. We may sink into unskillful patterns of boredom, apathy, agitation, self-loathing, or worry.

Godwin Samararatne, one of my first meditation teachers, was fond of a bold statement: “Mindfulness is the only way to be free.” Though there are many paths to inner freedom, each must include an aspect of mindfulness to be truly liberating. As we’ve explored, awareness is a prerequisite for transformation, revealing the forces that shape our minds and structure our society. When I first meditated, I felt like I was searching for something in the dark, without knowing what I was seeking. Mindfulness illuminates our inner life. The more it grows, the more aware we become in all aspects of life, creating a new, healthier habit of being wakeful moment to moment. Mindfulness works in tandem with other skillful qualities like concentration and equanimity, thereby opening the door to human flourishing and ultimately freeing our hearts and minds from reactivity and delusion.

“Research on mindfulness has confirmed what meditators have known for centuries: the untrained, wandering mind tends to ruminate on things that make us unhappy.”

When I began practicing mindfulness, I was so eager to make progress that I began silently narrating all of my daily activities with a tool called “mental noting”: “Now I’m getting dressed . . . I’m drinking water . . .” It took a few years to understand that mindfulness isn’t thinking about what’s happening but experiencing it. Being mindful means being fully embodied, feeling the texture of the clothing as it touches your skin, sensing the coolness of the water as you drink. To illustrate the difference, try this experiment. First, deliberately think the thought, “I move my hand through space.” Do it a couple of times. Got it? Now slowly and carefully raise one arm and move your hand through space, feeling all of the sensations. This direct experience is the difference between thinking about being mindful and actually being mindful.

Mindfulness is more than just paying attention. It is our innate capacity to be aware in a balanced and curious way. Mindfulness is a fresh awareness that connects intimately with whatever we experience, just as it is, without the distortions of bias, expectation, and control. We’re not judging what’s happening, waiting for something else, or trying to get something. Thus mindfulness has two parts: awareness and equanimity. One is clearly and directly aware of present-moment experience and not reacting to it or getting lost in it. To be mindful is to return to a very open way of being, sometimes referred to as “beginner’s mind.” The Zen master Suzuki Roshi talked about mindfulness as a soft readiness. It is receptive, alert, and engaged.

The Buddha taught mindfulness as a cornerstone of the path to inner freedom, instructing his disciples to establish mindfulness of the body as a vehicle for being aware throughout life. You can practice mindfulness in any posture—sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. To cultivate mindfulness, one typically begins by using an anchor such as the sensations of breathing in and out, the sensations of your hands resting in your lap, your backside touching the ground, or the sensations of walking. Again, if feeling sensations in the body is fraught or stressful, as can be the case when there is a history of trauma, try using hearing or seeing as an anchor. From the anchor, progressively expand the scope of mindfulness to include more and more of your experience.

“Popular mindfulness suggests that the sole source of our suffering is individual and internal, ignoring the vast influence of structural factors such as racism, sexism, and poverty on our well-being and our ability to access our inner resources.”

The Buddha instructs us to cultivate a direct experience of the body before the mental constructs through which we tend to view the world. So rather than “my hand,” we learn to be aware of a changing constellation of sensations—warmth, coolness, pulsing, throbbing, tingling—that our mind recognizes and refers to conceptually as “hand.” When practicing mindfulness, one endeavors to sustain this direct, nonconceptual awareness continuously, from moment to moment.

Developing mindfulness gives us back our life. We awaken from sleepwalking through the world and rediscover the richness and vibrancy of the world. We are present for the heat, aroma, and flavor of a cup of tea or coffee. We relish the presence of a loved one or a spectacular day, fully connected to life. A few years after my parents’ divorce, I was helping my father in his basement. While on my hands and knees snapping floorboards together, I looked across the room at my dad, smiled lovingly, and said, “Hi, Ab” (short for Abba, “father” in Hebrew). It was the most ordinary of moments, and it was precious. Here we were, alive, healthy, working together. He looked back across the room and smiled, “Hi, Or.” Life is made of moments. If we are not present, they slip by as in a dream. I’m so grateful for the moments of presence I had with my father before he died, and mourn the countless ones I was too preoccupied to cherish.

Although I practice and teach mindfulness, I’m also troubled by how the term has been commodified by the multibillion-dollar wellness industry. The latest feel-good fad, it is touted in pop magazines and advertisements as a panacea, suggesting if we are just present enough, everything will be okay. “Depressed? Stressed? Relationship woes? Climate anxiety? In debt or unemployed? Just be more mindful!” Mindfulness is a powerful tool, but it’s not a replacement for wise action and can’t cure all of our ailments on its own. What’s more, popular mindfulness suggests that the sole source of our suffering is individual and internal, ignoring the vast influence of structural factors such as racism, sexism, and poverty on our well-being and our ability to access our inner resources.

“Sometimes slowing down to connect with life can feel like stepping on the wrong end of a metal rake—you get hit in the face with all you’ve been avoiding.”

Contrary to the hype, mindfulness doesn’t always make us feel good. Sometimes slowing down to connect with life can feel like stepping on the wrong end of a metal rake—you get hit in the face with all you’ve been avoiding, like the fear I felt in my twenties. The insight meditation teacher Michele McDonald uses the metaphor of a flower to highlight the natural pace and radical inclusivity of opening the heart with mindfulness. A flower opens slowly, when conditions are right, and may close again at night. We don’t try to force its petals open. So too, our hearts open in their own time, closing periodically for safety or rest. As a flower opens, it doesn’t just open to warm sunshine and gentle breezes. It opens to all of the elements—to the wind and the rain, the heat and the cold. As we practice mindfulness, we don’t just feel the pleasant, loving moments. We learn to feel all of life—the hurt and pain, fear and anger, contraction and numbness.

When mindful, we encounter the defenses we’ve built up over the years to protect ourselves from the raw vulnerability of life. It hurts to be alive in an unjust world of loss and change beyond our control. Without wholesome qualities to digest the stress and pain of a complex and often harsh world, we develop a kind of armor to stay safe emotionally and psychologically. This takes many forms: from always being chipper and upbeat, cracking jokes, to assuming the worst and being cynical so we’re not disappointed; from staying chronically busy to disappearing into TV, video games, or substances. These layers of armor are informed by social factors like race, gender, sex, class, and ability. The more pain, the greater the perceived need for some way of insulating ourselves in order to manage the hurt.

Rather than being an obstacle, these defense mechanisms are a reflection of our heart’s intelligence. Imagine how untenable life would be if we lacked a means of protecting ourselves emotionally. In the absence of better strategies, we find a way to get by. Mindfulness provides a new way of metabolizing the challenges of being human, slowly dissolving and replacing the armor with more enduring qualities like wisdom, compassion, and equanimity—for armor comes with a price. The shields we put on don’t just block out the pain; they also block joy and vitality, and they disconnect us from the truth. When we shut down the heart or put up a wall, we limit our capacity to be alive and to see clearly. What is the cost of the distractions we use to ignore the realities of climate chaos? What price in integrity, wholeness, or connection do those of us who benefit from society’s current structures pay when we avoid or ignore the painful realities of oppression and injustice, or when we refuse to take action to address them?

Mindfulness brings us into direct contact with all that needs to be healed, felt, and released, allowing us to slowly integrate what needs to be learned and to release all that no longer serves us. The fact that we must encounter our pain to heal it is one of the reasons why the popular narrative that mindfulness is about feeling good is so dangerous. It distorts mindfulness to another defense mechanism, abandoning the opportunity to transform our hearts and meet all of life.