So you give yourself an opportunity to refresh your mind and life by just hanging out and being there and going with the next thing.Īimless wandering is more about trusting that the basic awareness is already there and it doesn’t need to be worked on. In seated formal mindfulness meditation, we tend to use the breath as an anchor.īut this kind of practice, aimless wandering, is more about trusting that the basic awareness is already there and it doesn’t need to be worked on. So those are opportunities to use the thing that you’re doing as the anchor for coming back to the moment you’re in, back to your body and mind. You let your mind go and it might catch the first thing to obsess on and before you know it, you’re not washing dishes anymore. So with washing the dishes, you start to feel like Oh, this is a chore. Let’s talk about everyday mindfulness practices such as paying attention while you’re washing dishes. How do you distinguish aimless wandering or walking from formal meditation, where you sit and practice for five or 10 or 20 minutes or more, and informal mindfulness practices like being mindful while brushing your teeth or bringing mindfulness to daily activities like listening. It obscures it but does not obliterate it. We trust that awareness is fundamental and agitated distraction is an imposition on that. You have a kind of a natural ease and natural awareness that’s there in the background, what Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches later on in MBSR as choiceless awareness: You really have no choice but to be aware, so you can let your mind wander around freely because you’re basically aware. You don’t have to focus on anything in particular. When we allow ourselves to be a bit spacious it’s also a way to be present.

Why mindfulness practice, particularly in the beginning, pays so much attention to focusing in the present moment is because our minds get caught up in thought loops that we can obsess over and we are not present for what’s around us. The mind has a capability to focus and it has a huge capability for spaciousness. Stephany Tlalka: One of the key definitions we talk about is “mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, non-judgmentally,” but here we are engaging in a practice that is intentionally letting the mind wander. On a park bench between locations, he provides some insight into why we can meander down a park path admiring trees, bother strangers for plantain chips, and call this random cluster of activities a mindfulness practice-one that some meditation teachers actually consider more advanced. In the video below, Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce takes us on an aimless walk. Too much of our time is spent watching our favorite bands lovingly compose songs from Game of Thrones accompanied by an orchestra, they say.īut what if I told you the pioneer of mindfulness himself regarded an inquisitive brain that followed its natural instincts not as the enemy of mindfulness, but as another form of practicing awareness? It’s practiced as part of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) curriculum as a technique called choiceless awareness, which roughly translates into being open to what unfolds in front of you, what emerges in your mind.Īimless wandering is also one of those practices.

Fifty per cent of our time is spent with our head in the clouds, they say. Every few years, a study or a Goop “wellness protocol” (pick your poison) seeks to recalibrate our relationship to the present moment. Mindfulness has experienced a wandering backlash.

Obliteration wander