Advent Attitude 9: Practicing Mindfulness
Experts tell us that when patients are recovering from an amputation, they go through several steps: numbness, pining for what is lost, and disorganization (or despair) before reaching what is called reorganization, or a new way of thinking and living. Before reaching reorganization, however, many people who have lost a limb experience a phenomenon known as “phantom limb sensation,” which is the sensation that the lost limb is still present and active.
New habits require mindfulness, because old habits are like lost limbs. Even when they are “gone,” they continue to demand attention. And so, we arrive at our ninth Advent Attitude, which is practicing mindfulness. In their book Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life, Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Lilian Cheung talk about the importance of mindfulness when developing new habits. They tell a classic Zen story of a man riding a galloping horse, giving the impression of an important, urgent quest. However, when a bystander calls out, “Where are you going?” the rider responds, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” In other words, a certain degree of mindfulness is required lest we continue to race through life led unthinkingly by our habits. Advent calls us to
a new mindfulness (St. Paul uses the phrase “set the mind”) so that we continually work at breaking the mindless old habits of sin (what Paul calls “life in the flesh”).
The birth of Jesus into our world and into our lives calls us to a “reorganization” in order to leave behind “life in the flesh,” in much the same way that a person who has lost a limb requires reorganization to overcome phantom limb sensation. “Life in the flesh” is life that is mindless—simply following patterns of behavior that our naturally self-centered brains dictate. “Life in the spirit” requires a mindfulness that shifts the focus away from the self and onto others. This does not come naturally to us and requires work. It’s like learning to live with a prosthetic after an amputation: ongoing therapy is needed so that the individual can reach the point of thinking of himself or herself as a “new me.” It is only through mindfulness
that an idea can become a belief and that a belief can be manifested in action. Advent reminds us that we need constant “therapy” so that we can repent (in Hebrew, metanoia, which means to “go beyond the mind that you have”) and become a new creation.
—Joe Paprocki, based on Under the Influence of Jesus
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