Mindful Formation

1
Introduction

Suddenly an angel touched me, through these words…

Fix your eyes…
Fix your eyes on the depths of your heart…
With an unceasing…
With an unceasing mindfulness of God…
I was fragile, breaking.
The touch held me together…^[1]

Closing the wound within attentively

‘Attention equals Life’ is the wisdom equation that has helped me most.[2] When that attention is focused on God that equals fullness of life. I say this having been broken and glued back together by the attentive grace of God. But more than that I have been mindfully reformed by God’s gracious remaking. I think many others know what it is like for their lives to fracture but are not sure how to remake their world. So, this is a book about graced mindful formation. At the heart of mindful formation lies paying attention.

However, our most important capacity, attention and awareness is held captive by the virtual world. We need to learn to reclaim our attention from the Web. As somebody said, ‘When it comes to the Web, we think we’re spiders, but really we’re flies.’[3] Oxford philosopher and former Google executive James Williams says, ‘The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.’[4] Freedom for me came when I learned to pay attention.

What I realised on this personal journey of reaching the end of my own self is that emptiness can be the pathway to a new thing. A process of being formed in a new way. What has helped me in that process is intentional mindful formation alongside God’s hidden work. Mindfulness is our God-given capacity for awareness and attention, and mindful formation happens through what we pay attention to – if it is unhelpful then it is mindless formation. If it is helpful and intentional, then it is mindful formation. From a Christian perspective, mindful formation occurs when we pay attention to God.

What I want to offer in this book is the wisdom contained within contemplation and mindfulness. I trained for three years at Bible college between 1994 and 1997 but realised I needed to continue to seek wisdom. My first quest was to seek relational wisdom, and between 1998 and 2010 I pursued counselling and psychotherapy training at Roehampton University. During that time in 2006 I came across Christian contemplative practices and mainstream mindfulness. I have been mining the wisdom of these strands ever since, completing a PhD in 2022 looking at mindfulness of God.

It is this accumulated wisdom I share in this guide to mindful formation.

Holistic contemplation

When thinking of our attention and awareness I find it helpful to think of my awareness as the ground (like the background of a 3D visual puzzle) and the figure as something that emerges from that background when my attention is stretched towards something. Gestalt psychology conceptualised the idea of figure and ground (background) as something that can be seen in visual perception. Gestalt therapy took up the idea of figure as that ‘which is most relevant or meaningful to the person’, and the meaningful need emerges from the background of our awareness.[5] But it can also be used as a metaphor for how attention draws a figure (object of attention) out of the background of awareness. As Lucy Alford puts it, ‘The ability of human perception to isolate objects (whether material or conceptual) from the general surrounding flux is attention’s principal and most primal task.’[6] I want to extend the metaphor to say we can create intentional ethical figures that can be attentively recollected from the flux of our memory. These are the metacognitive propositions that have ethical value that I expand on later.

I also like the visual example of our inner frontstage and backstage. When I pay attention to something it appears on my frontstage. These concepts can be applied to our lives. For example, I make sure that having a hand-crafted cup of coffee is a figure in my daily life (if possible). The same is true of eating regularly, having a shower, drinking enough water. I’ve created the internal conditions that these necessary (or desired) things emerge out of the ground of my life as figures. I’m arguing in this book that the process of mindful formation is a necessary figure in our daily life, and that we need to create the conditions for it to emerge as a figure and not merely stay a background intention. It is so important it should feature in the frontstage of our life. This is easier said than done.

I’ve tried to make prayer a figure that emerges out of the background of my life for nearly forty years. More recently I’ve expanded that to the idea of mindful formation, a holistic contemplation that involves the whole of me – it needs to be a central figure in my life that constantly emerges into awareness. One of the things I’m asked is, ‘How long should I spend in contemplation?’ When I was running a church, I would make spending half an hour to an hour in prayer a priority and the first thing I would do – after making a cup of tea. Try to catch that early morning light!

As I’ve moved into a role where I lead retreats, I try to follow a rhythm I picked up at Scargill House, a Christian community and retreat centre. At Scargill there is a rhythm of praying three times a day, half an hour in the morning, fifteen minutes at lunchtime and fifteen minutes at teatime. This spiralling back to tune in again to God is what I recommend now. However, cultivating mindful awareness of God can be done at any time, whatever you are doing. So, I also cultivate mindful awareness when I am drinking a cup of coffee, or walking the dog, or washing up. The aim, of course, of Christian contemplation is a continuous awareness of God.

This holistic contemplation is not just sitting down: it can be walking, running, gardening, looking at a sunset while opening your awareness to the spiritual as well as physical dimension. It might be using simple body movements to indicate opening yourself up to the Holy Spirit. I am trying to learn sign language for concepts like sorry, forgive, welcome, breath, heart, as well as the signs for Holy Spirit, Jesus, Father and so on. Try to find different ways of moving into your body that work for you. This can be noticing your feet on the ground, or coming to your breath, or allowing sounds to come to you.

In mindful contemplation I am trying to move into a place of stillness, or open awareness. By focusing on one element of our body that can be an anchor I am simplifying the way my mind normally works, as it tries to juggle many things all at once. I believe multitasking is a myth. Focusing on one thing and doing it well refreshes the mind rather than tires it. The focused attention allows the emergence of an open awareness, a move into a spacious place in our minds. We can allow ourselves to move back and forth with our attention from a narrow beam of light to a wider spotlight. This wider spotlight enables the emergence of our witnessing self where we perceive or reperceive what is coming or going in our minds, bodies and emotions.

As I train to teach mainstream mindfulness one to one via an accredited path, at the heart of being a teacher is having a personal practice. That means I also practise secular mindful awareness practices each day, although God can drop in on these as well! The challenge to the Church comes around this domain of practices. On secular mindfulness training or retreats I have often spent three to four hours a day in practice. In the Church, the emphasis is on information and knowledge rather than transforming practices. We need to redress the balance.

In a holistic pathway to contemplation, returning to the body whenever we can, moving out of our heads, is essential. This is because the body is always in the present moment and the present moment is home in mindfulness of God. It is also important because, as Alister McGrath says, ‘It is merely to assert that for human beings in this world the transcendent is accessed and the spiritual life is expressed exclusively through the medium of our material bodies.’^[7] This is my own experience and forms part of my argument that our natural senses, when inhabited by the Holy Spirit, become spiritual senses, receptive to the presence of God. A good question to ask ourselves is, ‘Why should I as a Christian pay attention to my body?’ It’s a question I hope to answer in part in this book. One of the answers is that Jesus came to live in a body to show us how to live in a body! I think many Christians are dissatisfied with their spiritual life because it is a disembodied spirituality.

As we learn to pay attention, we find that other things pull us away from what we are trying to focus on or be aware of. For me it was mainly anxiety. At other times, and I think this feeling is created by our virtual world inhabitation, it is restlessness. Sometimes it might be cravings for things that will bring us emotional comfort. Often these distractions are automatic reactions which we need to become aware of – so that we can choose wise responses instead.

The structure of this book

In Chapter Two I expand on the crisis of attention that we need to intentionally address. The key task is reclaiming our attentional capacities from their cultural captivity to our virtual world. Mindful formation occurs through intentionally training our attentional capacities to be aware of God. Paying attention to God is distinctive of Christian mindfulness. Going deeper into contemplation requires us to keep spiralling back to God through our spiritual practices. What we pay attention to in mindfulness of God is crucial. As we do this, we may experience epiphanies or moments of meeting with God. We cannot be mindful of God unless we first understand what mindfulness is and so I address this by drawing on secular or mainstream mindfulness which works with our innate capacities for attention and awareness. Secular mindfulness as a cultural phenomenon is an act of resistance. Paradoxically, if we are to become aware of God, others and creation, we need to cultivate self-awareness – we need to examine our own self. This reflexivity is an attentive act of resistance. There are some key formational questions that need to be asked, which I outline in this chapter. The process of mindful formation is a quest, a journey and a pilgrimage. I invite you to join me on it.

Running through the book are some shorter, more academic but accessible chapters which bring in some insights from my PhD research. In Chapter Three I introduce some of the theory underpinning the book. To understand mindfulness, we need to utilise contextual theology, which engages with personal experience, theology and wider culture. I add some further reflections on autoethnography and how it can help us observe our participation in mindfulness of God. There are key themes in the book which are introduced in this chapter: remembering, reperceiving, recognition, reclaiming and redeeming. I outline the idea that Christian mindfulness has an ethical dimension, how to live by our values. I outline a way of being introspective without being narcissistic. I also introduce the importance of embodied incarnational spirituality (sometimes called kataphatic). An important question to ask is how can we represent our contemplation of God, what sort of language can we use? I emphasise the importance of creative, poetic language that is symbolic as we walk at the edge of language in contemplative experience.

In Chapter Four I share how reclaiming our present moments is central to mindful formation, as the present moment is where we find our home in God. I write about some of the epiphanies or moments of meeting I have had that have generated wisdom. Many of our present moments are lost and so identifying the charged moments when life changes is a crucial first step in reclaiming our here and now. I articulate these through eight windows that explore my participation in mindfulness of God and secular mindfulness. Tom Denny, the stained-glass artist, provides inspiration for those creative reflections through his work at Gloucester Cathedral in the Ivor Gurney windows. These reflections include the learning from painful and vulnerable experiences.

In Chapter Five I trace and recontextualise the contemplative historical strand of mindfulness or remembrance of God, particularly in relation to the Jesus Prayer and the Benedictine monastic tradition. This chapter presents an informed position on this important but neglected strand. I address the suspicions of some Christians towards mainstream mindfulness, establishing that it is our God-given capacity for attention and awareness. I outline theologically what is God’s part and what is our part in mindfulness of God and the mindful turns we need to make in our spiritual formation. I emphasise the importance of embodied or incarnational spirituality.

In Chapter Six I outline the importance of Mark’s Gospel for living by our values. This is through an informed reading of commentaries, articles and narrative criticism, but also through emphasising the significance of Mark for devotional reading, that intentionally leads us by the hand into transformation. The watchfulness commended in Mark’s Gospel bears a family resemblance to mindfulness.

In Chapter Seven my theme is how I reclaimed my present moments through a creative fusion of secular mindfulness with mindfulness of God. I had realised that most of my present moments were overwhelmed by anxiety. The pathway to liberation is accessible to all. I address the problem of the present moment, and how often we are in mental time travel and not fully present to the here and now, which is reality. This is a problem faced by most people in our age of distraction. This means much of the time we are not living by our values. I begin to develop a theology of the present moment and how we can live by our values. This includes the theoretical underpinning for the idea that much of our relationship with God lies out of our awareness. These insights came out of a pilgrimage walk I undertook in northern Spain. As well as exploring anxiety as something that keeps us out of the present moment through mind wandering, I begin to explore the role of shame. I return to mindful theory about how we can cultivate self-awareness and learn to regulate the anxiety and shame we often feel in a way that liberates us.

In Chapter Eight I offer another strand of informed reading with a short reflection on the doctrine of the spiritual senses. My discovery is that my natural senses when inhabited by the Holy Spirit become spiritual senses. I engage briefly with Balthasar’s doctrine of spiritual senses which offers theological support for my discovery. This embodied, incarnational spirituality is called kataphatic in the contemplative tradition.

In Chapter Nine I expand on three models for liberating our present moments and leading us into mindful formation. The first is about how to live by our values in each ethical moment of choice, the second enables us to understand our relationship with God in time, especially when we doubt God’s presence, through noticing moments of meeting with the divine. The third is the adaptation of the Jesus Prayer and Lectio Divina (slow meditative reading of Scripture) as attentional training tools that enable us to inhabit all of our being, including the embodied.

In Chapter Ten I ask, ‘Who am I in the present moment?’ This is another chapter based on my informed reading, drawing on the idea from Logos theology that each of us is a word spoken by Christ (the Word/Logos) to be light to the world. I also draw on recognition theory which argues how fundamentally important it is for our wellbeing to be recognised as who we are. In Christian terms that is who we are in Christ. This recognising has an important relational and ethical dimension. I also touch on the impact on us when we are misrecognised and how mindfulness can help us recognise others as they truly are.

In Chapter Eleven I suggest that if we are to reclaim our present moments to be mindful of God, we also need to address the shadow of the past which may hang over our present. For me this was the trauma of being sent to boarding school at a young age. Freedom in the present moment comes from integrating every part of us into our conscious awareness. I begin to discuss the importance of trauma theory, especially in the age of trauma in which we live.

In Chapter Twelve, in a short, accessible chapter I offer some further informed reading around trauma theory as I spiral back to it to help deepen our understanding of it. There have been important developments in trauma theory which I address here. How the unspeakable nature of trauma can be represented creatively is touched on.

In Chapter Thirteen I come back to the theme of self-awareness and self-examination by offering ways to listen to the different parts of our self, especially those parts that may have been pushed to the margins of our lives. One way is to simply do a self-interview. I offer personal examples. I have found this helps us live in an integrated way, all of our being becoming transparent to our witnessing self. This includes listening to our past and the voices that bring the past to life, liberating ourselves from internalised and distorted narratives.

Liberating our present needs some examination of our past. However, it can also enable us to liberate our future through mindfulness of God. This is the focus of Chapter Fourteen. We can gaze at the future with realism and hope as we make this pilgrimage, once we are able to perceive a God-formed narrative for our life. One way we can do this is to look at the past through a symbolic lens, without our normal negative bias, and find what has been redemptive and graced in the past. This interaction with key symbols in our life can redress the balance and lessen the gravitational pull of negativity bias on our thought life.

In the final section of the book, beginning in Chapter Fifteen, I begin to apply what we have discovered. The wisdom of intentional Christian community says that if we are to live by our values we need a rule of life, pathways that are incarnate values. I lay out the foundation of a mindful rule of life that enables this congruent way of life where we choose the values of God over our culturally derived values. This enables us to live relational lives that are mindful of others and recognise the image of God within them. As well as drawing on the wisdom of intentional community I utilise psychological theory around healthy relationships and how to avoid distortions and handle fractures within them. Confession and drawing on the creativity of our moral imagination is also part of the foundation of the mindful rule.

In Chapter Sixteen I develop some other dimensions to the mindful rule. If we are to be transformed through mindfulness of God, we must find an inner motivation and will to fuel our intention. This can be found through stories, humour, symbols that become lamps that guide us. Another dimension is that the mindful rule is participatory and can be adapted for each person’s context. I outline how we can cultivate a wise remembering of the rule. The rule begins with a mindful confession of both our strengths and those elements of our life that get in the way of a relationship with God.

Chapter Seventeen outlines the short mindful rule. It draws on the wisdom that has directed the rest of the book. It is made up of the distilled wisdom of the fusion of Christian mindfulness and secular mindfulness – propositions that enable us to be self-aware and self-regulating, transcending our automatic self-focus. For example, one proposition in it says, ‘I aim to recognise and lay down negative critical unhelpful judgements about my own self, and others and cultivate a compassionate reperceiving.’

In Chapter Eighteen I also consider if there is an ‘overriding directional image’ to my journey.^[8] I identify that overriding directional image of the journey – as coming home. I explore this briefly in a wider cultural context. This theme is amplified in Chapter Nineteen when I reflect on the theologies I have found a home in, whose commonality is that they are open, spacious and aware theologies. They enable us to adapt our spiritual perceiving to grasp the Light in a dark world.

In the final chapter I offer a summary of the distilled wisdom that has helped me and that I hope will be a guide to others in this book. I reflect on the generous God I have met. I use David Brown’s theology of interaction between natural symbols, human unconscious, human creativity and God as a sign of the generosity of God.^[9] This symbolic interaction can be a pathway to God for others and I outline ways this might be possible.

I see this symbolic interaction as a sign that creation is sacramental. This idea has come to me in fragments. I briefly outline this journey of discovery. For example, in conversation at Worth Abbey, a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery, as I explained how creation spoke to me, a guest said, ‘Oh, you are talking about creation as sacramental!’ James K A Smith, the Christian philosopher, defines a sacramental view of nature as meaning ‘that the physical, material stuff of creation and embodiment is the means by which God’s grace meets us and gets hold of us’.^[10] This makes sense to my embodied, incarnational mindful spirituality. God speaks to me through nature. My application of creation as sacramental is to see our God-given mindful capacities as sacramental, full of created goodness. This means secular mindfulness that works with these created capacities has a sacramental element.

Summary

Mindful formation has a framework that explains why we are doing what we are doing (metacognition). There is an intentional act of remembering our values (God-given) and choosing them over the worldly culturally conditioned values jostling for our attention. In other words, at the heart of mindful formation is an ethical stance.

I am remembering how to be mindful of God. The practices of remembering are developed in this book. As I am mindful of God, I begin to reperceive God, myself, others and creation. I have reclaimed a historic strand from Christian contemplation which is about mindfulness (remembrance) of God. I have recontextualised that historic strand using the language, theory and practices of secular or mainstream mindfulness.

The present moment is home in mindfulness of God and so I must reclaim my present moments (the here and now) from cultural captivity to the virtual world. Although I can reclaim them through intentional attentional training, remembering my values and recognising how I relate to God in time (mostly unaware), only God can redeem my present moments.

As I begin to reperceive on this pathway to spiritual liberation I start to recognise my God-given identity – my true self, created by Christ. I am also graciously enabled to recognise others, God and the world, and as I do this, I begin to change my self-centred, judgemental attitudes. I am helped in this formation through a mindful rule of life.

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The crisis of attention

In this book I introduce a wide range of theory and practice that has informed and guided me. It might feel overwhelming, but we will keep circling back to these central concepts. Wisdom is not easy and straightforward; it takes time and effort to acquire. It takes time and often we feel like we are walking in the dark with only just enough light to illumine a few steps ahead. One of the central pieces of wisdom I want to share is about reclaiming our attentional capacities.

The problem is our attentional capacities are held captive by the virtual world and media technologies. The Web lures us in like a Venus flytrap lures in a fly. For example, N Katherine Hayles critiques the wider digital nature of our culture which channels us into ‘hyper-attention, a cognitive mode that has a low threshold for boredom, alternates flexibly between different information streams, and prefers a high level of stimulation’.^[11] I see this in myself when I go on retreat and put my phone away, and experience immediate boredom and the desire to search for the different information streams my phone provides. It may be that the intuitive turn towards mindfulness in the same culture is a form of tacit searching for the antidote to this cultural stream of hyper-attention and digital media.

The other phrase that Hayles uses as the opposite of hyper-attention is ‘deep attention’.^[12] This is the ability to sustain attention. This is now a rare commodity in our society. We live in an attention economy and reclaiming our attention is our number one task in mindful formation. We do that by mindfully training our attentional capacities. I offer models for doing this in this book.

What are we doing when we pay attention to God? I am suggesting that, as in the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’),[13] we pay attention to Jesus Christ, the incarnated Son of God. We pay attention to Scripture through Lectio Divina (the slow meditative reading of the Bible). We examine our own self and pay attention to others and creation. These practices simplify what we are paying attention to: very often we have too many tabs or windows open in our mind.

We pay attention to the ordinary, to the margins of our lives, to the symbolic. It is the virtual world that now shapes our everyday life. Because we are shaped by what we pay attention to it is the media and communication technologies that we conform to. None of this is new, but because of the cultural captivity of our attentional capacities our ability to truly pay attention is flabby and anaemic. The models I offer alongside the attentional training in this book are important additional and neglected steps to mindful formation. The spirituality we develop through these processes is incarnational and embodied, not virtual. It is not just the external world that we need to liberate ourselves from; we need to learn to deal with the tangled webs of anxiety and stress within.

I think we are often, unknowingly, trying to practise a disembodied spirituality. We can move our bodies in unaware, habitual ways with a limited range of how our physicality is used. We can have a body that we do not inhabit in an aware way. For example, it took me a long time to realise that I held stress, difficult emotions and tension in my shoulders, neck and lower back. I have learnt through working with a chiropractor what movements are helpful and safe to maintain flexibility and strength.

Within Christianity we don’t have a systematic practice of working with the body; what we have is fragments out of which we can make a whole. Knowing what movements are difficult for you is helpful to know. Now I have difficulty in lifting my right arm up to the sky because of a muscle that is tight and isn’t responding quickly to treatment. If I bend down, I bend down with my knees, rather than bending over, to protect my lower back. Learning to move and inhabit our bodies in an aware way is an important part of our mindful formation. In doing this we can work out if we are not inhabiting our bodies because we feel ambivalent about them.

My contemplative life story has been a meeting point between my intuitive impulse for healing and transformation and the cultural phenomenon of mindfulness. It led to a recognition of a pathway to mindful formation. My moment of need coincided with a cultural moment of great importance – the rise of mindfulness and a turn towards contemplation. This is an act of resistance because, as we learn to free our attentional capacities, we liberate our internal and external worlds. It’s a convergence that many others have experienced. One stream that enters this convergence that differentiates my story is the impulse to explore mindfulness of God. This makes it a unique pathway to mindful formation. In this book I retain an emphasis on personal story, theory, theology and cultural engagement.

As I researched mindfulness of God, I realised that I kept returning to the key concepts because I didn’t understand them completely the first time I examined them. The same was true for the academic methods I looked at and utilised, or complex subjects like trauma theory. I also realised that mindfulness and contemplative practices used this circling back in a process of deepening repetition. This intuitive process of circling back has been discovery-based and iterative, a deepening spiral of transformation. Mindful and contemplative formation happens through a revisiting of key concepts and practices and building on them, which fits with spiral learning theory. There are many subjects that cannot simply be reduced to something that is understandable immediately – some subjects need a pattern of returning to them that leads to a deeper understanding as this process is followed.

The architect of spiral learning theory was Jerome Bruner back in 1960, and it can be summarised as ‘the encounter and the revisit of specific content, e.g., concepts at stages in a course – but where the revisit includes a step up in rigour or depth’.^[14]This spiral process of repetition, remembering or iteration enables us to be slowly formed in spiritual terms. Mindful formation or any spiritual formation or discipleship takes time. It needs the benefits of a spiral learning approach which Harden outlines as ‘reinforcement’, a ‘move from simple to complex’ and ‘deepening levels’ of knowledge.[15] I introduce some key concepts as we go along and then spiral back to them. These include mindfulness theory, representation in writing, trauma theory, spiritual senses and types of spirituality.

Ultimately this process is rewarding. It can be approached from another angle. Margaret Koehler, in her study of attention in eighteenth-century poetry, writes about walking the same route again and again as a poetic act of attention: ‘A circumscribed area of terrain gets deeper and deeper, sharper and sharper, more and more familiar, over repeated considerations.’[16] In this consideration we are paying attention carefully over a long period of time. In mindfulness of God, we need to expose ourselves to ‘repeated considerations’ of the theory, practice and lived experience. That is why it is a pilgrimage.

This approach, with its revisiting of core concepts, which are applied in different contexts, led to three quest questions. The first was, ‘What is mindfulness of God, and how might we cultivate it?’ My lived experience suggested my home was in the present moment with God. The problem of the present moment was that I was unable to be present in the here and now because of anxiety. This led to a second question, ‘How can we reclaim our present moments from anxious rumination to be mindful of God?’ You may be taken out of the present moment by other afflictive thoughts and emotions. However, I also found the roots of my anxiety lay in the trauma of childhood separation from my family. I discerned through this experience of complete aloneness that I had to find my home in my own body. I recognised I did not live in all the rooms of my own being, and so discovered a deeper related question, ‘How could we be fully aware of and at home in our whole embodied self, to further reclaim our present moments?’ This is about life in all its fullness. This alienation from our bodies is a wider cultural issue because of the virtual world we live in. These quest questions are archetypal and need to be articulated for many.

Epiphanies and moments of meeting

This book has been influenced by the accessible methodology of autoethnography (AE), which came out of ethnography. Ethnography is a key methodology in anthropological research and is based on participant observation in and of a group of people.^[17] In a brilliant turn of phrase Tedlock outlines the key turn from ethnography to AE: ‘Beginning in the 1970s, there was a shift in emphasis from participant observation to the observation of participation.’^[18] In this way she distinguishes between ethnography as participant observation and AE as the observation of participation. However, for it to be true AE it needs to be the observation of one’s own participation in culture and society. I am, therefore, locating my journey as autoethnographic because I am observing my own participation in mindfulness and culture. Mindful formation requires us to examine our place in culture and how it has shaped us. That is why AE is a helpful methodology in keeping us intentionally focused on culture and our relation to it. This also enables me to share out of my contemplative experience and practice, which is also a mainstream mindfulness principle, and the way early contemplatives shared their teaching.

Another AE principle that has helped me to focus my thinking is the idea of examining epiphanies.^[19] Epiphanies are moments of recognition about your own life, others or God. I am also calling them ‘moments of meeting’, to signal these are the key times I had insights or moments of heightened awareness of God.^[20] These epiphanies or moments of meeting momentarily free us from the gravitational pull of our culture; they are an antidote to our crisis of attention.

A key epiphany was the realisation that if I wanted to be mindful of God, I needed to reclaim my present moments, which were often overwhelmed with anxiety. This meant my original quest question, ‘What is mindfulness of God, and how can we cultivate it?’ which needed to start with historical retrieval led to a related more present moment focused question: ‘How can we reclaim our present moments from anxious rumination to be mindful of God?’ I am aware that God is mindful of me, but in this question I want to establish my part: ‘How am I to be mindful of God?’

Some of my epiphanies have been positive realisations or insights that came out of my brokenness and vulnerability. This is another key focus of AE; through researching autobiographical impulses, the self becomes visible and vulnerable ‘in research and in writing’.^[21] To acknowledge vulnerability is not weakness but facing reality, being real. It isn’t just an academic exercise; it is something we need to do in our spiritual journey.

Secular mindfulness – a response to the crisis of attention

A near breakdown in 2006 was like an unmaking of my sense of self, through stress, anxiety and burnout. This resulted in an impulse to explore secular mindfulness which I had encountered in my counselling and psychotherapy training at Roehampton University. Secular mindfulness is generally mindfulness for mental health, and I was able to draw on it to manage my anxiety and stress. The pioneering mindfulness-based approaches were Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction followed by Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for recurrent depression. Mindfulness has emerged as a response to the crisis of attention and our inability to live aware and wakeful lives.

Secular (or, as it is sometimes called, mainstream) mindfulness defines mindfulness essentially as ‘awareness itself, an entirely different and one might say, larger capacity than thought, since any and all thought and emotion can be held in awareness’.^[22] This is a simple but profound definition of mindfulness as awareness which can hold our thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations in present moment consciousness. Awareness, and therefore mindfulness in this definition, is a universal human capacity. I cannot talk about my capacity for awareness without talking about attention, which is where I direct my awareness. Attention is, according to Tim Lomas, ‘awareness stretched toward something’.^[23] This interconnection between awareness and attention is underlined in the definitions provided by Brown and Ryan: ‘Awareness is the background “radar” of consciousness’ which scans the environment, and attention ‘is a process of focusing conscious awareness’.^[24]

Another central definition has helped me steer my course to mindfulness of God. It is this central summary of mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn: ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally’.^[25]Shapiro et al take this definition and break it down into key elements, and here I come back to her theme of reperceiving. These key elements are to intentionally practise mindfulness, train your attention and change your attitude. As you do this there is a ‘shift in perspective’ where you ‘reperceive’ reality.^[26] Through reperceiving you can ‘reflectively choose what has been previously reflexively adopted and conditioned’.^[27] This has implications for wanting to live consciously by my values: ‘Reperceiving may also help people recognise what is meaningful for them and what they truly value.’^[28] I use these key elements to shape intentional reflection at the end of each chapter. An important element of mindful formation is consciously living by our values. Our culture and the power of the virtual world make it very difficult to live by our values; rather, we live by the values of a materialistic world that wants us to over-consume without awareness.

Attention itself has a range of capacities. What we need to learn to exercise is our muscle of attention. Instead of my attention being held captive, for example, by social media, I can learn to regulate my attention.^[29] I can focus my attention on Scripture, or chocolate, or my breath, or a bird of the air. What happens next, according to the muscle of attention, is that my mind will wander, and that is indeed my experience.^[30] I have this beautiful capacity called meta-awareness, where I notice that part of my mind has wandered to a meeting I am worried about tomorrow. Through the self-regulation of my attention, I can switch my attention back to what it is I am focusing on.^[31] This enables me to sustain my attention.^[32] With practice I am able to both sustain a focused attention and inhabit an open awareness to thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations as they appear in awareness.^[33] This can be described in different ways and has important implications not only for wellbeing but also for my awareness of God’s presence.

When I was first married, we went to ballroom dancing, but gave up after the first lesson owing to my lack of rhythm. Recently, as part of the community at Scargill House, during an entertainment evening I mentioned this lack of rhythm, and someone offered to teach me some dance moves, which they proceeded to do. I find it helpful to talk about mindfulness as consisting of several moves as in a dance. Mark Williams outlines a helpful concept of how our mind works, principally through two modes, ‘conceptual (language-based) processing versus sensory-perceptual processing’.^[34] This has also been called our narrative self and experiential self.^[35] I will expand on this as I show how I applied this map to my wellbeing and spirituality. Put simply, my narrative self is where I live most of the time, telling stories, often negative ones. My experiential self is my body, breath and senses.

Mark Williams introduces another aspect of our being when he says in a summary statement, ‘Attentional training in mindfulness programs cultivates the ability to shift modes as an essential first step to being able to hold all experience (sensory and conceptual) in a wider awareness that is itself neither merely sensory or conceptual.’^[36] In mindful experience it is essential to shift to this wider, more open awareness that holds all our experience in conscious awareness. It is in this place of open awareness, as we expand our bandwidth of conscious experience, that we can also become more aware of God’s presence. In my experience, the same attentional capacities are at work in mindfulness of my anxious thoughts as are at work in mindfulness of God. This awareness has also been called the ‘observing self’.^[37] Just as the phrase ‘seeing clearly’ can be critiqued from a disability consciousness perspective, so ‘participant observer’ can be critiqued from the perspective of sensory ethnography.^[38] The participation in sensory ethnography is conceptualised through the wider idea of perception, drawing on all the senses.^[39] I prefer the term ‘witnessing self’, or perceiving self.^[40] Having outlined these three aspects of self – narrative, experiential and witnessing – I can then show the moves that I make in mindfulness.

The first move is to navigate from my narrative self, my head, into my experiential self – my body, my senses, my breath. This is important because in doing this I shift into the present moment; my body, breath and senses can never be at any other point of time.^[41] In my head I can be at any point in time, as I worry about the morning prayer I am doing tomorrow or imagining reactions to the sermon I preached last Sunday. It is a move I can make without conscious awareness through having natural ways to find a calm state of mind when I am stressed, for example, by taking the dog for a walk. If I can learn to make this move intentionally and with conscious awareness, then I move out of mind wandering and my distorted stories. Within this I am using my witnessing self to tell a bigger narrative, one that can hold the distorted narratives within me. As a graced response, as God transforms my awareness, I want to rewrite my story, in my mind and body, not just on the written page.

However, there is another move, and that is into my witnessing self, where I can hold both my narrative self and my experiential self in conscious awareness. It is in this place that I learn to relativise my distorted thoughts and stories as just thoughts, not facts. But for my purposes it is also in this place of awareness that I can sense God’s presence. In this place I am also in the present moment, and here my experience is that I am more likely to find God. The theology of the present moment is also something that I develop further.

Just as modern discipleship is often disembodied, we are not often taught how to deal with our afflictive thought life. I offer one central way in the relativising of our thoughts. It is there in the Christian tradition, and one helpful verse is, ‘take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’ (2 Corinthians 10:5). This is not every thought but the afflictive ones. We cannot take captive what we are not aware of, and so implicit in this verse is the idea that we can witness our thoughts from a larger self. Again, another challenge for Christian discipleship from mainstream mindfulness is the time and effort to become aware of one’s state of mind in the practice. I don’t think significant transformation is possible without this self-work. I emphasise the importance of embodied living and awareness of thoughts and emotions in mindful formation.

Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), an early Christian contemplative, emphasised the importance of becoming aware of our thoughts and feelings. Bamberger calls this ‘psychology of a practical, experiential kind’.^[42] We see the examination through self-reflection: ‘Let him keep careful watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity, their period of decline and follow them as they rise and fall.’^[43] It was to be a non-elaborative awareness with the aim that you catch the first thought as it appears, before a whole train of thought takes your attention away.^[44]

These definitions make a statement that is anthropological; they raise a central, if neglected, part of our incarnated being – the importance of awareness and attention, and the different aspects of self we can inhabit. Mindfulness definitions also recognise other mindful capacities that we all have. These
have been called ‘self-awareness’, ‘self-regulation’ and ‘self-transcendence’.^[45]

Vago defines these three aspects of mindfulness as:

meta-awareness of self (self-awareness), an ability to effectively manage or alter one’s responses and impulses (self-regulation), and the development of a positive relationship between self and other that transcends self-focused needs and increases prosocial characteristics (self-transcendence).^[46]

I need to transcend my anxious self, my wounded boarding school self, through self-awareness and the regulation of the anxiety that takes up so much of my inner space. These capacities can be enhanced through mindful awareness practices.

Mindfulness theory distinguishes between mindfulness-based therapies like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-incorporating therapies like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I also draw on the ideas of experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, and acceptance from ACT in my map of mindfulness. Experiential avoidance is quite simply ‘the process of trying to avoid your own experiences’ as a way of regulating them.^[47] Acceptance is the way to step out of avoidance: we accept the reality we face in the moment, without avoiding it.^[48] In cognitive fusion I become the difficult thought or feeling.^[49] In my experience of anxiety I was trying to avoid the difficult thought, not accepting it and often fused to it. I must learn to ‘defuse’ from my anxious thought, to witness that thought and not be a victim of it.

Each chapter will have a reflection space to do some self-work. It will ask you to work on something intentionally that the chapter talks about. It will ask you to train your attention in a way that helps you be mindful of God. There will be an opportunity to examine your attitudes which are unhealthy. I will also ask you to see if there is an element of your life or the world or another person you can reperceive, see more clearly. There are other definitions of mindfulness that we will pick up later and spiral back to.

By examining my life, I had the vulnerable epiphany that the cultural ‘making of me’ at boarding school had created an identity that fractured under extreme pressure, because it was self-sufficient, emotionally avoidant and, therefore, avoidant of the body. At my boarding school, unquestioning loyalty was encouraged rather than awareness, exploration and curiosity. Mindfulness turned me towards an aware inhabiting of my body, emotions and awareness. As it did so it brought spiritual life. This slow turn to incarnational living was followed by a spiritual epiphany, a moment of meeting that was brief but has stayed with me ever since. Mindful formation is a turn to incarnational spirituality. This pattern of not inhabiting our bodies and emotions is mirrored in our virtual culture.

A spiritual impulse in 2006 led to the discovery of mindfulness of God and the foundational epiphany for my contemplative formation. One phrase from my contemplative reading has been a second-person guide to me since 2006 when it first sounded in my awareness. It has led me by the hand into a lived experience of its intention. Olivier Clement translated an original Greek phrase from fifth-century Greek Bishop Diadochus of Photike, a pioneer of the Jesus Prayer, as, ‘Let us keep our eyes always fixed on the depths of our heart with an unceasing mindfulness of God.’^[50] These words were a summary statement, a theological fragment, that became the cornerstone of my research. This phrase struck my heart, as if my heart was a bell, and I still ring with it today. It was a spiritual defibrillator that shocked me into awareness, my body and emotions. It was more than words on a page; it was something sensed spiritually in my embodied being. The energy of that moment has never left me. I have asked myself why. I think the phrase caught the ‘attention of my heart’.[51] That is, there was an emotional connection that motivated me to examine this phrase year after year. Even when my heart was burnt to ashes. This emotional magnetism provided me with the fuel for my intention to study mindfulness of God.

The paradoxical mutual indwelling of the physical and spiritual in me in that moment of meeting with God helped shape the rest of this quest. The original phrase could be translated as remembrance of God, and this element of remembering has become important to my concept of mindfulness of God.

Reflexivity as attentive resistance

An important question to ask in a journey of mindful formation is how to critically examine our own experience. The critical gaze I use to uncover the implicit and observe my own self experience to gain some critical distance is mindful awareness. This use of mindful awareness as reflexive self-awareness is essential in mindful formation. Scripture encourages us to examine ourselves and to allow ourselves to be examined by the Holy Spirit (Psalm 139:23; Lamentations 3:40). If we do not become self-aware, we cannot change into Christlikeness. It is in this way we can move from being flies in a cultural web to those who become liberated to transcend it. We are equipped to resist our cultural captivity.

 Mindfulness also has an anthropological stance in its emphasis on awareness as the central aspect of the good life. This is a critical gaze when directed towards Western culture and its emphasis on information and the mind. Williams and Kabat-Zinn in the context of critiquing Western culture make the point, ‘While we get a great deal of training in our education systems in thinking of all kinds, we have almost no exposure to the cultivation of intimacy with that other innate capacity of ours that we call awareness.’^[52] This critical gaze and anthropological stance can be used not only to examine my boarding school self, and other cultural shaping, but also to critically examine my experience within a specific charismatic church culture.

Within my discovery process I grasped that my participative approach led me to read scriptural and mindfulness texts in a distinct way. I wanted to apply theory to this way of reading, and the best way to describe it is as one articulated by Peter Candler, that is I read ‘manuductively’, allowing the text to ‘lead you by the hand’.^[53] I have done this with Scripture, but also with the mindfulness self-help texts and some key contemplative texts. This is a helpful devotional form of reading that I spiral back to, to develop it further.

As a young man, not yet a Christian, I was drawn to the charismatic movement because of its lively embodied worship. However, my immersion in secular psychology as a psychotherapist provided another critical gaze. I felt that much of the practice of charismatic worship had not been reflected on, that it was not an aware or particularly self-reflective movement. This was especially highlighted when I began to explore mindful theory and practice. I was looking for more introspective, meditative practices in my own spirituality. This led me to historic Christian contemplation, which can also be used as a critical gaze on charismatic worship, because of its contemplative emphasis on silence, solitude and meditation on Scripture. However, there was still something missing, and I did not know what that was until I discovered mindfulness theory and practice.

In charismatic worship I did not fully inhabit awareness, but in Christian contemplation I felt I was practising a disembodied platonic spirituality. Mindfulness theory and practice, with its emphasis on the cultivation of mindful awareness, a clear seeing of reality, became the new critical gaze for me. Although I am critiquing my experience of charismatic worship, I still identify as belonging to a charismatic spirituality, in believing in the person and presence of the Holy Spirit as the transforming presence of God. However, that charismatic spirituality has required a new anthropological understanding of my mindful and embodied capacities that are inhabited by that divine presence.

Journey, quest and pilgrimage

This retrieval of the phrase ‘mindfulness of God’ from contemplative history led me on both personal and academic journeys, both a quest and a pilgrimage. Two central metaphors of pilgrimage and quest will help shape the journey of mindful formation in terms of its representation and wider resonance as there are archetypal elements to both ideas. I saw that mindfulness itself as a cultural phenomenon could be described using pilgrimage language.

I began to make connections between mindfulness and pilgrimage after reading Jill Dubisch’s autoethnographic book on pilgrimage to a Greek island. A common factor between pilgrimage sites and mindfulness as a cultural phenomenon, as I observe it, is that both have ‘spiritual magnetism’.^[54] Mindfulness has personally attracted me, and it is a widespread cultural phenomenon in the West in terms of numbers of people practising, the rise of self-help books, the new therapies incorporating mindfulness and the emergence of mindfulness gurus. Traditionally it is places that have spiritual magnetism. On pilgrimage one is drawn to a place that has spiritual magnetism. Certain sites even within secular psychology could be said to have become must-go-to pilgrimage places, like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s hospital in Massachusetts, or Mark Williams’ Oxford Centre for Mindfulness.

It is not just ‘places’ that attract pilgrims; ‘Pilgrimage may also center around a sacred person.’^[55] Mindfulness in secular psychology has its ‘saints’ and gurus that have spiritual magnetism. People flock to hear the main mindfulness speakers. In the virtual world we now live in, with internet connectivity, we do not have to physically go to a site any more to make a pilgrimage. Mindfulness can be accessed via the online world, as well as in the physical world.

People who are in pain are attracted to pilgrimage. People who are in pain are attracted to mindfulness. Mindfulness research shows that mindfulness can help alleviate chronic pain.^[56] On pilgrimage people hear stories of healing and transformation. Mindfulness books tell stories of healing
and transformation as people give testimony in them.^[57] We can ask the question here as to why mindfulness has become so popular.

Regarding mindfulness, I believe it is something to do with the search for wellbeing and wisdom, and an intuitive response to a culture inimical to health, as well as a desire for self-transcendence which is something mindfulness offers. It is also a pathway to liberation from a distracted life.

Another helpful methodology that can help develop self-awareness is the heuristic approach, which has a clear process for working with lived experience, involving a personal ‘immersion’ in a quest. After immersing yourself in the quest you might have a period of ‘incubation’ where you allow your thinking to grow intuitively. You might experience an epiphany or ‘illumination’ before everything is put together in a ‘creative synthesis’.^[58] These are archetypal experiences in learning and creativity. A heuristic approach can, therefore, transcend an academic methodology and be a conscious, intentional process for contemplative and mindful formation.

The initial question was ‘What is mindfulness of God, and how can it be cultivated?’ Although my discovery was built on a moment of meeting with God, I was not aware that I did not inhabit fully most of my present moments. As the journey progressed, I realised that if I wanted to be more mindful of God, I needed to reclaim my present moments from being overwhelmed by anxious thoughts. I was also aware that anxiety is a symptom; I had recognised that my anxiety came from automatic boarding school narratives that operated out of my awareness, with anxiety being their symptom. In this sense the past is always in the present and I knew I had to also see if I could rewrite these scripts through engagement with scriptural propositions.

Paradoxically, it was secular mindfulness that helped me be more mindful of God, by allowing me to be more mindfully aware in the present moment. I realised that the theory, practice and anthropological insights of secular mindfulness were a key foundation in my practice of mindfulness of God.

A brief summary

I am on a quest to discover a culturally congruent form of mindfulness of God, how I can cultivate it and how it can be offered to others. The form of mindfulness of God I have created is an integration of secular mindfulness and mindfulness of God becoming an original pathway to kataphatic spirituality leading to mindful formation. My personal journey shows God is to be found in the present moment. If I am to be mindful of God I need to be in the present moment. I have identified that the ‘problem’ of the present moment is that I am often not in the present moment owing to anxiety. This anxiety stems from my childhood experience of boarding school. I need, therefore, to reclaim my present moments to be more mindful of God. I also recognise I need to reclaim the past to reclaim my present moments. Although I can reclaim my past to some extent using mindfulness and other theory, again, as with the present moments, only God can redeem my past. These insights are true for others.

What emerged unexpectedly with the creation of this mindful spirituality was the existence of symbolic interaction between my unconscious self and God that had been hidden in my childhood, an interaction that was continuing as an adult. This included a symbolic aspect of that self through which God was able to redeem my interpretation of the past. Although the aim of mindfulness of God is a continuous awareness of God’s presence, through the creation of another analogical conceptual model I am seeking to open myself to multiplying moments of meeting with God as a form of scaffolding on the way to continuous awareness. Moments of meeting with God are to be valued. My own experience in the foundational epiphany of this research shows that one moment of meeting with God can transform the direction of a whole life. Enabling this is ethical mindful awareness, a form of remembrance of God in the present moment.

Reflection

Intention

We live in a crisis of attention. We are the flies in the web, not the spiders. What in the virtual world holds you captive? Intentionally resolve to reduce the time you give to the world of media. How often are you in the present moment?

Attention

What absorbs you outside of the virtual world, which could be a pathway to freedom? For me, for example, it is walking in nature. To train your distracted and captivated attention, find other pathways that absorb you.

Attitude

What is your attitude when you read something you don’t understand straight away, that requires focused attention? Resolve not to give up on more difficult pastimes. Perhaps read some poetry that requires effort.

Reperceiving

Have you had any epiphanies that have helped you reperceive the world or yourself? Meditate on Luke 5:1-11 where in a small detail the disciples wash their nets every day. If they didn’t, their nets would deteriorate. Our minds and bodies are our nets and need to be washed daily in spiritual and mindful practices. Use the model of the disciples to strengthen your intention to practise daily.

[1] An allusion to Elijah being touched by an angel in 1 Kings 19:5. A poetic rendering of the words that launched my research, Diadochus of Photike, Gnostic Chapters, 56 (SC 5 bis. p. 117), quoted in Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 7th edition (London: New City, 2002), 204.

[2] Attributed to dance critic and poet Edwin Denby by Frank O’Hara in Standing Still and Walking in New York, edited by Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1975), 184, quoted in Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture(OUP: 2016), 2, Kindle.

[3] Frances Ward and Richard Sudworth, ‘Introduction’, in Holy Attention: Preaching in today’s church, eds Frances Ward and Richard Sudworth (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2019), 63, Kindle.

[4] James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii.

[5] Petruska Clarkson, Gestalt Counselling in Action, 4th edition, updated by Simon Cavicchia, Sage Counselling in Action Series, series editor Windy Dryden (London: Sage, 2014), 242, Kindle.

[6] Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 12, Kindle.

[7] Alister E McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 82.

[8] David J Leigh, Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 1, Kindle.

[9] David Brown, ‘God and Symbolic Action’, in Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer, eds Brian Hebblethwaite and Edward Henderson (Edinburgh: T& T Clark, 1990), 113-117, and David Brown, Divine Generosity and Human Creativity (London: Routledge, 2017), 5.

[10] James K A Smith in Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009), 141.

[11] N Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12.

[12] Hayles, 12.

[13] The Jesus Prayer is an ancient Christian contemplative prayer, a good introduction is Simon Barrington-Ward, The Jesus Prayer: A Way to Contemplation (Boston, Massachusetts: Pauline Books & Media, 2011).

[14] Russell Woodward, ‘The Spiral Curriculum in Higher Education: Analysis in Pedagogic Context and a Business Studies Application’, E-Journal of Business Education and Scholarship of Teaching 13, no.3 (2019): 15. See Jerome S Bruner, The Process of Education (Harvard University Press, 1960), particularly chapter three.

[15] R M Harden, ‘What is a spiral curriculum?’, Medical Teacher 21, no. 2 (1999): 142, accessed 28th September 2023, dx.doi.org/10.1080/01421599979752.

[16] Margaret Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 187.

[17] Paul Atkinson, et al, ‘Editorial Introduction’, in Handbook of Ethnography, eds Paul Atkinson et al (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 2001), 5.

[18] See Barbara Tedlock, ‘From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography’, Journal of Anthropological Research 47, no. 1 (1991): 69.

[19] Focusing on epiphanies is highlighted in Carolyn Ellis, Tony E Adams and Arthur P Bochner, ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1 (2011): 347, accessed 26th August 2016, doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589.

[20] See The Boston Change Process Study Group, Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm (New York, London: W W Norton & Company, 2010), 5-7, for the idea of moments of meeting in implicit relationships.

[21] Leon Anderson and Bonnie Glass-Coffin, ‘I Learn by Going’, in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E Adams and Carolyn Ellis (Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press Inc, 2013), 71.

[22] J Mark, G Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn, ‘Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins, and Multiple Applications at the Intersection of Science and Dharma’, in Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins, and Applications, eds J Mark, G Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn (London: Routledge, 2013), 15.

[23] Tim Lomas, Masculinity, Meditation and Mental Health (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100-101.

[24] Kirk Warren Brown and Richard M Ryan, ‘The Benefits of Being Present: Mindfulness and its Role in Psychological Well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 4 (2003): 822-848, accessed 18th September 2017, dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.4.822.

[25] Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 375.

[26] Shauna L Shapiro, et al, ‘Mechanisms of Mindfulness’, Journal of Clinical Psychology 62, no. 3 (2006): 374, accessed 18th July 2014.

[27] Shapiro, et al, ‘Mechanisms of Mindfulness’, 380.

[28] Shapiro, et al, ‘Mechanisms of Mindfulness’, 380.

[29] Scott R Bishop, et al, ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’, Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 232.

[30] See Wendy Hasenkamp, et al, ‘Mind Wandering and Attention During Focused Meditation: A Fine-grained Temporal Analysis of Fluctuating Cognitive States’, Neuroimage 59 (2012), 751, accessed 18th November 2015, dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.008. Daniel Goleman calls these steps the muscle of attention see, Daniel Goleman, ‘Meditation: A Practical Way to Retrain Attention’, November 2013, accessed 18th November 2015, available at www.mindful.org/meditation-a-practical-way-to-retrain-attention.

[31] Bishop, et al, 232.

[32] Bishop, et al, 232.

[33] Bishop, et al, 232.

[34] J Mark, G Williams, ‘Mindfulness and Psychological Process’, Emotion Vol. 10, no. 1 (2010): 2.

[35] See Farb, et al, ‘Attending to the present: Mindfulness Meditation Reveals Distinct Neural Modes of Self-Reference’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) 2 (2007): 313-322, accessed 13th March 2019, dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsm030, 313-314. See also D J Siegel, ‘Mindfulness Training and Neural Integration: Differentiation of Distinct Streams of Awareness and the Cultivation of Well-being’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN), 2, no. 4 (2007), 261, accessed 12th March 2022, dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsm034, for a witnessing or observing self that holds the narrative and experiential self.

[36] Williams, ‘Mindfulness and Psychological Process’, 2.

[37] See for a full-length exploration of this idea. Arthur J Deikman, The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1982). Siegel, ‘Mindfulness training and neural integration’, for delineating the witnessing or observing self holding narrative and experiential selves, 261.

[38] Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd edition (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 2015), 95-96.

[39] Pink, 95-96.

[40] Shapiro, et al, ‘Mechanisms of Mindfulness’, 379. Shapiro also uses the term witnessing and says reperceiving allows an ‘intimate observing or witnessing, not a detached one’.

[41] Mark Williams and Danny Penman, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (London: Piatkus, 2011), 197-198.

[42] Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos: Chapters on Prayer, translated by John Eudes Bamberger OCSO (Spencer, Massachusetts: Cistercian Publications, 1970), lxviii.

[43] Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos, 29.

[44] Mary Margaret Funk, Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life (New York: Continuum, 2004), 53.

[45] David R Vago and David A Silbersweig, ‘Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Self-Transcendence (S-ART): A Framework for Understanding the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Mindfulness’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012): 4.

[46] Vago and Silbersweig, 2.

[47] Steven C Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (New Harbinger Publications, Inc, 2005), 30, 58.

[48] Hayes, 45.

[49] Hayes, 58.

[50] My italics, Diadochus of Photike, Gnostic Chapters, 56 (SC 5 bis. p. 117), quoted in Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 7th ed (London: New City, 2002), 204.

[51] Cynthia Bourgeault, ‘Centering Prayer and Attention of the Heart’, Cross Currents 59 no. 1 (2009), 23.

[52] Williams and Kabat-Zinn, ‘Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning’, 15.

[53] See Peter M Candler Jr, Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God (London: SCM Press, 2006) for this idea of manuduction, texts that are written to lead you by the hand towards God, 1-20.

[54] Jill Dubisch, In A Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 35.

[55] Dubisch, 35.

[56] See Dubisch, 111, and for mindfulness stories Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman, Mindfulness for Health: Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeing (London: Piatkus, 2013), 27-35.

[57] See Dubisch, 72, and Burch and Penman, Mindfulness for Health, 27-35, where both authors tell story of terrible injuries leaving them in chronic pain, and page 2-11 for reference to the efficacy of mindfulness in reducing pain.

[58] Clark Moustakas, Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology and Applications (London: Sage, 1990), 9, 28.