Learning About Mindfulness with Alice

I was coaching a friend on mindfulness and suggested stepping outside her normal mental processes and try observing herself from the outside while she was doing her normal day-to-day. I was asking her to implement an impartial, non-judgmental observation system, looking at, but not commenting on, or dwelling on, everything that was going on in her life. If you've never done this, it's not that easy, but once you get the hang of it, you can turn it on easily.

What we see in this cartoon is what might be happening as Alice walks into the kitchen. In Buddhism, I see these as attachments; in psychology, therapists may connect these to embedded behaviors that are running Alice's life. In either case, interpreting their value is absolutely not the point.

Freeing herself from those attachments or embedded behaviors does not mean that Alice doesn't know what to do in this situation, but it will give her the freedom to choose her own path, free from past limiting constraints.

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