We work so hard at everything, don't we?

And almost without noticing, our mindfulness practice can become just one more thing on the list. One more thing to do correctly, to evaluate, to feel vaguely guilty about when we skip it. The very practice that's meant to offer us some relief from the relentless productivity machine becomes another item in the productivity machine.

We come to mindfulness training with genuinely good reasons. We want to stop being hijacked by anxiety, to sleep better, to be more present with the kids, to manage chronic pain, to find some breathing room inside a life that feels too full. These are completely legitimate motivations, and mindfulness can genuinely help with all of them. But somewhere in the pursuit of those outcomes, the practice itself can start to feel like a treatment we're administering to ourselves. Something to get right. Something that works some weeks and mysteriously fails us in others.

The evaluating mind gets busy. Am I doing it correctly? How come it felt so different last time? I think I might be getting worse at this. Our brains are exquisitely designed for assessment and planning - it's one of the things we do best as a species, and it's enormously useful in many areas of life. But it's not particularly useful here. Because mindfulness isn't a technique that works or doesn't work. It's something closer to a way of being.

Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it like this: “Mindfulness can only be understood from the inside out. It is a way of being and a way of seeing that has profound implications for understanding the nature of our own minds and bodies, and for living life as if it really mattered.” There's something in it that points beyond self-improvement into something more like genuine care. For ourselves, for this life, for this moment, exactly as it is.

The root of the word attention is tenderness.

I find that quietly startling every time I remember it. What would it mean to bring tenderness rather than technique to our practice? To sit down not to fix ourselves or improve ourselves or even calm ourselves — but simply to be with ourselves for a few minutes? Not pushing or pulling. Not instrumentalising our own experience. Just a few moments of genuine intimacy with whatever is actually here.

This is a different kind of practice. It asks us to set down, even temporarily, the usual orientation of managing and sorting and making things happen. To get curious instead. To let ourselves be seen - by ourselves - with care and without agenda.

Discipline or love?

In my late twenties and into my thirties I practiced Aikido, six days a week for seven years, until my first pregnancy made that impossible. People used to comment on my discipline, and I always found that a little funny, because I'm not a particularly disciplined person. I wasn't showing up six times a week out of willpower. I'd fallen in love with the practice. That's an entirely different quality of motivation — less like forcing yourself to the gym and more like making your way toward something you genuinely want. Like visiting a beloved friend.

I think this is what can go missing when practice becomes a duty. The falling-in-love quality. The sense of genuine curiosity about what we might discover when we actually stop and look inward.

Ajahn Chah, one of the great Thai forest meditation masters, offers an image I return to often. He describes a mind that has found this quality of rest as being like a clear forest pool. All kinds of creatures come to drink at it. Strange and wonderful things appear and disappear. And the pool remains still, receiving everything, disturbed by nothing. Let it be. Grasp at nothing, resist nothing. Step out of the battle where it is cool.

There's an invitation in that image that I find deeply nourishing. Not the stillness of suppression or avoidance — not the stillness of someone gritting their teeth and trying very hard to be calm. But the natural stillness of something that has stopped fighting with itself.

We are social animals, and it helps to remember that sustaining a practice rarely happens in complete isolation. Finding even a small community to practice with — a group, a class, a friend who also sits — makes an enormous difference. We are not designed to do this alone.

But the quality of practice itself, the inner orientation we bring to it — that's what I'm pointing at here. Less task, more tenderness. Less assessment, more curiosity. Less am I doing this right and more oh, hello — what's here today?

What if practice were less like a discipline and more like a relationship? One you return to not because you should, but because something in you genuinely wants to. Because you've discovered, slowly and perhaps a little surprisingly, that this inner life of yours is actually rather interesting company.

If you'd like support in developing or deepening your practice, OpenGround runs regular MBSR courses and ongoing meditation programs. We'd love to practise alongside you.

—Timothea Goddard