Mindfulness, it's one of these words that makes some people just roll their eyes. But what if it wasn't just or at all about sitting in the lotus position and chanting or forcing yourself to clear your mind? Today, we're cutting through the buzzword and getting into what mindfulness actually is, how it can help you focus, reduce stress, and navigate life with more clarity. Whether or not the term mindfulness is overhyped or not.

Welcome to The Meaningful Shit Show with your host Vincent. In a world full of selfishness, blaming, and scapegoating, Vincent aims to inspire inner work with deep topics and insights on emotion regulation, personal development, psychology, philosophy, and the trauma growth healing process. Welcome to another episode of The Meaningful Shit Show. It's hard to describe how big of a change mindfulness made in my life. Mindfulness is at the root of basically every mental health skill that I have.

And as my therapist has said, I can teach you how to change a light bulb, but you have to notice that the light goes out. Awareness lies on the root of everything. My journey started with using meditation, not necessarily mindfulness just yet, to manage anxiety and stress. At the time, years ago, I felt pretty self-conscious about it because meditation was woo-woo according to my family, and certainly not something that people like us used.

It was effective for calming down, basically getting from fight or flight to the rest and digest system. See my episode about the Polyvagal Theory. But it would take me quite some time to sever the connection between new age and woo-woo and meditation, thanks to the work of, amongst others, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Alan Watts, and Headspace. It would take me another few years until I understood and knew how to actually embody mindfulness, that the formal sit was training, but that mindfulness itself is best served sprinkled on numerous everyday experiences, instead of a continuous sit.

I learned that mindfulness is a skill to practice. So especially when you don't need it in the moment, so that you can use your experience in calming the mind, in letting go of thoughts in the most challenging of moments. I'm going to talk about dialectical behavioral therapy, because dialectical behavioral therapy offers a structured way to learn mindfulness with clear steps. We'll also explore its deeper existential layers, but we'll first go into what and how before we get into why.

Why listen to me? Do I have anything special or new to tell you? I think what's a bit unique about my message is that I've both enjoyed mindfulness secularly, for simple material benefits, and spiritually, for deep existential realizations. It's not a surprise I didn't handle this DBT module until now. It's so hard to speak about mindfulness, I think, and this is just one of these topics where I can tease you, but nothing, nothing will happen until you pick it up and run with it.

Do the experiments yourself. Also, what's unique is that I can speak to you as a practitioner. I am not an accomplished researcher like Jon Kabat-Zinn or a guru like Alan Watts that spends my career talking to people as a communicator. I'm not accredited as a DBT teacher. I am here struggling in the mud with you, and I can speak to you as a companion on the road.

All right, let's dive in. What is mindfulness according to DBT? DBT says, Mindfulness is intentionally living with awareness in the present moment without judgment or attachment. Let's go through that again. Mindfulness is intentionally living with awareness in the present moment without judgment or attachment. So what does mindfulness not entice? So some of the common myth that I would like to debunk. I have to meditate in lotus position for hours every single day, go to yoga retreats, use namaste regularly.

No, mindfulness can be practiced anywhere. It's not beholden to any of those specific traditions. I need to clear my mind. No thoughts. No, it's not about stopping thoughts. It's about noticing thoughts and not judging them. Getting caught up in thoughts is bad. Not if you notice it and then let it go. The goal is not to experience no mind. At one point, the goal could be to experience that.

But at the location where we are, as journeymen, no, you're not doing mindfulness wrong if you're having thoughts. It's great if you notice that you're having those thoughts, even if you get caught up with those thoughts, and you let them go. Mindfulness means I have to practice meditation. No, there are many mindfulness practices. Also, notice that you can sit on a pillow with your eyes closed without being mindful.

And just the same, you can be mindful without being in a formal sit. Mindfulness is just an ABC step process. Everybody can learn it. Yes and no. Compare it to making a kick-ass latte. You can learn to make that amazing hot beverage by rote, without being curious, just following the process, without knowing anything about the coffee, the machine, the beans, the milk, etc. If you follow the steps, you will get the result, even if you don't care about the coffee, there's no curiosity there.

Mindfulness, I think, is different because it's not about a result. Although, arguably, there is a process to learn it, we're about to talk about that, it is not like producing a fancy coffee drink, where the result is the goal, not the inquisitive very nature of the process. For mindfulness, one could say a calm mind is a result, is the desired goal, but that is not mindfulness itself.

It is merely a side effect, something that comes with it. If you are ever driven somewhere and realize you don't remember part of the trip, that's the opposite of mindfulness. So first of all, what does DBT promise that mindfulness can do for you? DBT teaches mindfulness as a skill, not as a philosophy or a spiritual practice, which is interesting, so no woo-woo here. The goal is to help you gain control over your mind, rather than letting your thoughts and your emotions run the show.

According to DBT, practicing mindfulness consistently can lead to less suffering, more happiness. By learning to accept experiences as they are, instead of fighting reality. It's a major one. More control over your mind. Instead of being reactive, mindfulness allows you to pause and choose your response. Remember my favorite quote? I've used it many a time from Viktor Frankl. Between impulse and response, there lies a pause. And within that pause lies your freedom.

I might be butchering it slightly. But same situation. With awareness on the process of what is unfolding in your head, you have more control. Stronger decision making. When you act from wise mind, we will talk more about that later. Rather than pure emotion or cold logic, your choices align better with what truly matters to you. It's the DBT promise. Greater presence in daily life. You experience moment more fully instead of living on autopilot.

Sometimes it's as easy as that. Not living on autopilot, that's all that it takes to experience more joy. In DBT, mindfulness isn't about feeling peaceful all the time. It's about showing up to life as it is, with clarity and intention. Let's talk about wise mind versus emotional and rational mind. So this is a DBT model. Rational mind is most associated with facts, logic, but it's disconnected from emotions.

Do you recognize this mind state in yourself, when you're crunching the numbers, but you're not really taking into the equation how you feel about things? The emotional mind, on the other hand, is feelings driven. It can be impulsive and irrational. DBT sees wise mind as the wise middle ground, the voice of deep inner knowing, where you're not overly analytical, pretending that you are a logical, rational creature, which, newsflash, you are not.

But you're also not getting swept away by the emotion. This is the ideal. The ideal is to take both in the equation. DBT shows it as two Venn diagrams that overlap, and where a rational mind and emotional mind overlap, that's where wise mind is. Reflect on that. Do you recognize that in yourself? Do you know when you're pretending to be more rational than you know you actually are?

Do you recognize the states where you just follow your emotional cues without really thinking about that? Reflect on it. It's interesting. The what skills. What you actually do when practicing mindfulness according to DBT. These are the actions you take to be mindful. They're about engaging with your experience in a certain structured way. DBT starts with one observing, noticing thoughts, emotions, and surroundings without reacting. For example, right now, take a deep breath.

Notice the sensation of air in your nose. Listen for the softest sound you can hear. Just observe. No judgment. So that's observing. What do we have next? We have describing. Putting words to what you experience. Very important in the DBT world. Instead of, I feel bad. Try, I notice a tightness in my chest, and a thought that says I'm overwhelmed. Words can be important. For example, example of describing.

Pause. Look around you. What's one thing you can describe about your environment, your current environment, using only facts, facts as well as you know them. The third skill is participating. Fully engaging in the moment, not being in split brain mode, which involves trusting your wise mind intuition. It involves checking in what mental state am I. Do you ever lose yourself in a workout, a dance, or a deep conversation?

That's participating. Notice how that is different from forgetting where you were driving. In that situation, you are not participating in the driving. You're not even noticing driving. So that's the antithesis. An exercise here is the next time that you eat. Try focusing only on the taste and the texture of each bite, instead of just throwing some nutrients down the hatch. It will be a shocking difference how you experience eating.

Now, DBT also talks about how skills. Doing mindfulness effectively. And I find this complicated. There's a what and a how. Like, how do they relate? You know, it's... Confuse it. I would say that the how skills are more the mindset that you bring to the what. Like, you can meditate, you can sit on a pillow with your eyes closed without a mindfulness mindset. And although you're doing the what, you're observing, you're maybe describing, you're participating.

If you're going through these steps by rote, without truly using some of these how skills, you will not get out of it what you want to get out of it. So, the how skills are more the mindset. And I would say that these matter more. They're the attitudes that you bring. The first one is non-judgmentally. Seeing things as they are without labeling them as good or bad.

An example being, instead of I screwed up, try I made a mistake or even a mistake was made by me. Can you feel the subtle differences between these three ways of describing the same thing? Judgment is an interesting thing. Because generally, we get taught in just, you know, common parlance that judging is bad. We shouldn't judge. But the thing is, we judge all the time. All the time.

We do that to survive. It is required to judge to survive. So it's not the case that you can forgo judging completely. It can be nice to practice for specific moments to lie down, to lie to the side, to put to the side the tool of judging. So for the next hour, try to notice whenever you judge something, even if it's small. This is a great skill.

Of course, you can do that while you're meditating, but you can also just do that throughout the day. Just noticing the judgments and not judging the judgments. That will be counterproductive. That would be judging. You're just noticing. You're just noticing that you're using the tool of judgment to evoke an emotion, to evoke an action. It's ultimately, it's there for a reason. The last how scale is one mindfully.

Well, that sounds very much like mindfulness itself. And you might know this from Zen Buddhism. Doing one thing at a time with full attention. The classical example being, when eating, just eat. No scrolling, no Netflix. Note that it doesn't mean that you can never do that. It can be a welcome break. Sometimes, whenever mindfulness comes to the table, people take it to an extreme direction. Like you have to be like that all the time.

It's great when you're meditating, you're experiencing a stretch of time, maybe 30 seconds, where you're not having any specific thoughts, where you have a blank mind. That's great. That's a wonderful experience. That doesn't mean that that's how your life should be all the time. An exercise here is next time that you drink a cup of coffee, like that kick-ass latte that you learned to make. Focus only on the warmth, taste, and aroma.

Very similar to what we did with the eating. We have the skill of effectiveness, of or effectively, doing what works instead of what feels right or fair. I've talked about this skill before, and I find that very, very useful in life. Since I have an entire episode on it, look for effectiveness, I'm not going to go in very much detail. I'll just give you an example. Do you ever argue just to be right, even when you know in your heart of hearts that it actually will make things worth?

You're just doing that because it's fair, because you're right, because you have the truth on your side. Do you though? Mindfulness teaches us to focus on the outcome, not just the feeling. So again, this is wise mind, not emotional, not rational. Note that when you're most emotional, sometimes you think you're rational. So I've talked about the promises that DBT does to you, less suffering, more control of your mind, etc.

Talked about what do you do to live mindfully? What are sort of the steps? And we've talked about how. Right? We haven't talked about why yet. So if we go beyond technique, beyond to a certain extent, I've talked to you about an ABC step process. Do these things, you know? Go describe a situation. Go observe, right? Do that one mindfully. Why? Because so that I get these goals met?

Partially, yes, but there's an existential depth. DBT teaches mindfulness as a skill. So again, to reiterate, observe, observe, describe, participate. And supposedly these steps help us regulate emotions, reduce impulsivity, and improve relationships. I say supposedly not because I don't believe it, but because you don't believe it. Why would you watch something about mindfulness if you're not fully on board, or you're trying to learn about these things?

So you have to experiment. Like, I sing the gospel. I believe it. I've experienced it. Maybe you haven't. Beyond the pragmatic benefits, which you have to discover, mindfulness, though, confronts something way deeper, our relationship with reality itself. The human condition ultimately is marked by suffering, and impermanence, or pain, I've talked about this, and the tension between control and surrender. This is also a core tenet in DBT.

Remember radical acceptance? I talked about that. That is composed of if you really want to change something, you first have to radically accept that they arise together. You have to both control and surrender at the same time. It's weird. If we go beyond mindfulness as a mere tool, we see it as a response to the fundamental truths of existence. Why does this matter? Because without the understanding of the why, the how can feel mechanical, empty.

Let's talk about the nature of reality. It's just a light topic. Impermanence and interconnection. One of the core insights mindfulness reveals is impermanence. Every thought, sensation, emotion, every aspect of identity is transient. We chase permanence because it feels safe, it feels controlled. We cling to identities, relationships, opinions, possessions, fearing our loss. But mindfulness trains us to sit with this impermanence. Not as a tragedy, but as a liberation.

If everything is in flux, suffering comes not from change itself, but from resistance to it. The practice becomes an exercise in letting go. Not out of indifference, but out of deep engagement with life as it is, because it's true. To reflect on that, what are you clinging to? That is already changing. What would it feel like to experience that change, rather than fight it? Personal story here.

When I personally contemplate this and experience this, I experience this amazing feel of contentment, peace, and calm. I realize that I can enjoy a break away from the egoic circus that usually is the forefront of our mind. And that doesn't mean the ego or the circus is bad. It has its place. And it's nice to take a break and realize that that is an illusion we create for ourselves, for good reason, to compete in the game of survival.

It's there for a reason. Self as an illusion. The more we practice mindfulness, the more we will encounter a paradox. Go test this for yourself. If we can observe our thoughts and emotions, who is the we that is doing the observing? DBT frames mindfulness as a tool to regulate emotions, but existentially, it unveils the illusion of a fixed self. We are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions.

We are not our preferences. We are an unfolding process, a pattern of awareness that really shifts moment to moment. Speaking of impermanence, there's no constant to it. There's no solid self to defend. And what does that free us to do? How much of our suffering is rooted in defending to something that doesn't even actually exist in the first place? Of course, that's why we defend it, because it doesn't exist.

If it exists, we wouldn't have to defend it. I have an exercise for you. Try to find the fixed you. Where is it? Can you see how thoughts and emotions ultimately arise? They don't come from you. They arise, they persist, they dissolve. Without a central entity, controlling them, I relate to this as the driver of a car who's in control. But then also, I can be the passenger.

But also I can be the passenger in the back of the car who is watching the driver and the passenger do their thing, or the car itself, or even the route the car is driving, or maybe the drone that is watching the landscape with the car, or maybe the turtle that operates that drone. And from there, it's turtles all the way down, which is an analogy you might have heard.

You use that when you encounter an infinite regress problem. There is always a watcher to a watcher. And as soon as we discover that watcher, there is another one. And we created the other watcher. And because we keep discovering watchers, there might as well have never been a watcher to begin with. It's a delicious paradox for you to contemplate, or read, or listen to some Alan Watts.

I used to go to sleep listening to his audiobooks because I found not only his voice very soothing, but this world view, talking about this, this deep truth, feels very peaceful for it to me. Then there's the paradox of control and surrender, spoken about a little bit already. The DBT mindfulness skills emphasize control, learning to regulate attention, disengage from judgment, and act effectively. But at a deeper level, mindfulness is an act of surrender.

Surrender is terrifying because it means embracing uncertainty. Yet, when we release control, we enter a more authentic relationship with reality, what's actually going on. The river flows whether we fight or we float with it. Wu-Wei, I've talked about that before, aligning yourself with the forces of nature. Mindfulness teaches us to trust the river, rather than exhausting ourselves trying to redirect it. What is one area in your life where you are gripping too tightly, where you're swimming upstream, and what happens if you loosen your grip?

Just a little. I personally get giddy thinking about this. The absurdness of life and the ridiculous little control that we actually have, and for some reason it seems so significant anyway, we think we're in control. And of course, as it must be, how unmotivating it would be if we weren't entranced by the illusion that we have knowledge and control over things, we would do nothing because A, it doesn't matter, and B, we can't even know what is the right thing to do anyway.

The reality is, to me, that the entire illusion is beautiful and laughable, and yet it's the game we're playing. And there's nothing else to do in life. So although we can be aware that it's a game, we might as well play it as the most serious thing that we know. And at the same time knowing it is a silly game we're surrendering to. It's simultaneously of life and death importance.

It's such a sweet contradiction for you to contemplate. I've also found mindfulness to be a portal to meaning. Viktor Frankl, one of my favorite authors, wrote that suffering without meaning is unbearable. In other words, we can bear pain, because that's just suffering, but pain without meaning is unbearable. And mindfulness at its deepest level is about making space to find that meaning, for that meaning to arise, not necessarily by constructing it artificially, but really just by experiencing life so fully that the meaning just bursts off the page.

Like we don't have to do that much effort for it. The experiencing of life is the meaning. It is what we're here to do. That's all we're here to do. When we observe without judgment, we don't just see reality, we feel its depth. A simple moment, watching the wind move through trees, the rhythm of our breath, really becomes profound when truly witnessed. Mindfulness, then, is not just about managing suffering or being effective or controlling.

It is really about awakening to the richness of being, being alive, being. What if, instead of seeking meaning as a concept, we sought to experience life so fully, so fully, that the meaning revealed itself? To me, this feels similar to the previous point we made about control and surrender. To me, it seems obvious that meaning isn't imbibed in the universe. And even if it would be, I wouldn't have the knowledge to like rationally completely recognize it without any doubt.

It's subjective. Through deep work, and it will help from psychedelics, I have experienced that it's all like a grand stage play. That my mind casts such a powerful illusion that I am literally living in my own world. That it's so powerful that it's ridiculous to think of really breaking out of it. Which gives me the power to create my own meaning, allow meaning to arise. See my episode about nihilism, absurdism, and existentialism that takes a little bit more of a direct approach to meaning generation versus what mindfulness does, allowing meaningfulness to arise by just fully experiencing life.

Two different strategies. I would like to close off with giving you a couple of resources that I love, because I've done my best talking about these topics. But there are so many, it's such a rich topic, there are so many people that talk about this. I really like the Masterclass, on masterclass.com, from Jon Kabat-Zinn. I also really like all the audio books from Alan Watts. You can find lots of them for free on YouTube.

These oftentimes remixed and used in various different songs, speeches, whatever. And the last plug I have, of course, is for meditation itself. I both use the Insight Timer app, which is more crowdsourced meditation, people creating their sleep meditations, formal sit-down meditations, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, there's the Headspace app. I've both used, I've used the Headspace app for like a really, really long time. Insight Timer is a little bit more recent, which I really like for sleep meditations, but there are wonderful resources to experiment with.

All right, that's it. I've blown through this topic. I've really focused on really staying on track here, to make it concise, to make it understandable, to highlight the personal story that I have. It's a very, very important topic. It's very hard to explain why it's so important, but it unlocks so much. I think if I could throw away, no, if I would choose one skill to keep, this would be the skill to hang on to, because really almost everything is mindfulness redefined.

I also really like to think about mindfulness, both from a spiritual perspective, which we've covered, but also from a secular perspective, as being a scientist. When we do science, and that's popular in the world right now, so there's a chance that you like science because it puts us on the moon and creates iPhones and whatever. If you like science, if you like observation, then if you like empirical data, then one of the things that you should consider is studying yourself like a scientist, not assuming that something is a certain way, not knowing the story and leaning into that, letting go of knowing.

It's really Zen, beginner's mind. Letting go of knowing and truly discovering how life unfolds, how it opens it up to yourself. You will draw very, very interesting conclusions, I think. And it's interesting because although science is very popular, people don't really like being scientists. It's the last science experiment that we did. We love reading the headlines of whatever study already tells us what we already believe, right?

But when do you actually conduct an experiment? Mindfulness is the best way, the closest to yourself, to be a scientist, to observe, to gather some empirical data about yourself. If you believe in science, then I'm sure that you know that from the data, you can synthesize all kinds of very interesting, very useful things. Science is useful. And on the other side, if you're not that much about the secular perspective, there is such a wealth of the spiritual tradition, on the other hand, which is so exciting about mindfulness.

In this case, both camps agree. So there might be something of value here. So I really challenge yourself, I challenge you to challenge yourself, to explore, to really conduct some deep research on yourself. Thank you for tuning in. This was Vincent for The Meaningful Shit Show, and I will see you next time.