From Unconscious to Conscious to Unshakeable Mindfulness

The times during the day when it is easy to be mindful in the way I operate…well there’s the time just after waking, or the last hour or so in the evening, when the songs of the world and its

Meditation for Medics: Stopping the Noise by Dr Andrew Dean, Emergency Physician

demands fade to silence.  The background chatter naturally settles. 

Paradoxically, there are other times during the day when it intensifies, or a music fragment from a song just keeps looping around in my head.

And then there are the deliberate times of mindfulness, when I call the mind to order like an officer on a parade ground with the troops who just don’t want to fall into line.

To use the relevant terms from my book Meditation for Medics: Stopping the Noise, the first almost accidental calmness is called unconscious mindfulness.  The ‘calling on the troops’ analogy, when we deliberately create the situation where our mind tends towards mindfulness, is of course conscious mindfulness, and when we get good at this, we demand a higher and higher consistency of mindful thinking and responses as we go through our day – yes, this makes it the unshakeable mindfulness.

It's a gradual evolution.  Most people know the random or unconscious mindfulness of being on holiday, or the quiet moments that come along and make us feel happy. But without discipline, we go into and as quickly out of that type of mindfulness, all the way back into stress.  And we have no idea why, until we start to study what is actually going on.

Early awareness of mindfulness techniques - and some practice – get the boat moving.  At first the conscious mindfulness is hard, like learning to steer a kayak in a strong river current.  We capsize, we lose concentration, we get cold, and we lose hope.

But with kayaking in a river, the safety and manoeuvrability come from leaning in, from taking powerful and determined strokes to build up the boat-speed.  We decide to take control and we certainly don’t get distracted.

And that’s it really.  Unshakeable mindfulness.  It’s a fierce and determined new way of thinking and reacting to life.  We demand of our mind that it ‘takes the stroke’, watching the current and for any rocks, and we don’t allow distraction or lapsing back into old habits that led to proverbial capsizes, and being pushed around by the current onto submerged rocks.

And the hospital or clinical environment is, like any other moment in life, a perfect learning environment for learning to navigate mindfully across the currents of stress and fear.