The Mindful Review: Meditation, With Script

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

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John Yates (Dharma name Culadasa) created a practice called the Mindful Review that has been really helpful for me. Think of it as you take some time each day to look at the film of your life so to speak and especially pay attention to the things that didn’t go well. 

That’s what we’re doing here. It’s a little bit different in tone from other practices we’ve done, but I promise you it’s a really valuable one that you’ll want to keep in your repertoire.

So just get comfy, wherever you are. You don’t have to be in a formal meditation posture at all to do this practice, but you certainly can be. Formal meditation posture is powerful and will bring support and depth to anything you do. 

We’re just going to do a little review, calling up a moment in the last 24 hours. And if you can’t think of anything in the last 24 hours, think of something in the last week. It doesn’t have to be a cataclysm. It can just be a suboptimal moment, which our lives tend to be full of.  Any moment that brought suffering unnecessarily, avoidable suffering, namely you reacted to an objective event in a way that was less than optimal. And by objective event, it could be an event in the world, but it could also be an emotion. After all, we objectify our emotions and respond to them in an objective way, so basically how you related to anything that caused any undue suffering. Just call it up.

Meditation

Call the event up vividly: See it, hear it, feel it, taste it, smell it. Where were you?  What were you doing?  Who were you with if anybody?  Really reconstruct the moment. This creates a kind of virtual reality for the body. When we imagine it, it brings the experience back up in the body, it gives us some juice to work with.

Notice how good your mindfulness was as you call this experience up. How mindful were you being in the moment? Where was your attention, what were you paying attention to? Maybe you needed to be broadly aware of the environment that you were overly focused on something. Or maybe the opposite, maybe you were broadly aware of the environment, but you needed to be more focused. You needed to be more focused but you were just scattered and not totally tight on the matter at hand, so just notice how your attention was.

Notice what information is coming in through your senses, thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, all of it. How clear were you in the moment, how alert?  

Notice any feeling emotion present if it was positive, negative, neutral. 

Take a moment here to really acknowledge how you responded to the situation in a way that was less than desirable. Just acknowledge it to yourself. Resolve to respond differently in the future. So this is where you get to reimagine the memory. Imagine that you responded with much better mindfulness, even perfect mindfulness. How does the scene play out now?  Just let it play out, feel it in your body, your heart, your mind. You’re now in this same situation but you get a second chance to live it again, only this time with perfect mindfulness. What do you do differently?

Good. Finally, if you reacted to a situation objectively in a way that hurt yourself or hurt others in any kind of way, make sure you take the time to make recompense. You might owe someone an apology, you might owe yourself an apology. Hopefully you didn’t do any property damage during the suboptimal response, but if you did, make sure to make things right. Just think about what you could do to make things right. Oftentimes it’s really just acknowledging to ourselves or another like, “Hey, this is how I acted in this moment and I did it in a place that was not particularly mindful or helpful.” No need to haul yourself over the coals for this. You note the response and commit to responding with more mindfulness the next time.

In a sense, it’s that simple. Just call up the situation vividly, notice what was going on in the moment, and ask why we acted the way we did.  And then imagine ourselves acting from a place of more mindfulness. That does a lot to rewrite our scripts and our programs. 

Part two is really important. I want you to stay in this same moment, the moment that you reacted to in a way that caused suffering for yourself, for others. I want you to examine your intention in the moment, deep down beneath your response and of everything you did in the moment, what was the underlying intention?  Just notice it, detect it. Feel it, and even put some simple language to it. 

When I do this practice and find my intention, in that moment when I acted less than desirably, I was trying to get something out of my way that I perceived to be in my way. Something’s in my way, I get it out of my way, that was the intention, a kind of angry response to it. What’s yours?

And now as we did in part one, I want you to replace the intention with a more wholesome intention, a more mindful intention. Imagine yourself in the same situation, the same objective challenge, everything’s the same except now, your intention is different, you’re replacing the previous intention with a new, more adaptive intention, a more mindful intention.

When I do this in my own practice, I imagine a new intention of just staying open and soft, not bracing, staying open and soft. 

And finally, imagine next time something like this, similar in any way might happen, this is making a prospective memory, a memory of the future. Imagine this same thing or something similar happening in the near future, and you have this new intention. “Next time this happens to me, I’m just going to stay open. I’m going to listen to the other person more. I’m going to be kind, patient.”  Just see what’s true for you, feel it playing out in the future.

And there it is:  there’s your second chance.

Well done. 

An Example

So I’ll tell you, it was Sunday, it was a really stormy Sunday in Salt Lake City and I got out my iPad and just wanted to read the Sunday paper, and I wanted to listen to my music on Spotify while I read the paper.  You’re going to get a glimpse into my first-world problems real quickly here. I got the paper up on my tablet, I put on some nice soothing Sunday music and the moment I flipped back from my Spotify app to the newspaper, that music stopped playing, and I did it a few times and it kept doing it. And I went to Settings and I erased the app on my tablet then downloaded it again. Then I turned off my app and my tablet and turned it back on, I did all the stuff you do when you problem shoot. Which is good for me; a few years ago before I started this Mindful Review practice, I probably would have been screaming at my tablet long before I did five things to intervene.

And then moving along, after I had failed to relaxingly read the paper with my music, I remembered an audio course that I wanted to listen to, and I needed to get it from my laptop to my new tablet. You’re starting to see the pattern here. But the AirDrop didn’t work, Apple! And I did several different things to try to get those tracks over to my tablet, and at this point I’m feeling a real clenching in my chest, like like I’ve gone from “Ah, it’s so cozy inside, the rain’s falling, I’m warm inside, got my music going, got my paper,” to within 30 minutes I was in a hell realm. My solar plexus was clenching and I was irritated, I was angry, I was growing impatient and to top it all off, I got some strange bill from the electric company that was literally 10 times more expensive than it usually is. 

And gracefully at that point when I got the bill, I said, “Self, this is not the kind of Sunday I set out to have.” And this is what kicked in the Mindful Review, and I thought of all of you and I thought, this is a really good practice that I want to share with my friends. 

So what happens is just now when I was doing this practice with you, I was calling up that moment right when I started to feel that clench in my solar plexus, right when I started to get irritated, and at the bottom of that experience was this intention, like kind of cave man problem in my way, destroy problem. I gave that a good 30 minute push of doing as many tech workarounds as I could, which is not many in my case. 

And when I dropped into the Mindful Review, I quickly realized, “Oh I have this intention, like I just have to explode the problem or crush it with my rock,” to extend the caveman metaphor. And it became clear to me that, you know what, I don’t have to solve all the world’s tech problems right now, it’s okay. My priority right now is to relax. Another time I can pick it back up when my priority is to figure out my new tablet. And that would have saved me a good 20 minutes of clenching and getting frustrated.

So I replaced the intention of bracing and wanting to smash the problem with a rock to just staying open, staying relaxed. And when I replaced my old intention with a new intention in this situation, the intention to just be soft and stay open, the whole scene changed. Like instead of obsessing about how to come up with a workaround on how these apps communicate with each other, I just relax and I say, “You know, I care about being relaxed more than I care about listening to music and reading the paper simultaneously, or you know what? I have a speaker I can put on instead of having to listen to music and read a paper through the same device.” I get creative, I start to flow when I’m soft; I’m no longer running into a problem. That is, that’s it. It’s simple but it’s profound.

Our mindfulness practices will be defeated many dozens if not hundreds of times a day. We’ll experience more and more freedom, more  and more creativity and dynamic quality in the way we show up in life as our practice deepens, and still there will be these valuable moments of failure. And when we bring the Mindful Review to these moments where our practice was collapsed, we shine a light on what was going on in the mind, what was going on with my intention, what was going on with my attention in that moment where I collapsed?  

We imagine the scene unfolding where we’re more mindful, where we have a new intention and over time we train ourselves to optimally respond to the problem areas in our lives, to the holdouts. That’s the principle, that’s the practice. You can go back to this meditation, review it, it just takes a few minutes to step through each particular challenge moment in your practice, and over time you’ll find that you’re making huge progress in the most difficult areas of your life. You’re more and more mindful, you’re more and more intentional about how you’re showing up.

If you’re interested in getting back to the original source, Culadasa, John Yates, writes a powerful book, The Mind Illuminated. You can check that out as well. I hope you’ll work this Mindful Review into your daily practice and really start to draw the benefits from it.