Waking UP to Mindfulness

The practice of mindfulness is a modern movement established by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, appropriated from Buddhist roots which emphasizes the powers in being fully cognizant and aware in the present moment. The phenomena of reaching a level of awareness in your everyday life which allows you to live it more fully is often referred to in mindfulness as "waking up". This term is associated with practical steps that mindfulness suggests for reaching this state, which I have found mirror some of the metaphors related to up and down that Lackoff and Johnson highlight in their piece Metaphors We Live By.

One of the most recognized steps to "waking up" is to practice taking conscious action each day. Many who have written on the topic suggest that this means turning off your brain's autopilot and disrupting habitual routines by practicing beginner's mind. Lackoff and Johnson parallel the idea of conscious decision to "up" by drawing on the obvious metaphor of "waking up" but also juxtapose it to metaphors like "he fell asleep", "he was under hypnosis", and "he sank into a coma", which all express inattentive behavior of the mind.

Another well recognized tenant of "waking up" is the practice of observing your own personal judgments/viewpoints and separating them from your understanding of the world. In this sense our individual reality is related to what it "known" to us and recognized as truth. Mindfulness asks us to separate ourselves from any absolute truth which looks at the world from a specific lens, and encourages open-minded uncertainty. Lackoff and Johnson bring up some interesting metaphors related to the known and unknown such as uncertainty being something that is "up in the air" while knowing is related to matters that are "settled". Another related metaphor to the tenant of "waking up" associated with detachment from the individual perspective is that of rationality vs. emotion. Mindfulness encourages an awareness of emotions the individual experiences in order to both recognize their validity for the individual while separating them from the whole truth. In this way, "waking up" can be paralleled to the metaphor "rising above" your emotions to cooperate or seek truth found in rationality.

Renshin Bunce, a mindfulness blogger, writes on the inhibiting force of individual mind through an orientational metaphor:

"In once very short day, each of us could become more sane, more compassionate, more tender, more in touch with the dream-like quality of reality. Or we could burry all these qualities more deeply and get more in touch with solid mind, retreating more into our own cocoon."

The use of the the words burry, solid, and retreating all imply downwardness, which he seems to be criticizing in this excerpt. This is illustrates the upward association of mindfulness further.

Lastly, the practice of "waking up" is associated with experiencing abundance through awareness and gratitude towards your surroundings. Abundance is the state of having a copious quantity of something or experiencing plentifulness. This upward aim can be paralleled to Lackoff and Johnson's idea about metaphors related to up being more while metaphors associated to down being less.



In a nutshell, the experience of "waking up" in the practice of mindfulness is an accumulation of steps taken towards metaphorical upward orientation in the ways which we choose to view the world.