Mindfulness Week: When the mind stops, life starts by Charmain Lines

The ability to be fully present, aware of where I am and what I am doing, is for me mind-empty-ness. My head very often races with thoughts – mind-full-ness is therefore a literal state for me. I am a great overthinker of things, and often silly small issues can claim an inordinate volume of headspace. 

For me, then, my mindfulness practices are aimed at emptying my mind and enabling myself to just be in the moment, to find the spaces between the thoughts.

I try to move forward “without thinking” a little bit every day, and on the days when I get it right, I am amazed at the results, at what I can accomplish when I don’t overthink, when my mind moves out of the way. Planning can paralyse me. Having realised this, I consciously and increasingly train my flow muscle, my mid-empty-ness muscle, and the results are encouraging.

I am a freelance writer and editor by profession, and mindfulness is slowly emerging as one of the most powerful tools in my writing box. By consciously giving myself permission to just write without concern for the outcome, without knowing how a piece will end, I find that the writing becomes easier and lighter, and often far more meaningful than when I try to plan an article.

Increasingly, I go into interviews with the same mindset. I remind myself that my biggest job is to be curious and engaged, and prepared to be amazed (in the words of Celeste Headlee). Time and again, the interview finds its own direction as we go.

If this sounds all a bit esoteric, let me give an example. For about a year now, I’ve been generating content for an organisation that helps our domestic chicken industry fight back against excessive imports into South Africa, a practice that is strangling the local producers. One of my focus areas is to tell the stories of the small, mostly black farmers who suffer greatly as a result. I baulk at highlighting hardship and poverty only, and have indeed found many people who live in opportunity and entrepreneurship. One of the challenges is to keep finding fresh angles for these farmer stories.

A week ago I had an appointment on a chicken farm near Zeerust, a smallish town in South Africa’s Northwest Province. The farmer was a woman called Grace Kgomongwe, and I found her to be utterly charming, wonderfully articulate, and clearly passionate about her business. I spent an inspiring hour with her and her husband and drove home without any idea of how to turn that interview into a story that would further the cause.

I reminded myself to not get anxious, but to wait with eyes and ears wide open. And sure enough, the answer arrived in the person of none other than South Africa’s Minister of Finance. On Tuesday evening, Minister Mboweni published a discussion document on economic growth that included a section on agriculture with explicit reference to contract farming – the model on which Grace supplies chickens to one of the large integrated local producers. It was as if Mr Mboweni wrote my article for me. I had a relevant, newsworthy hook on which to hang Grace’s story in a way that showed that contract farming was indeed an avenue for economic development and that its success was being proven already. 

Another area of my life in which mindfulness is working its magic is, weirdly enough, weekends. I went through a prolonged phase where I viewed weekends as opportunities to catch up and prepare myself for the week ahead. I know how crazy this sounds, but it was true. I ended up betting on weekends to get my work done, and negotiated deadlines around them.

Then, about four months ago, an impromptu decision to go for a walk early on a Saturday morning changed my weekend game. My husband and I quite unexpectedly found ourselves at the edge of a park just after 07:00 every Saturday morning, ready to walk for about 45 minutes (before the parkrun hordes descended) with my brother-in-law and his wife, and our nephew and his wife. Afterwards we would go for breakfast together and be home by about 09:00 with what felt like a day of limitless possibilities ahead of us. 

That simple change in routine that came with spending time outdoors and moving my body unlocked a perception of abundance that I could not have predicted. Weekends started feeling longer, had more quality about them, and I felt myself yielding to not having a plan.

Last weekend is a great example. With the nephew and his wife parenting a new-born and the brother-in-law recuperating from an operation, my husband and I have been doing our weekend walks (we now walk on Sunday mornings too) in our own neighbourhood. Last week Saturday we decided to walk in a different suburb as I wanted to buy fresh vegetables at the organic market that is held there on Saturdays. We did our walk, had breakfast at the market and bought the veggies. On our way home, we decided to pop in to see my mother-in-law, and from there we stopped at a nursery to buy a few herb plants. Back home, lunch was a meal improvised from what was in the fridge. Next I drifted into preserving lemons, followed by a brief stint at my computer before, at dusk, I was outside, planting the seedlings we had bought. We ended the day with pressing the remainder of the lemons to freeze the juice.

I went to bed that night with a profound sense of peace and joy and accomplishment, not to mention the awe of what a day with no plans could yield. Being present in every moment, and moving on to the next thing without question or resistance, proved to be a good way of spending the day.

Where did this start? The short answer is I don’t know; the long answer is that it’s been an unfolding process that first sneaked into my life at least 10 years ago. Over the past decade I have done several programmes that had mindfulness at their core, although the word was not necessarily mentioned. I had read many books, and gradually stepped into a tribe of people who wanted to live differently and were not scared to voice the desire and discuss the ways they were setting about achieving it.

Reflecting on it now, I am convinced that my current, and growing, ability to life with more ease, connection, curiosity and gratitude is a result of a journey over many years. I feel that I have become steeped in a way of thinking and acting that brings me closer to mindfulness every day.

In many ways, mindfulness is about saying yes – before thinking. I did that at the very end of last year when a friend sent me an email about choosing a word for the new year. The notion appealed to me and in thinking mode I came up with something (I don’t even recall what it was). But then I decided to actually follow the process she had forwarded, and it felt like opening a door into my being. At the end of it, and it really was not more than 30 minutes, my word for 2019 was “dare”. And how I have loved to see and feel that word around me and with me this year. Most often, I recognised that I have dared only after the fact, but on a few occasions, when faced with a tricky decision, I have consciously chosen to dare. Without fail, the outcome was so much more than I could have planned for.

From about the middle of this year, I have paid more attention to how I start my day. Although my husband and I did a transcendental meditation course a few years ago, we had let the practice fall by the wayside, and my days kind of started as they wanted.

In June we went overseas for three weeks, and on our return, I decided to take charge of my early mornings. Courtesy of a cat that insists on breakfast at 05:00, our predisposition to waking early has in recent times become a habit. My husband’s morning routine leaves me with about an hour to myself. Before I would simply lounge in bed, maybe scrolling through social media. Often I would fetch my laptop and get some work done.

These days, I have my own routine. I get up and do a few breathing exercises, then get back into bed and do a 20-minute meditation session. Some days I succeed in achieving stillness better than other days, but I have decided to persist. Following my meditation, I read a chapter or two from an inspirational book and, over the months, I’ve come across practices in these books that I now incorporate into my morning routing. Some days I do some EFT tapping, other days I say affirmations or afformations, and other days I simply share what I’ve read with my husband.

Books like Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, Life Loves You by Louise Hay, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and, most recently, Being Mortal by Atul Gawanda, have filled my mornings with meaning and inspiration and joy. Much like the weekend walks, these early morning practices feel like a jumpstart to my day – not because I start work earlier but because I am filled with wonder at life.

I am not a mindfulness guru or even what could be considered a practitioner. I am simply a person who went in search of a different way to live and who have found that when her mind is empty, her life is full to overflowing.

About the Author

Charmain Lines spends a large part of her life writing. Her day job is as a freelance corporate journalist, editor and producer of publications. Her clients include a variety of organisations operating in industries ranging from chicken production and financial services, to building and construction, and tourism.

After hours, she dabbles in fiction and creative writing. Charmain self-published her first novel in 2012, and has been haunted a half-completed manuscript for several years now. In the meantime she has contributed to two anthologies of short stories published by a group of indie authors.

Charmain loves travelling, and regularly spends extended periods overseas, sometimes visiting family and friends, other times indulging in activities such as cookery courses, historic city walks and learning about local cultures.