Mindfulness Skill 6: Openness

TRANSCRIPT

Interviewer:

It's the Morning Show here on Youth Jam with Lachlan Bose broadcasting for you today until the end of the morning at noon. And right now, as it's a Thursday, I'm joined on the other end of the line by Dr. Patrick Jones. Patrick is the founder of Perth Psychologists, who comes on air each week to discuss a different facet of our mental health. Over the last few weeks, we've been looking at various mindfulness techniques. Now, Patrick, the technique that we're going to be looking at today is called openness. Now, what do we mean by openness when we're talking about it in the scope of mindfulness? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, openness has a lot of research behind it in terms of what they call the big five personality traits. Openness is one of them and is correlated with success in all kinds of areas, business, and so on. It's a big area. And in mindfulness, of course, it turns up. So essentially it's a stance of yes, or at least curiosity versus no to life. So you could say it's openness to life events, to the unknown, because life can provide just lots of random opportunities. And the default often can be if people are a little bit cautious or a little bit risk-oriented, to default to no first. But that kind of closes off the life experience. So essentially openness enables us to have the chance to get enjoyable life experiences that we may not have previously been open to. 

So, for example, being unconditionally loved by someone or trusting someone, these are sort of big yes opportunities for people. And sometimes our fears might say not so sure. So openness is that stance to say, let me see what's here, versus I need more information before I even go any further. So it's a yes to life. 

And I think a lot of people would recognize it as an oft-repeated maxim from growing up, always be open to new experiences. When you're growing up, you might not necessarily like a particular food, or you may be put off by the idea of trying it, but your parents might say, be open to it, and give it a go. Also, if you travel overseas and perhaps you're in a culture that does things vastly different from what you're accustomed to, you might be pushed by your parents to be open to that new experience. But in your experience, what do you find? People often find it difficult to be open. And why is this the case? 

Yeah, it's the risk element, I think, that comes with openness, for example, being open to people versus our closed way of living. So potentially we could on the surface be doing the right things, but there isn't a general sense of openness. And you can feel the vibe when someone's open, or when they're protecting themselves if you like. And there are just opportunities that can't be created. Often there's a flow that can happen when people are willing to explore, willing to experiment, willing to be creative. It can be within the boundaries of what you could call values or morals, but it's also an inner stance, really, of openness, even if perhaps you might say that's not for me. There isn't this fear-driven place that it's coming from. 

It's a chance, really, in a sense, to be able to say, let's see if there's anything in this. And for example, being unconditionally loved by someone, that's a beautiful experience. But someone might feel or find that quite a difficult concept, perhaps because then they're left with also the contrast possibly of being left by that person. So with openness comes risk. And I think that's where people sometimes shut down. 

Interviewer:

And as well as that, there are also instances where people might have had an experience with something that they then attribute negative connotations to it and they don't want to encounter something like that again. Why do you feel that it's important to maintain an openness to things that we might find challenging? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, basically life can shrink if we don't have openness. It's very easy to develop a life that is sort of clear-cut and known, a little bit like military precision. We can have a little fence around our lives and set up very sort of small goals. But the danger is that we suffer from underperformance, you could say, not maximizing our potential. Openness is the tonic for this. It's that chance to be able to say, well, what if I had unlimited potential, and what if life had unlimited possibilities and those two met? What could get created? That's a very different way of living.

And it's open to challenges versus seeing challenges as threats. I think that's the kind of primary sort of reason why we would say openness is a healthy thing. 

Again, from all the psychological well-being indicators, openness is highly correlated with well-being versus the default of self-protection. 

Interviewer:

So Patrick, where we've been looking at what it means to be open in the scope of mindfulness, why it's important to be open in certain capacities, and then also why people find it difficult to maintain an openness in the potentially challenging things. What is your technique for achieving it in the scope of mindfulness? 

Patrick:

Yeah, okay, well, there can be two areas we could look first at thoughts for example, or beliefs. Say you could imagine an area of difference in your life, like a difference of view on a particular topic or an area of conflict even. That's step one. And then step two is to experiment with taking the alternate view and argue for that. Often, say in debating, you might be randomly selected to take a position that might be the total opposite of what you think. And your job is to create a fantastic argument as to why that's the case. So I think we can do this with, say people have certain views about us is a nice easy place to start and just go well what if? 

And there might be things that we perhaps don't agree with but then how do we get inside their experience and argue from their world? So the first you could say technique would be to experiment with alternative views or different views from yourself and try and what I call root out the old fuddy duddy beliefs. Some things like software need upgrades and this is one that we can use for beliefs. That's the first. And the second could be perhaps on the emotional level. You can imagine, say, a challenging situation. For example, say you're public speaking being asked to give a talk for a good cause and I think 80% of people I think are more scared of public speaking than they are dying. So that's one that people aren't always very open to. 

So you can imagine feeling the fear and still committed to I want to make a difference here and what that's like to say yes. So that would be the second exercise to imagine a challenging situation and what it would be like to open to it and achieve the outcome that you want. And of course, you then hit resistance. You hit the things that actually might be the beliefs feelings or fears that stop us. And that's often why. Back to your question about why is it challenging, why is it difficult? It's because often we will hit the things that we fashion our life around to not experience. Openness forces us to face the things that we don't typically like the way we've designed our lives so that we don't meet those feelings or those fears. 

And these exercises give you a chance to be able to explore that. And I guess you can also say that it's not just the exercises but if you have that approach to life, then life is continually introducing us to those places that we may not want to go to but if we break through them, then we come out the other side with a different experience. And that's generally the opportunity that kind of gets offered by being open. 

Interviewer:

And you've mentioned there in your response the idea of us coming into basing our head on certain things that we may have made a stated attempt to avoid throughout our life. With that in mind, the idea of being open of course, means being open to certain things that might be unpleasant or that we, like you say, would otherwise try to avoid. With that in mind, is there anything we should be cautious about being open to in the scope of this exercise? 

Patrick:

Yeah, look, absolutely I think this is a trap for young players openness does not mean agreement or even preference but it's rather to not have a closed-off belief system or emotional resistance default to any life event. So there's a whole truckload of things that I might not want or agree with, but my internal position isn't sort of fearful or resistant or angry or annoyed. It's just open, it's just understanding and going, yeah, I can see what the function of that is for that person. I don't think that's necessarily healthy. But I think also the byproduct of that openness is a general understanding and compassion that can come. So, yes, openness does not mean agreement to everything, but it's almost like a nonprejudiced view of things. I think that's it. So it's a certain back-to-response freshness. 

It's a fresh moment-by-moment way of living. And I think with all the different mindfulness attributes, they all layer on top of each other. So, I mean, to be open is also to be in the moment and to have a fresh response. All these different attributes almost layer on top of each other and they come into a sort of one moment, open, fresh, response, present moment, et cetera. So that's the first bit. And I guess the second bit would be that, say, in the practice of Zen, or practice of mastery, if you like, they have this phrase called the beginner's mind. And this is where the student, if they're to learn anything, then they have to be open. There's a lovely story of the student going up to the Master and with a whole lot of complicated questions. 

And whilst he's peddling out all his theories and questions, the Master is pouring in tea and it kind of spills over the cup and into the saucer, and the students just had enough thing. I came all this way for this Master and I can't even listen to my questions, let alone pour the tea properly. And at the end, the Master just looks at him clairvoyantly, knowing his mind goes, well, your mind is like its cup. It's so full, there's nothing I can put in it. And so I think this is the openness process, is to have that beginner's mind, which then makes our life so malleable, flexible, creative, and our past doesn't have to equal our future with openness. It's like a whole new possibility. And I think that's the real power. 

Interviewer:

Of the openness attribute and thinking about that story and also the idea of, as you outline there, of all of these techniques sort of coming to layer on top of each other. And inform one another. You can see how regulating attention like one of the techniques we talked about in the past would be useful in sort of maintaining an openness to something new. And so it makes sense, like when you think about each of these techniques as a mindfulness exercise, you think yourself, okay, well, I'll do this one technique and it's openness, and that's me set for mindfulness folks. But then it also pays to look at everything else because you might learn something new about the one technique that you're focusing on. 

Patrick:

Absolutely. I think these attributes literally can all coexist. I think we can be in the moment and you're quite right, regulating attention, even if we bring that into one of the other areas like clarity. If I can regulate my attention by going, well, let's have a look at what are my beliefs and feelings that I've got about this particular topic so that we're not a mystery to ourselves, that's clarity. But of course how that clarity then says, for example, serves openness is to go, well, gosh, I realize I've got quite a prejudiced view about something or other. I had a bit of an English background with my parents and I had almost a colonial way of looking at things and I didn't realize that some real prejudices were just part of my natural filters. 

But because we can investigate and go, what are my underlying beliefs? And then of course we can link that to say, one of the other Mindfulness attributes, neutrality, nonjudgmental, awareness, I can identify some of my beliefs and go, interesting versus jeez and have an emotional reaction that makes it more complicated in my head. So, yes, they all sequence rather beautifully. 

And a lot of what we've been talking about over the last few weeks, specifically with Mindfulness, has sort of clarified for me what would be a distinction between being self-aware and then what you might categorize as self-conscious, where that last one is more to do with an unproductive self-assessment over the more mindful self-awareness. 

Interviewer:

Yeah, exactly. And I talk about traps for young players. I remember I was in year eleven or twelve walking around my lunchbox, introspecting about that, which was important to me for hours. And they were like good skills but just like overdone. So I think at one level, yes, it's that ability to be able to observe neutrally, non-judgmentally. So, I mean, this is the thing about having these skill sets is that there's so much emotional static that is unnecessary when we're exploring what are my beliefs about something or what should I do. And then there's a lot of emotional response or reaction that makes the whole thing quite a cloud and then I get a little bit stuck in there. 

Patrick:

So if we can begin to use some of these Mindfulness approaches and in a nutshell, it's that capacity, you could almost say step back and observe, then we can apply investigation, we can apply emotional openness, we can apply, you could almost say just clean analysis just to looking at what's there. But it's in a very sort of peaceful, relaxed way, which is the foundation, I think, of wisdom, of being a wise, kind, peaceful, aware human being. I mean, how is that not an amazing activity to pursue? So yeah, that's why I am a big fan. 

Interviewer:

Absolutely. And you'll be back next week to discuss another technique with us. But in the meantime, thanks for getting in touch with us this week, Patrick. Hope to speak to you again soon. 

Patrick:

Yep, that sounds good.

Interviewer:

Excellent. All right. See ya. 

Patrick:

Take care.