Approaching Catholic Mindfulness with Dr. Greg Bottaro

Healing

Sep 28

By Leah Eppen,

The first segment of this two-part series on practicing Catholic mindfulness explored understanding why mindfulness is integral and in fact, natural, to the Catholic faith as well as how to begin.

Dr. Greg defines mindfulness in his book The Mindful Catholic as “paying attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism”. When we begin working mindfulness into our day, it quickly becomes clear that staying present, without drifting to “auto-pilot” and operating from a space of non-judgment is very difficult! So, if we want to pay attention to the present moment without judgment, we might want to look for the fruits of our practice. Any new practice is a lot like planting a fruit tree–and healthy fruit will tell us if we are growing in the right direction!

The Fruits of Mindfulness

Mathew 7:20 says, “So by their fruits you will know them.” When we evaluate and ask questions about practices, this case being mindfulness, an essential question to pursue is, “What are the fruits of mindfulness?”

To this Dr. Greg responds, “I think the most important, beautiful, life-changing, and valuable fruit that I've ever experienced for mindfulness in my own life and in the lives of my students is a deeper understanding and experience of God's mercy. It’s mind-blowing how many people have told me almost in the same words, “I never knew how much God loves me”. And most of my audience are faithful Catholics, going to daily mass, praying the Rosary, doing all their devotions… And they’re the ones that are saying to me after 8 weeks of my program, “I never knew how much God loves me’”.

Understanding God’s mercy often arises from knowing our limitations and our capacities, as well as gaining self-awareness, which is what mindfulness is all about! Dr. Greg shares that this method of living changed his life and was first taught to him under the influence of Father Benedict Groeschel while Dr. Greg was discerning religious life with the Franciscan Friars and then as he identified it and explored it as mindfulness, he now feels confident that it is bringing people closer to God, as evident by the fruits and transformational testimonies from Catholic participants of his program.

Dr. Greg mentions that it surprises him when Catholics who have experienced his program say that they didn’t know how much God loves them. “We don't realize how much we are on autopilot,” he explains, “and we don’t realize how much we’ve taken for granted in terms of how we are living our lives. We often let ourselves fall into patterns where we’re going to daily Mass and we’re saying our Rosary and we’re doing all these things but we don't realize that there are underlying narratives in our minds and hearts telling us that we’re not good enough or we’re failing.”

The danger of falling asleep in our lives and in our faith–or switching ourselves to “autopilot” mode, if you will–is evident particularly through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The COVID-19 quarantine is God's gift to the world. It is a worldwide mindfulness exercise because it's making everybody stop and listen. And what we're listening to––what we find when we stop and listen is not comfortable. We might not like what we hear,” Dr. Greg says.

People have been challenged, through quarantine, isolation, and solitude to sit with themselves with less distractions. “And now a year later”, Dr. Greg explains, “We can see all the different ways people have coped with what they had to actually find and listen to and there's all these studies like how much marriages have suffered and the divorce rate has increased, how drinking has increased, anxiety disorder and depressive disorder have increased…a lot of bad stuff has happened but I think it's because people have been shaken out of their autopilot and ultimately, I think that's going to be a really good thing because people have a better chance to confront Truth.”

Mindfulness Leads to Acceptance

Another common misconception about mindfulness is that it means clearing or emptying our minds of our thoughts. Dr. Greg clears this up by confirming that we cannot control our thoughts; however, the ultimate purpose of practicing mindfulness is to learn to accept our thoughts–the nice ones and the ugly ones.

“The whole point of mindfulness is that you’re accepting everything–even the most intensive suffering. It’s acceptance instead of avoidance. Avoidance is mind-lessness and acceptance is mindfulness,” he elaborates. “Believing Christ’s promise means we accept even death. So, all the suffering that leads up to death and death itself can be accepted and allowed for in God's plan, by trusting in His Providence.”

Acceptance is particularly challenging when our thoughts are sinful or disturbing. But even the most sinful or disturbing thoughts should be accepted instead of avoided or engaged in. “We’re talking about the [thoughts] that we don’t want,” Dr. Greg says, “Any of them. Sinful, ugly, disgusting, judgmental… The stuff that can go through our heads is disturbing and yet St. Teresa of Avila says, “Let nothing disturb you.” She doesn’t say to make all the disturbing stuff leave. It's, “Let nothing disturb you”. So it's not the fact that this stuff’s gone, but it’s that you're not disturbed by the disturbing things. If we engage disturbing or sinful thoughts more than we should–that's where we actually are doing something that ultimately could be unhealthy or wrong.”

Mindfulness can help someone in their healing journey in a particular way too because often when we run, avoid, or even ruminate, we can actually increase our suffering! The net effect of practicing mindfulness is that we can decrease our anxieties or our suffering. Dr. Greg explains that, “Actually, it was created to decrease the suffering of people with chronic pain. That’s where Kabat-Zinn started this in 1979. He worked with patients with chronic physical pain. But they were increasing their disturbing experience of discomfort because of how much they just sat and ruminated about their chronic pain. When they stopped doing that, they felt less pain! So it’s a little paradoxical but it ends up being true.” And true of our emotional pain, too!

The gift of mindfulness in healing is that it provides us with an open connection between who we are and also who God is. Dr. Greg adamantly shares his belief that opening up this connection is the best way to collaborate with the grace God offers us in our lives.

Can You Master Mindfulness?

As mentioned previously, many saints took their entire lifetimes learning to be aware of themselves and fully alive in their relationship to the world and with God. So, mastery of this particular skill can also be expected to take us that long, too! But Dr. Greg shares a useful example: “In the mindful paradigm, we have this thing called the beginner’s mind and the way I explain it is to say you’re going to do a ten minute exercise. When you're starting off you lose track of the exercise and you go off on a trail of thoughts one minute in and then you spend 9 minutes fantasizing about lunch and then the end of the exercise comes up and the audio is finished or whatever and you’re like, “Oh, I just got so distracted and I lost track.” Well, as you get better, all that means is that you’re going to become aware of the distraction sooner. So you start your exercise and you're still going to get distracted in the first minute but then you're going to be aware of the fact that you got distracted and you're going to call your attention back to the exercise. And then what's going to happen after a minute and a half, you might get distracted again and your mind will wander off. Then you remember and you are aware and you get back to the exercise. So, the advanced practitioner of mindfulness is going to be distracted more in a ten minute exercise because they've come back to the exercise more. And after a ten minute exercise, you might have been distracted 147 times instead of just once. That's really a matter of what growing in this practice means.”

Ultimately, this process is about strengthening your mindful muscle and syncing up your triune self–mind, body, and soul. We are not more prominently soul or mind or body. Each part of ourselves deserves equal acknowledgment and nourishment. Arriving in your body in order to be present to pray and think is a human practice, essential to living life as a fully integrated child of God. Let’s lean into the richness of the present moment and watch the grace of God transform our lives.