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I tried a yoga app for the first time recently, several years behind everyone else’s lockdown fervour. It confirmed my suspicion that my mind is now far more agile than my body. I can barely balance, my foot stutters, my arms windmill. On my tiny phone screen, I struggled to follow the equally tiny woman who moved like plasticine, elongating into one pose before bending into another. My husband thrust the app on me because he’s now a proselytiser of yogic arts. Every morning he pops in some AirPods and salutes the sun, folds into a lotus pose and balances (damn him) on a single big toe. Well, almost. He’d like me to experience the benefits of focused intentionality, that wondrous alignment of mind and body. But I resist.
As a society, we celebrate the supple body and the stilled mind. But I worry that the stilled mind, emptied of its dancing thoughts, comes perilously close to the blank mind. I worry about becoming marooned in a kind of stupefied torpor, a state which, to me, encompasses everything from wordless wonder to the genial numbness of watching crap TV. I worry that the apotheosis of mindfulness is dumb vacancy. See that Buddhist monk, crossed-legged on his mat, his brow unfurrowed, saffron robes smoothed, his smile benignant? Peer inside his head and you’ll likely see . . . nothing. Just a handful of dust motes milling in the void. Far better is the chattering, restless mind, hopping and skipping to its own beat, surprising you with its twists and turns, surreptitiously sliding you thoughts you never knew you had. This is the unbidden mind. It is like having another self within yourself, something half known that discloses its textures and proclivities with a sporadic impulsiveness.
Most experts now believe that the restless mind is the brain’s default setting. It gets overwritten whenever we focus on something, intent on achieving a near goal. Only when we drop our guard and loosen our attentional focus does it make its presence felt. To paraphrase Timothy Leary’s countercultural mantra, you have to tune out to tune in.
It seems our brains are most likely to work in associative fashion when we are engaged in tasks requiring little conscious thought (so not beginners’ yoga) but so familiar we perform them automatically. Walking, cycling, showering, chopping vegetables, cleaning. When our bodies are occupied in rhythmic repetitive action, our minds “uncouple” from the task at hand and drift off. We daydream. We float away. Get swept into a blissful reverie.
In such states we glimpse the mind at play, conjuring pleasing hypothetical scenarios (getting it on with a romantic other; opening a newspaper to find a glittering review of your yet-to-be-finished book) and toying with counterfactuals and what-ifs that cast us as the heroes of our own mental moviescapes. You might say wish fulfilment is daydreaming’s guilty pleasure.
The playful mind might even be capable of perceptual feats that otherwise defeat us. Writing in Psyche magazine, the novelist and former neuroscientist Rachel Genn suggests that reverie’s dream-state provides a bridge between unconscious and conscious thinking. She likens its epistemic reach to William James’s concept of the “fringes” of consciousness, which encapsulates the idea of a diffuse knowability that exists at the peripheries of our perception and which sometimes manifests as an ineffable sense of moreness. This qualifies less as cognition than “metacognition”.
If this makes reverie more work than holiday, it’s the gentle kind, an engine idling not revving. The Germans, naturally, have the perfect expression for this: die Seele baumeln lassen (let the soul dangle). When I’m sitting at my desk, gazing out of the window and trying to write, I’ll often feel my attention wander. I try not to notice where it wants to go and instead give myself over to the drift. If I’ve been pushing at something that won’t yield to interrogation, zoning out can lead to shimmery intuitions or hazy ideas. The kind of “fuzzy thinking” that for some reason carries negative valency, as if the one-pointedness of mental acuity were the bullseye of thought, when in fact, in scoring the highs it misses the wider scatter of the cognitive field — the world of hunches, instincts, intimations.
The inherent creativity of the mind that wanders is something that philosopher John Armstrong champions. He claims the associative flow of ideas is generative, that in tripping lightly from one thought to the next, the mind discovers novel links. Letting the mind roam encourages a plasticity of thought. This is different from being in a state of “flow”, which denotes a highly attuned absorption in a task. And while we cannot command the wandering mind to solve problems for us, we can invite it to do so, like some shy creature we lure out of the dark with the promise of something to feed on.
I’m not saying that the restless mind can’t sometimes foil our best intentions. The intention to sleep, for example. A life-long insomniac, I’ve struggled through many a white night, my chuntering brain gnawing at me nonstop, begging for attention. I’ve battled with earworms, enduring a single song on endless replay, exhausted of all interest by morning.
But then, I would rather have the jazz improvisations of a restless psyche than the pure notes of mindful harmony. Rather the capricious company of a mental alter-ego that at least tries to keep me entertained. I mean, in my daydreams I’m balancing en pointe like a ballerina, leaping and twirling to loud applause, doing any yoga app proud.
Marina Benjamin is the author of books including “A Little Give”, “Insomnia” and “The Middlepause”
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