Navigating Life’s River: Embracing Mindful Awareness in a Sea of Empty Boats

Mindfulness as a blend of technique and attitude, can help us differentiate between illusory dangers and genuine challenges, helping us steer through life with wisdom and resilience.

Photo by Boxed Water Is Better on Unsplash

Imagine that our path through life is likened to a serene journey sailing down a beautiful river, where everything appears perfectly peaceful. This might seem idealistic, being cocooned in our boat, sailing down the river surrounded by a sea of tranquillity. In fact, this would not be an accurate representation of life, as life can be quite unpredictable, and within these moments, it’s very easy to get washed over by thoughts of worry.

This could be likened to sailing down the river and spotting another boat slowly making its way towards us. No matter how much we signal to it or try to change direction, this boat seems just to continue inching closer to us. Here, an unexpected wave of worry washes over us. Questions would start flooding our minds: “Will it collide with my boat? Will it sink me?” And as the distant boat inches closer and closer, our anxiety intensifies. We start waving our arms, yelling, and frantically trying to avoid a potential collision that could leave us drowning in the river. Our once perfectly peaceful space suddenly transforms itself into a tense and frantic experience, with our apprehension growing as the boats come together.

And although we stand up, jump up and down, and desperately shout, “Stop your boat! Turn away!” Inevitably, both boats collide, but to our surprise, we find the other boat is empty. No damage has been done, and it simply drifts harmlessly away on the river’s current. A seemingly perilous encounter, where we just realised that the perceived threat was an illusion – an empty boat that posed no danger at all.

This metaphor reflects the nature of our lives. There are numerous “empty boats” around us—situations that, in reality, aren’t harmful. Yet, our reactions to them might signify the frantic waving of arms and the fear of a collision, paradoxically putting us at risk of falling into a river of worry.

The boat story serves as a reminder to cultivate a sense of kind spaciousness in our experience, fostering an openness and awareness that can guide us through the twists and turns of life.

In this context, mindfulness becomes useful for navigating life’s river. Contrary to common misconceptions, mindfulness is not about being passive or resigned to the currents of life. It’s about developing skilful means and discernment to determine which events are genuinely worth our effort to address. Much like identifying whether the approaching boat is empty or filled with potential danger, mindfulness encourages us to approach situations with clarity and discernment.

The key lesson from the boat metaphor is the importance of discernment in our reactions. It is about recognizing that not every situation requires a frantic response. Many of the challenges we face are, in essence, “empty boats”—situations that may initially seem threatening but lack substance upon closer inspection. The unnecessary energy we expend on these situations in anxious worry not only fails to avert a collision but also puts our well-being at risk.

Mindfulness involves developing a keen awareness of these reactions and responses. Rather than reacting impulsively to perceived threats, mindfulness encourages us to step back, observe, and recognize the true nature of situations we encounter daily in our lives. To recognize that, much like the empty boat, many situations we perceive as challenging turn out to be transient and harmless if met with a calm and collected mind.

This is what mindfulness practice encourages us to cultivate: a “more spacious” mindset and emphasizes the importance of approaching life with an open heart and mind. And mindfulness can help break that cycle of succumbing to knee-jerk reactions driven by fear, worry, or anxiety of what might happen or the unknown. At one time or another, we will all experience an innate bodily feeling, sometimes gut-wrenching discomfort with uncertainty.

This invites a reflection into the role that pre-perceived perspective can have on situations we encounter in our lives. And how many times what we might initially perceive as a potentially worrying, anxiety-provoking situation turns out to be harmless, or things just work out fine as the situation takes its course. This highlights the subjective nature of our perceptions and the impact these can have on our experiences.

Mindfulness, but not the reductionist view of mindfulness as attention to present experience that is “being aware of what is happening right now.” But mindfulness as a faculty and quality of awareness, one that is objectively aware of what is happening right now as a matter of fact while also inviting qualities of curiosity, kindness, acceptance, trust, etc., what are commonly referred to as the attitudes of mindfulness, recognizing that not every approaching challenge requires a frantic response (Kabat-Zinn, 2013; Wolf & Serpa, 2015).

These are sometimes called the two faculties of mindfulness technique and attitude, which are both important in our mindfulness practice, like the two wings of a bird, where both wings are needed for a bird to fly (Baer et al., 2019; Choden & Regan-Addis, 2018). A bird cannot fly with one wing. But more crucially, I would say that the attitude that we bring into mindfulness is key. As Shauna Shapiro points out so well in the video below, “What we practice grows stronger.”

And when technique and attitude are combined appropriately, mindfulness empowers us to choose where to direct our attention and encourages us to differentiate between the empty boats—situations that may initially trigger anxiety but lack real substance—and those that genuinely require our focused attention and action.

This is to remind us that, ultimately, as we navigate the river of life, we will always encounter empty boats, and our journey to a degree or another will be peppered with perceived threats that, upon closer inspection, dissipate like a morning mist. Mindfulness practice can help us discern between the illusory dangers and the genuine challenges that demand our attention, empowering us to respond skillfully to the challenges that truly matter allowing us to steer our boats through the currents of life with wisdom and resilience.

Bibliography

Baer, R., Crane, C., Miller, E., & Kuyken, W. (2019). Doing no harm in mindfulness–based programs: Conceptual issues and empirical findings. Clinical Psychology Review, 71, 101-114. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2019.01.001

Choden, & Regan-Addis, H. (2018). Mindfulness based living course. New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full catastrophe living: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation (Revised and updated ed.). New York, NY: Random House USA Inc.

Wolf, C., & Serpa, J. G. (2015). A clinician's guide to teaching mindfulness: The comprehensive session-by-session program for mental health professionals and healthcare providers. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.