You Are Allowed to Be Bad at This: Playfulness, Beginner’s Mind, and Why Mindfulness Does Not Have to Be Serious

Somewhere along the way, mindfulness got serious. Really serious. It became something you achieve. Something you optimise. Something you track in an app with a streak counter and a daily reminder that quietly judges you when you miss a day.

Sit correctly. Breathe correctly. Think correctly about not thinking. And whatever you do, do not fidget.

No wonder so many people bounce off it.

Here is a thought that might feel radical if you have only encountered mindfulness through apps, corporate wellness programmes, or Instagram infographics: mindfulness was never supposed to be another thing you are trying to be good at.

The cult of getting it right
Most adults approach mindfulness the same way they approach everything else. As a performance. There is a right way to do it. There are benchmarks. There are levels. There is a version of you, somewhere in the future, who has finally mastered the art of sitting still and thinking about nothing, and that version of you is calm, composed, and probably has better skin.
 

This is the exact opposite of what mindfulness actually asks of you.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the person who brought mindfulness into Western clinical practice through Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979, identified seven foundational attitudes of mindfulness practice. One of them is non-striving. Not reduced striving. Not striving more efficiently. Non-striving. The deliberate release of trying to get somewhere, achieve something, or become a better version of yourself through the practice.
 

That attitude is almost impossible for most adults. Because most adults have spent decades in environments, school, work, relationships, health, where value is directly tied to effort and output. Doing nothing, on purpose, without trying to get anything from it, feels not just uncomfortable. It feels irresponsible.

If you have ADHD or other neurodivergent traits, multiply that discomfort by about ten. The ADHD brain is wired for goal pursuit, novelty, and immediate feedback. Asking it to sit with non-striving is like asking a border collie to ignore a tennis ball. The instruction makes sense. The wiring does not cooperate.
Beginner's mind is not a metaphor.
 
The Japanese Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970) that in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few [1]. He was not being poetic. He was describing a real cognitive phenomenon.

When you are a beginner at something, you have no expectations. 

You do not know what the experience is supposed to feel like, so you are open to whatever it actually feels like. You are curious. You are slightly awkward. You might even laugh at yourself. That openness is the entire point.

The problem is that adults are trained out of being beginners. We are trained to be competent, efficient, and correct. We are trained to skip past the awkward stage as quickly as possible and arrive at mastery. So when an adult sits down to meditate and their mind wanders fourteen times in two minutes, they do not think, "Interesting, my attention is all over the place today." They think, "I am failing at this."

Beginner's mind is the antidote to that. It is not about pretending you do not know anything. It is about approaching each session as if it were the first one, because in a very real sense, it is. Your nervous system is different today than it was yesterday. Your stress load is different. Your sleep was different. The breath you are taking right now has never been taken before. If you can meet this moment without dragging in all your opinions about how the last session went, you are practising beginner's mind.

Children do this naturally. They do not evaluate their experience of playing. They just play. Mindfulness, at its best, is closer to play than it is to homework.

Why playfulness matters for your nervous system

This is not just philosophical. There is a practical reason why lightness and play matter in mindfulness, especially for neurodivergent people.
 

When you approach a practice with seriousness and self-evaluation, you activate the same prefrontal monitoring systems that are already overworked in people with anxiety and ADHD. You are adding cognitive load to a practice that is supposed to reduce it. Your brain is simultaneously trying to meditate and trying to assess how well it is meditating. That is two tasks, not one, and for an ADHD brain that already struggles with task management, it is a recipe for frustration and dropout.

Playfulness short-circuits that loop. When you approach mindfulness with curiosity rather than judgement, with a "let's see what happens" attitude rather than a "I need to do this properly" attitude, you lower the stakes. And when you lower the stakes, the nervous system has less reason to stay on high alert.

This is why, in my sessions, I will occasionally ask a client to do something that feels a bit silly. Listen to the sound of your own name as if you have never heard it before. Notice what colour the inside of your eyelids are. Count backwards from ten and see if you can make it without your brain wandering off (you will not, and that is the point). These are not serious exercises. They are invitations to be curious, to notice, and to discover that nothing terrible happens when you stop performing.

 
For neurodivergent clients in particular, giving permission to approach mindfulness with lightness rather than gravity is often the single most important thing I do in a first session. Many of them have spent years being told that the reason wellness practices do not work for them is that they are not trying hard enough. The idea that trying less might actually be the instruction is genuinely new information.
 
Non-striving is not the same as doing nothing
There is a common misunderstanding that non-striving means being passive. It does not. It means being fully present and engaged without attaching your sense of worth to the outcome.
You can breathe with intention without needing the breath to fix you. You can notice tension in your shoulders without needing it to dissolve. You can observe a thought without needing to label it as good or bad, productive or wasteful. You can sit for three minutes and have your mind wander twenty times and still have had a completely successful session, because the practice is the noticing, not the stillness.

Suzuki put it simply: the goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind [1]. Not to reach a destination. Not to accumulate expertise. To stay in the place where everything is still open, still possible, still worth paying attention to.

That is a profoundly freeing idea for anyone who has been grinding themselves down trying to relax.
 
Where this fits in the bigger picture

If you have been following this blog series, you will have noticed a thread. The Buteyko piece was about how breathing less, not more, is often what anxious and neurodivergent people need. The mindfulness and relaxation-induced anxiety piece was about how the standard template fails people whose nervous systems do not match the assumptions. This piece is the other side of that coin: even when the approach is right, the attitude you bring to it matters just as much as the technique.

You can have the most trauma-informed, neurodivergent-adapted, evidence-based mindfulness practice in the world, and if you approach it like a test you need to pass, your nervous system will stay in performance mode.
 
Playfulness is not a luxury add-on. It is a regulatory signal. It tells your brain that this moment is safe enough to be curious in. And for a brain that has spent years in survival mode, that signal is worth more than any technique.

Try this tonight

Before bed, lie down and place one hand on your chest. Do not try to change your breathing. Just notice whether your hand moves. If it does, notice how far. If it does not, notice that. Then ask yourself, with genuine curiosity and no expectation of an answer: what does resting actually feel like?
 

You do not need to know the answer. You just need to be willing to be a beginner.

Cian O'Driscoll is a breathwork and mindfulness facilitator, reflexologist, and complementary therapist based in Wicklow, Ireland. He works with neurodivergent adults and burned-out professionals through Low Tide Calm.

To book a session or find out more, visit lowtidecalm.ie
 
References:
[1] Suzuki, S. (1970). Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice. Shambhala Publications.
[2] Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Delacorte Press.