Mindful Stories

 I have been contemplating for a while the idea of what story looks like when coupled with mindfulness. I am not talking about writing stories so much as I am talking about reading the stories of others. My question is how does mindfulness inform the process of reading? What new spaces might it create that might not appear when we are reading without mindful awareness? A lot of these questions would be unresolved or in need of further experiment, but it might be interesting to explore the questions beforehand.
  It may seem difficult to pair narrative and mindfulness together in many cases, because some narratives by nature are trying to dictate to readers how they should feel or respond to the text, rather than giving them the space to explore for themselves how they experience the story on the deepest level of themselves. Perhaps the crudest examples of this kind of writing is the plain old advertisement. Advertising typically arranges images and text according to an overarching 'gist'- an idea which determines what is promoted, when and for whom. I have often seen commercials which leave me feeling quite the opposite to what the advertiser intended, yet somehow feeling alienated as a result of having this 'counter reaction'. It's as though there is only one appropriate response, which ultimately ends up centering around embracing a particular product or service.
   The opposite is the story that allows readers to explore it on many different levels or subtexts. This is the kind of story that, I must admit, attracts me the most. I like having my own space and time to take whatever I need from a narrative, rather than feeling somehow compelled to embrace some presumably 'universal' aspect of a narrative or message. Sometimes, it's the unusual identifications with specific characters which gives me a new slant on myself, and there is freedom in literature to find strange connections that may not even relate to the officially agreed upon 'story'. And readers need to have the freedom to see the book not as a linear piece of information that is to be memorized, but more so as a springboard for one's personal explorations: a kind of inner-world soulful mirroring.
   Do literature classes stress this aspect of reading as a personal exploration? Sadly not, I'm afraid, because we have become accustomed or conditioned to view the story as having only one or two 'messages', and thus being constrained by those messages. Could mindfulness in this context potentially be about allowing students the open space to make their own associations and (dare I say), learning from one's creative misinterpretations of the text? This is the kind of thing I would especially like to explore.