The practice of Mindfulness

Engaging in mindfulness practice and other forms of meditation has become increasingly frequent at public events and demonstrations. These practices serve as a helpful preparation for being more attentive, less distracted, wiser, and more open-hearted in these activities. Such innovative uses of the 2,500-year-old practice of mindfulness point to a vital way in which there can be a deep integration between inner and outer transformation, through the cultivation of a ‘mindfulness in action’ that can build on and complement our ‘mindfulness on the cushion’. Mindfulness practice has been called the heart of Buddhist meditation and is central to all forms of Buddhist meditation. The practice involve cultivating the ability to be directly aware, moment by moment, of what is occurring in one’s experience-including both inner experiences of bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions, and the outer experiences of being with our world, with objects, or with other human beings. When such mindfulness is sustained over time, wisdom, the clear seeing into basic inner and outer patterns of experience, arises, guiding us in our choices.

Mindfulness being the main controlling faculty of the mind is of course indispensable. It brings the mind to the point of concentration skillfully. Besides it guards against defilements and extraneous thoughts. Then it causes us to take the appropriate action to remedy it. It also keeps the mind flexible, workable, soft, and so on. Therefore there must be plenty of mindfulness at various depths.

What is the mindfulness? In one of the ancient Buddhist commentaries on this discourse, it is said that mindfulness means “presence of mind, attentiveness to the present…..It has the characteristic of not wobbling, i.e. not floating away from the object. Its function is absence of confusion or non-forgetfulness.”^[1] Mindfulness as the aware, balance acceptance of present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it. So mindfulness is a way of being attentive to whatever is predominant in the present moment of experience, whether of our inner experiences of body sensation, emotions, thoughts, and so on, or of our outer experiences of external objects and other beings. What is distinctive about this way if attending is, on the one hand, its directness, focus, fullness, and ability to penetrate deeply and, on the other, it’s nonjudgmental, nonpreferential and nonreactive quality.

To be fully mindful is to approach one’s moment-to-moment experience freshly, as much as possible not bringing the cognitive and emotional baggage of the past, which lead us as well to project into the future. (It is possible, however, to look freshly at how the past and future are present in our experience.) With this openness, there can be a great sensitivity to and curiosity about what is occurring in the present moment, even a sense of attending to a wondrous and awesome mystery.

Typically in contemporary settings, the practitioner learns mindfulness first by focusing on his or her individual experience, undergoing an initial training separate from the more relational and collective aspects of experience and from ordinary actions in the world. On the basis of this training, it becomes possible to sustain mindfulness in more complex actions and interactions, in a variety of settings. And so the Buddha speaks of first finding a quiet place and starting with mindfulness of breathing: Having gone to a forest, the foot of a tree, or an empty building, a practitioner sits down with legs cross and body erect. Establishing mindfulness in the present, one breathes in mindfully, breathes out mindfulness.

There are four main ways were taught by The Buddha to cultivate mindfulness, linked to four different aspects of experience. The first way is mindfulness of the body, often beginning with mindfulness of breath, and commonly understood as the development of present-centered awareness of bodily sensations, including the sensations of the breath. In the highly mind oriented culture such as ours, this kind of practice is particularly valuable in helping to cut through the mental “cloud” of repetitive thoughts is which many of us live or most of the time, bringing us back, so to speak, to our senses.

The second way, mindfulness of “feeling_- tone” (vedana) involves paying attention to the quality of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral that is present with every moment of experience, on a scale that ranges from ecstasy to agony. Attending to the feeling-tone is particularly important because when we are relatively unconscious of feeling-tone, we tend to grasp pleasant experiences, push away unpleasant ones, and “space out” with neutral experiences. Such tendencies are the roots, on the Buddha’s analysis, of suffering, of the so-called three poisons of greed, aversion, and delusion.

The third way of mindfulness is the “mind and heart” (citta), is usually interpreted to mean the clear awareness of the presence of the particular “mental and emotional formations” (cittasamskara). Here, we identify and are present to various formations such as desire, anger, distractedness, concentration, joy, peace, planning, remembering, and so on (the quality of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral is also a mental formation but because of its importance is treated separately, as the second way of attending). In the contemporary practice of mindfulness, the usual instruction is first to know that a particular formation is occurring, which helps us to begin to notice the range of our basic patterns of mind and heart and the details of our experience perhaps as we may never have noticed them before. Then we are invited to investigate more deeply the qualities of these states.

The fourth form of mindfulness is mindfulness of the broader patterns of experience (of dharma). In the Satipatthana Sutra, the Buddha mentions several teachings that provide lenses to help us see more clearly the nature of experience. So, for example, a practitioner might work with the core teachings of the Fourth Noble Truths: (1) we all suffer in life to a significant extent;(2) the cause of suffering is the compulsive grasping or pushing away of aspects of our experience; (3) peace, or the overcoming of suffering, is possible; and (4) there is practical path toward such peace. The practitioner might try to note when there is suffering, examine its nature, and look for how there might be compulsive grasping or pushing away. Similarly, one might explore the nature of peace and what lead to it.

One way to interpret this fourth way of training is to understand it is a second-level study of the more complex patterns and dynamics of our experience, based on having learned first, in the first three foundations, to identify more clearly some of the basic constituents. We are particularly instructed to examine those dynamics that lead to suffering and those that lead to freedom. This help to deconstruct, as it were, the seeming solidity of our patterns of reactivity, to bring awareness and clarity where there previously was automatic, relatively unconscious behavior.

We then extend this fourfold training, which occurs initially in the simplified “laboratory” of meditation, to the further complexities of ordinary day-to-day actions and interaction.

Since the intention of mindfulness practice is simply to be aware of what predominates in our experience, such a practice is particularly suited to any ordinary “informal” moment of our live.

I know what should be known
What should be cultivated, I have cultivated.
What should be abandoned that I have abandoned?
Hence, I am the BUDDHA, the Awakened One.^[2]

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Bhikkhu Bodhi, ed., Abhidhammattha Sangaha: The Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma. 2000. 86

[2]:

Piyadassi. The Spectrum of Buddhsim, Karenaratne, Colombo. 1991