Mindfulness
In The Greater Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness, the Buddha set forth the practice of mindfulness for his students:
There is, Monks, this one way to the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and distress, for the disappearance of pain and sadness, for the gaining of the right path, for the realization of Nirvana — that is to say the four foundations of mindfulness.
What are the four? Here, monks, a monk abides contemplating body as a body, ardent, clearly aware and mindful, having put aside hankering and fretting for the world; he abides contemplating feelings as feelings;… he abides contemplating mind as mind;…he abides contemplating mind-objects as mind-objects, ardent, clearly aware and mindful, having put aside hankering and fretting for the world.
Meditation practice helps you to be mindful in daily life; in other words, awake to what you experience and do as you move through life. It is easy to get caught up in stories about the future and the past, and sometimes these stories run to worry and regret. You may find yourself commenting, and more likely complaining, about the present, but not actually paying attention to it. To be awake is to be mindful; paying attention to the reality of this moment as it is happening without judgment or storytelling. To be mindful is to break the habit of automatic pilot and following every impulse that arises. To be mindful is to be awake in movement: in eating, eliminating, driving, working, loving, and whatever else you do during the course of your day.
To be mindful, try to give full attention to your lived experience. As William James said over 100 years ago, “The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly of his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally lives.” To be mindful is to re-orient to the perceptual away from the conceptual, storytelling aspects of the mind. To be mindful, pay attention to what you see, hear, taste, smell, and most importantly, the sensations you feel in your body. Be aware how your mind generates thoughts in the form of stories, images, memories, and emotions (and all the possible combinations of these). The fruit of meditation practice on the cushion and all the techniques described so far is to facilitate this mindful awareness in daily life.
You should take your practice with you into everything you do. Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh provides mindfulness exercises in his wonderful book, The Miracle of Mindfulness. Here are a few of his suggestions that you can use during the day:
Measure your breath by your footsteps
Count your breaths
Set aside a day of mindfulness
Half-smile
Follow your breath while having a conversation
Strive to become mindful in every part of your life. When you are eating, eat. When you are walking, walk. When you are making love, make love. When you are cooking, cook. Be there in the moment each and every moment. The moment is all you have. This moment.
In Zen and the Ways, Trevor Leggett explains how meditation can push agitation away: “When in sitting meditation there is agitation of thought, then with that very agitated mind seek to find where the agitated thought came from, and who it is that is aware of it. In this way pressing forward as to the location of the disturbance further and further to the ultimate point, you will find that the agitation does not have any original location.”
The art of meditation is a way to wake up to the world. You can learn new ways to see your troubles and your pain and bring true wisdom to your life. As American vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield relates in A Path with Heart, attention is like training a puppy. You sit the puppy down and tell him to stay, but the puppy immediately gets up and runs away. So you sit the puppy back down again and tell him to stay. And the puppy runs away. Sometimes he runs away and poops in the corner.
So it is with your mind. You tell your mind to sit still and it is off to the corner to make a mess and you have to start over and over again. With mindfulness, you can come back to the present moment in a matter of fact way, just picking up where you left off, or you can reproach yourself for attention having wandered. You wouldn't yell at the puppy, so try not to yell at yourself. All minds wander — that's what they do.
Anything worthwhile requires effort, and meditation practice is one of these worthwhile endeavors. Sometimes practice will flow fluently and at other times it will be a struggle. It is at those times that a community and a teacher are helpful to provide support and keep you on track. Once you have been practicing for a while, you will start to taste the fruits of your labor and have glimpses of something beyond the stories about yourself. You might even taste that sense of no-self the Buddha talked about as you experience yourself as a moment-to-moment process rather than a “thing” that needs to be protected and constantly convinced of its worth. Enjoy your practice and keep at it!
