Right mindfulness requires a foundation of right concentration. While practicing mindfulness meditation, or vipassana, you will have a direct experience of the three marks of existence. By paying attention to, for instance, the rising and falling of your breathing or the arising and fading away of sensations in the body, you will have a direct experience of impermanence (anicca). When you see how your mind engages with painful stories or identifies with themes of loss or deprivation, you have a direct experience of suffering (dukkha).

When you practice and the mind gets concentrated and stays with the moment-to-moment phenomenological energies of being alive, you have a direct experience of no-self (anatta) — if it is all energy, who is it that is meditating? You have an experience of awareness without identification with me and mine.

This meditation practice can help you to weaken the bonds of attachment that keep you in samsara and to simultaneously promote wisdom — clear seeing into the actual nature of things. Meditation provides a crucible to experience the chain of causality or what the Buddha called dependent origination in action. You can see for yourself how the mind and its usual habits generate desire and ignorance.

Right mindfulness has to do with living your life in the moment and being mindful of everything you do. When you eat, eat. When you wash the dishes, wash the dishes. When you read, read. When you are driving the car, pay attention to driving the car (what a concept!).

Right mindfulness asks you to retrieve your attention from the future, especially if that future-oriented attention takes the form of worry. Right mindfulness asks you to retrieve your attention from the past, especially if that past-oriented attention takes the form of regret. Once retrieved, bring your attention back to the present moment and notice with interest what is happening.

The Buddha was practicing right mindfulness when he was observing his thoughts, his sensations, his bodily functions, and his mind. The key to mindfulness is not to judge the contents of your mental experience as good or bad, wanted or unwanted, right or wrong. Right mindfulness and right effort go hand in hand. Without right effort there wouldn't be mindfulness, since mindfulness takes an appropriate degree of effort. Without mindfulness, effort would be futile.

When you are mindful of your thoughts and actions, ethical conduct becomes possible in everyday life. This also connects to wisdom as well. From your direct experience, you will start to notice which actions are skillful and lead to happiness and which actions are unskillful and lead to misery. This process is empirical, that is, you can test it out in real time, moment-by-moment. Again, it's not about following some pre-ordained code of conduct but realizing what works and what doesn't.