Introduction
Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. (Page 10)
PART I ENTERING
Beginner’s Mind
Suzuki Roshi, the Japanese Zen Master who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and touched the hearts of so many, is famous for having said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (Page 17)
The Breath
our breathing can serve as a convenient first object of attention to bring us back into the present moment, because we are only breathing now—the last breath is gone, the next one hasn’t come yet—it is always a matter of this one. So it is an ideal anchor for our wayward attention. It keeps us in the present moment. (Page 19)
Gradually we can come to feel what the attending itself is all about. It is about the relationship between what seems like the perceiver (you) and the perceived (whatever object you are attending to). These come together into one seamless, dynamical whole in awareness, because they were never fundamentally separate in the first place. It is the awareness that is primary. (Page 20)
Who Is Breathing?
this brings into question just who is breathing, who is beginning to meditate and cultivate mindfulness, who is even reading these words? We shall be visiting these fundamental questions with a beginner’s mind in order to understand what is really involved in the cultivation of mindfulness. (Page 21)
The Hardest Work in the World
the work of cultivating mindfulness is also play. It is far too serious to take too seriously (Page 22)
Taking Care of This Moment
Taking care of this moment can have a remarkable effect on the next one and therefore on the future—yours and the world’s. If you can be mindful in this moment, it is possible for the next moment to be hugely and creatively different—because you are aware and not imposing anything on it in advance. (Page 24)
Mindfulness Is Awareness
mindfulness is what arises when you pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, and as if your life depended on it. And what arises is nothing other than awareness itself. (Page 25)
Doing Mode and Being Mode
If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness reminds us that it is possible to shift from a doing mode to a being mode through the application of attention and awareness. (Page 26)
A Grounding in Science
Other studies have discovered that people trained in MBSR show activation in networks in the cerebral cortex that are involved in the direct experiencing of the present moment. People not trained in MBSR show less activation in such circuits and greater activation in networks that involve generating narratives about one’s experiences. These findings suggest that mindfulness practice develops a broader repertoire of ways of experiencing oneself and influences the degree to which we build stories about our experiences that may eclipse or color the experiences themselves. (Page 29)
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Mindfulness Is Universal
Wakefulness
The Buddha himself symbolizes the embodiment of wakefulness. The very title, “the Buddha,” means, in Pali—the language in which his teachings were first written down—the one who has awakened. Awakened to what? To the nature of reality and to the potential for freeing oneself from suffering by engaging in a systematic and very practical approach to living. (Page 32)
Stabilizing and Calibrating Your Instrument
if you are trying to look at the moon but you set up your telescope on a waterbed, it would be hopeless even to find the moon, never mind keep it in view and study it carefully. Every time you shifted your posture even a little bit, you would lose the moon completely. We face a similar situation with our own mind. If we are going to use the mind to observe and befriend and ultimately understand itself, first we will have to learn at least the rudiments of how to stabilize it enough so that it can actually do the work of paying attention in a sustained and reliable way and thus, of becoming aware of what’s going on beneath the surface of its own activities. (Page 34)
it is in the nature of the mind to wave. Knowing that makes a huge difference in how we will approach the meditation practice. (Page 35)
Inhabiting Awareness Is the Essence of Practice
Whatever the quality of your experience in a particular moment, what is most important is your awareness of it. Can you make room for awareness of what is unfolding, whether you like what is happening or not, whether it is pleasant or not? Can you rest in this awareness, even for one breath, or even one in-breath, before reacting to try to escape or make things different? Inhabiting awareness is the essence of mindfulness practice, no matter what you are experiencing, whether it arises in formal meditation or in going about your life. (Page 36)
if, through bringing an ongoing intentionality and gentle discipline to both formal and informal practice, mindfulness were to function increasingly as our “default setting” so to speak, our baseline condition that we come back to instinctively when we lose our emotional balance momentarily, then it could serve as a profoundly healthy and reliable resource for us in challenging times. (Page 36)
The Beauty of Discipline
The discipline I am referring to is really the willingness to bring the spaciousness and clarity of awareness back over and over again to whatever is going on—even as we feel we are being pulled in a thousand different directions. (Page 38)
The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself. Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. (Page 38)
If we are willing to encounter our old habits in this way, without turning non-distraction and non-doing into unattainable ideals, and if we can bring gentleness and kindness to the process over and over again for even the briefest of moments, then we might taste the very real possibility of being at home and at peace with things exactly as they are without having to try to change or fix anything in this moment. When it comes right down to it, this orientation constitutes not only a gentle and healing discipline. It is a radical act of love … and of sanity. (Page 39)
Adjusting Your Default Setting
As soon as you take your seat or lie down to meditate, the first thing you will notice is that the mind has a life of its own. It just goes on and on and on: thinking, musing, fantasizing, planning, anticipating, worrying, liking, disliking, remembering, forgetting, evaluating, reacting, telling itself stories—a seemingly endless stream of activity that you may not have ever noticed in quite this way until you put out the welcome mat for a few moments of non-doing, of just being. (Page 40)
It is a bit like television sports commentary. There is what is actually going on in the game, and then there is the endless commentary. When you begin a formal meditation practice, it is almost inevitable that you will now be subject to meditation commentary to one degree or another. It can fill the space of the mind. Yet it is not the meditation any more than the play-by-play is the game itself. Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way—a first-order, first-person experience—rather than filtered through the mind of another. In the case of meditation it is the same, except your own thoughts are doing the broadcast commentary, turning a first-order direct experience of the moment into a second-order story about it: how hard it is, how great it is, and on and on and on. (Page 41)
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Awareness: Our Only Capacity Robust Enough to Balance Thinking
We certainly do need a foundation in critical thinking and in analytical and deductive reasoning in order to understand the world and not be totally lost or overwhelmed by it. So thinking—precise, keen, critical thinking—is an extremely important faculty we need to develop, refine, and deepen. But it is not the only capacity we have that needs developing, refining, and deepening. There is another equally important faculty that almost never gets any systematic attention or training in school, and that is the faculty of awareness. (Page 43)
Attention and Awareness Are Trainable Skills
Nothing Wrong with Thinking
when thinking is not held and examined in the larger field of awareness, it can run amuck. Coupled with our unexamined afflictive emotional states, our thinking can wind up causing great suffering … for ourselves, for others, and sometimes for the world. (Page 47)
Befriending Our Thinking
Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn’t think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise. (Page 48)
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We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mis-take them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times. (Page 49)
The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean. (Page 49)
Images of Your Mind That Might Be Useful
The Tibetans sometimes describe thoughts as writing on water, in essence empty, insubstantial, and transient. I love that. Skywriting is another apt image. Touching soap bubbles is another lovely metaphor. In all of these images, thoughts can be seen to “self-liberate,” to go poof just like soap bubbles when they are touched, or in our case when they are “touched” by awareness itself—in other words, when they are recognized as thoughts, simply events arising, lingering, and passing away in a boundless and timeless field of awareness. (Page 51)
Not Taking Our Thoughts Personally
We do not have to believe them. We do not have to even think of them as “ours.” We can recognize them simply as thoughts, as events in the field of awareness, events that arise and pass away very rapidly, that sometimes carry insights, sometimes enormous emotional charge, and that can have a huge effect for better or for worse in our lives, depending on how we are in relationship to them. (Page 52)
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Selfing
Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns—Especially I, Me, and Mine
The selfing habit is a major part of our default setting, that mode of mind that we revert to constantly when we go unconscious or drone on in the automatic pilot doing mode. (Page 55)
“Selfing” es un concepto que al parece acuña él. Hace referencia a cuando tramitamos toda nuestra experiencia en relación a “nosotros” mismos.
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Awareness Is a Big Container
awareness is a big container and can hold any thought, any emotion, without in the slightest being caught by any of it. (Page 57)
The Objects of Attention Are Not as Important as the Attending Itself
we can focus on awareness itself and become aware of awareness, without choosing any particular object to focus on. (Page 59)
it is essential that you know right from the beginning that it is not the breath sensations, or sounds, or even our thoughts when we are paying attention to thoughts, that are most important. What is most important but most easily missed, taken for granted, and not experienced is the awareness that feels and knows directly, without thinking, that breathing is going on in this moment, that hearing is going on in this moment, that thoughts are moving through the sky-like space of the mind at this moment. As we have seen, it is the awareness that is of primary importance, no matter what the objects are that we are paying attention to. (Page 59)
PART II SUSTAINING
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
A World-Wide Phenomenon
Mindfulness develops bare attention, discernment, clear seeing, and thus wisdom, where “wisdom” means knowing the actuality of things rather than being caught in our misperceptions and misapprehensions of reality. And those misperceptions and misapprehensions tend to be truly legion for all of us, no matter who we are, because it is so easy to be caught up in our own belief systems, ideas, opinions, and prejudices. (Page 64)
An Affectionate Attention
Mindfulness Brought to All the Senses
Buddhism explicitly includes mind as a sixth sense. And by “mind,” Buddhists don’t mean thinking. They mean awareness, that capacity of mind that knows non-conceptually. (Page 67)
anything and everything can become our teacher of the moment, reminding us of the possibility of being fully present: the gentle caress of air on our skin, the play of light, the look on someone’s face, a passing contraction in the body, a fleeting thought in the mind. Anything. Everything. If it is met in awareness. (Page 68)
Proprioception and Interoception
The Unity of Awareness
Since awareness, amazingly enough, can hold all of it—both the inner landscape and the outer landscape of our experience—there is no fundamental separation in experience between inner and outer, between the knower and what’s being known, between subject and object, between being and doing. There only seems to be. (Page 71)
in a conventional sense, of course it is “you” who is hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and knowing. But who are you?
When we are unconsciously caught up in making distinctions that separate and fragment our experience rather than recognizing its intrinsic wholeness, this orientation exerts a profound grip on our habits of thought, emotion, sensing, and knowing. Those unexamined habits of mind are what keep us stuck and prevent us from apprehending the spaciousness, the clarity, the unity of awareness—even though you could say that along with the breath, mindfulness is right beneath our noses in every moment, all puns intended. Thus, mindfulness is always available to us. It is also easily missed if we are not attending, if we ignore the potential of our own presence, if we are not willing to show up and to stop, to look, to listen. It is that simple. (Page 78)
mindfulness is a way of being, one that requires consistent cultivation. It is a discipline all its own that naturally extends into all aspects of life as it is unfolding. (Page 80)
And while it is simple, it is not easy. It is not so easy to maintain mindfulness, even over very short periods of time. We saw earlier that in some ways, you could think of it as the hardest work in the world, and the most important. So until and unless you implement it and sustain it through ongoing, regular practice, leavened with an appropriate attitude of gentleness and kindness toward yourself, mindfulness can easily remain simply one more thought to fill your head and make you feel inadequate … one more concept, one more slogan, one more chore, one more thing to schedule into your already too-busy day. (Page 80)
I am using that sensory metaphor of being “out of touch” intentionally, to acknowledge how astonishingly easy it is to be unaware, to be more on the mindless side rather than mindful, to see without really seeing, or hear without hearing, or eat without tasting. In other words, we can easily zone along on autopilot for most of our lives, meanwhile thinking we know what is happening, we know who we are, we know where we are going. That could be said to be our current default setting: the highly conditioned and tenacious mode of unawareness, of automatic pilot, of mindless doing. (Page 81)
What mindfulness can do to help in such circumstances is very simple. It reminds us that this internal narration of ours is entirely based on thought. It is a construct, a fabrication that we have gotten comfortable with. It may be an amazing, convincing, absorbing story a good deal of the time. It may also at turns be horrific or boringly normal. But it is a confabulation all the same. (Page 82)
Yet all such efforts are simply the spinning out of self-centered, self-preoccupied yarns, woven by our thoughts interacting with our experience, usually completely outside of our awareness. (Page 84)
While they may contain elements of truth, these narratives are not the entire truth of who we are. Who you actually are is far bigger than the narrative you construct about who you are. That is the case for all of us. So either we need a much bigger narrative, or we need to see into the intrinsic empty nature of all narrative: that while it may be true to a degree, it is devoid of any essential, enduring finality or truth. Our lives are simply bigger than thought. (Page 84)
awareness allows us to see and to realize that we are seeing, to think and to know what’s on our minds, and to experience emotion and be in relationship to it in a way that is actually wise and self-compassionate—that doesn’t saddle us with stories of how great we are or how horrible we are or how inadequate we are. Such narratives can act like cement boots that sink us in a morass more or less of our own creation—that is, if we believe them, if we think they are the truth rather than recognizing them as merely thoughts coming and going. (Page 87)
We may be very much bound up in identifying with the contents of our thoughts and emotions and with the narratives we build around ourselves based on how much we like or dislike what is happening to us. The power of mindfulness lies precisely in examining the fundamental elements of our lives—in particular all those self-identifications we indulge in and their consequences for ourselves and for others—and in examining the views and perspectives we adopt and then proceed to think are us. (Page 89)
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The value of mindfulness lies in paying attention in a different, larger way, to the actuality of life unfolding moment by moment by moment. It lies in paying attention to the miracle and beauty of our very being and to the expanded possibilities for being, knowing, and doing within a life that is lived and met and held in greater awareness. (Page 89)
PART III DEEPENING
mindfulness is sometimes described as an affectionate attention (Page 95)
Mindfulness is not some kind of cold, hard, clinical, or analytical witnessing, nor is it a pushing through to some special, more desirable state of mind, nor a sorting through the detritus and debris of the mind to discover the gold underneath. You can feel the forcing, doing, striving elements in this way of thinking about meditation and its potential benefits. It may help to remind ourselves over and over again that meditation is not about doing! It is about being, as in human being. It is about the attending itself, pure and simple. (Page 95)
This is what we mean by the practice of mindfulness. It is the how of coming to our senses moment by moment. There really is no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully? (Page 96)
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My briefest response to the question, “Am I doing it right?” is that if you are aware of what is happening, you are “doing it right,” no matter what is happening. That may be hard to accept, but it is true. (Page 99)
When you practice mindfulness, the first thing you are likely to notice is how mindless you can be. Let’s say you decide to focus on the feeling of the breath moving in and out of the body. It is happening in the present moment. It is important. You can’t live without breathing. It is not hard to locate the sensations in the body associated with breathing, at the belly or in the chest, or at the nostrils. You might find yourself saying, “What is the big deal? I will just keep my focus on the breath.” Well, lots of luck with that one. Because invariably, you will find that the mind has a life of its own and is not interested in taking orders from you about staying focused on the breath or anything else. So it is very likely that you will find your attention dissipating over and over again, forgetting about this breath in this moment, and being preoccupied with something else—anything else—in spite of your own best intentions. This is just part and parcel of the landscape of meditation practice, and it tells you something about the nature of your own mind. (Page 99)
Remember, we have established that the objects of attention are not of primary importance. What is of primary importance is the quality of the attending itself. So the mind’s wanderings—its self-distractedness; its changeability; its dullness on occasion; its excitability; its endless proliferations, constructions, and projects; its lack of focus—are all telling you something important, even critically important, about your own mind. It is not that you are doing anything wrong. You are not! You are simply beginning to realize how little we actually know ourselves and our own minds. This awareness is far more important than whether your attention in a particular moment is focused on the breath sensations or not. If we understand this, the mind’s own distractedness and unreliability become new and worthy objects of attention in virtually every and any moment. (Page 100)
If you are going to criticize yourself every time your mind wanders out of the present moment, well, you’re going to be criticizing yourself a lot. (Page 101)
Maybe it is time to stop berating or belittling ourselves for not living up to some romantic “spiritual” ideal. How about just noticing what is unfolding? When we think we have “blown it completely” by forgetting about the breath altogether during a period of formal practice, how about just bringing awareness to thinking that you “blew it”? That thought is itself a judgment, just one more internal commentary. You haven’t “blown” anything. There is nothing wrong with you. And there is nothing wrong with your mind. These are just judgments the mind is generating in reaction to one experience of your attention wandering away from its chosen object. You will have millions, billions of such moments. They don’t matter, but they can teach us a lot. Can you see that you can dwell in awareness or come back to awareness, at least for brief moments, over and over again, even as the mind goes here and there and is preoccupied with this or that? (Page 101)
In each new moment, we are presented with this option, to see what is actually happening, which we call discernment, rather than to fall into judging, which is usually overly simplistic, dualistic, binary thinking: black or white, good or bad, either/ or. Suspending judging, or not judging the judging that does arise, is an act of intelligence, not an act of stupidity. It is also an act of kindness toward yourself, as it runs counter to the tendency we all have to be so hard on ourselves, and so critical. (Page 101)
The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself. The irony, of course, is that you already are. (Page 103)
We can see that liberation from suffering does not mean that we get a free pass out of all suffering just by practicing mindfulness. If you are human, you are going to suffer at times. It is part of the human condition. It is inescapable. Just having a body is a prescription for suffering. Just having a mind that doesn’t know itself is a prescription for suffering. As we have seen, being attached to anything, clinging to anything, is a prescription for suffering. So we will suffer. You might also contribute to the suffering of others, sometimes without even knowing it. The question is, is it possible to investigate and befriend our suffering no matter what the circumstances? Are there commonsensical and practical ways for us to approach deeply painful experiences and not make them worse? What might be the consequences of seeing that it is possible to intentionally and mindfully work with pain and suffering when they do arise in our lives? (Page 111)