Mindfulness in Everyday Life
We have discussed, and hopefully some of you are doing, Mindfulness Meditation. Mindfulness is different from the other meditations that we have studied in that it can and should be extended to everyday life. It is in the crucible of everyday life that we can learn the full lessons that Mindfulness can teach us. It is a self study of our mind - not that we actively ‘study’ per se but we learn (gain Insights) through experience merely by observing.
Favorite practice tasks in retreats are: Walking Meditation, Mindful Eating, etc.
Whereas Concentration meditation can help reduce stress after the fact. Mindfulness helps cut stress off at the source, when the stressful event is happening. Without Mindfulness you might not even recognize it as a ‘stressful’ event.
Definitions of Mindfulness:
Jon Kabat Zinn -
“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”
Merriam-Webster Dictionary -
“The practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.”
Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles -
“Mindful Awareness is the moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.”
Reach Out (Incorrect definition) -
“Mindfulness is about training yourself to pay attention in a specific way. When a person is mindful, they:
- Focus on the present moment. (redundant)
- Try not to think about anything that went on in the past or that might be coming up in future. (wrong - a thought about the past or present is the present moment)
- Purposefully concentrate on what’s happening around them. (wrong - not around them, their perceptions of what is happening to them and in them in response).
- Try not to be judgmental about anything they notice, or label things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.” (Yes - we try not to use the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Use ‘skillful’ or ‘unskillful’. There is no good or bad, there just is. However, it is very useful to watch the mind assign a ‘feeling’ to everything - satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or neutral and then watch the mind reach toward attachment, aversion, or boredom. If you are bored, you are not paying attention!)
Four Foundations of Mindfulness (from the Satipatthana Sutta, the Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness) -
- mindfulness of the body
- mindfulness of feelings (satisfactory, unsatisfactory, neutral)
- mindfulness of mind or consciousness.
- mindfulness of dhammās. (I could not find where anyone agrees on what this one is. Translation is not clear.)
To be very simple - anything that you are aware of can be the subject of Mindfulness.
From the American Psychological Association - Empirically Supported Benefits of Mindfulness -
(http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/ce-corner.aspx)
Researchers theorize that mindfulness meditation promotes metacognitive awareness, decreases rumination via disengagement from perseverative cognitive activities and enhances attentional capacities through gains in working memory. These cognitive gains, in turn, contribute to effective emotion-regulation strategies.
More specifically, research on mindfulness has identified these benefits:
- Reduced rumination….
- Stress reduction…..
- Boosts to working memory….
- Focus….
- Less emotional reactivity….
- More cognitive flexibility….
- Relationship satisfaction….
- Other benefits. Mindfulness has been shown to enhance self-insight, morality, intuition and fear modulation, all functions associated with the brain's middle prefrontal lobe area. Evidence also suggests that mindfulness meditation has numerous health benefits, including increased immune functioning (Davidson et al., 2003; see Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004 for a review of physical health benefits), improvement to well-being (Carmody & Baer, 2008) and reduction in psychological distress (Coffey & Hartman, 2008; Ostafin et al., 2006). In addition, mindfulness meditation practice appears to increase information processing speed (Moore & Malinowski, 2009), as well as decrease task effort and having thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand (Lutz et al., 2009).
Default Mode -
See Jon Kabat Zinn article - ‘How to Adjust Your Default Setting’
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.
On some occasions your thoughts might tell you how boring meditation is, how silly you were for thinking that this non-doing approach might be of any value, given that it seems to bring up a good deal of discomfort, tension, boredom, and impatience. You might find yourself questioning the value of awareness, wondering, for instance, how awareness of how uncomfortable you are could possibly "liberate" you, or reduce your stress and anxiety, or help you in any way at all above and beyond just wasting time and succumbing to endless tedium.
This is what the thought-stream does, and that is precisely why we need to become intimate with our minds through careful observation. Otherwise, thinking completely dominates our lives and colors everything we feel and do and care about. And you are not special in this regard. Everybody has a similar thought-stream running 24/7, often without realizing it at all.
As we learn how to stabilize our paying attention and how to allow objects in the field of awareness to become more vivid—to see them with greater clarity, to drop beneath the surface of appearances—we are actually learning how to inhabit and how to rest in this capacity for awareness that is already ours. It can accompany us moment by moment by moment as we journey through our lives as they unfold through thick and thin. Each one of us can learn to rely on that awareness, on the power of mindfulness, to live our lives as if how we live them in the only moment we are ever alive really matters. As you will find out more and more through continued practice, it does matter.
We are very much in the habit of thinking of ourselves in small, contracted ways—and of identifying with the content of our thoughts, emotions, and the narrative we build about ourselves—based on how much we like or dislike what is happening to us. This is our default mode. The power of mindfulness is the power to examine those self-identifications and their consequences and the power to examine the views and perspectives we adopt so reflexively and automatically and then proceed to think are us. The power of mindfulness lies in paying attention in a different, larger way to the actuality of life unfolding moment by moment by moment. It allows us to shift from mindlessness to mindfulness.
In the end, the healing and transformative power of mindfulness lies in paying attention to the miracle and beauty of our very being and in the expanded possibilities for being, knowing, and doing within a life that is lived and met and held in awareness and deep kindness in each unfolding moment. So as you continue with the cultivation of mindfulness in your life, may you, as the Navajo blessing goes, "walk in beauty."
And may you realize that you already do.
On the Spiritual Path -
These are fine but to grow in the Spiritual Path one needs to be aware of Spiritual Insights. That is to have direct experience of the 3 Characteristics - Impermanence, Unsatisfactoriness, and Selflessness. Any one of these can be the doorway to Awakening.
An example was an Insight I had on a retreat in 2004. Outside my room was a refrigerator with a box of large Hershey-style candy bars. The kind that are easy to break off in squares. I tried to avoid them but one day I paid my dollar and bought one. I broke a piece off and ate it. Man, it was good and i had a great ‘feeling’ eating it. But I noticed that there was a unsatisfactory feeling after eating it. I wanted more. I wanted more of that good feeling. I ate 2 squares. Same thing. Great at first but a lingering feeling of unsatisfactoriness, much longer that the ‘good’ feeling. I ate a bigger piece. Same thing. I realized that I was having the direct experience and understanding that no matter how much of the candy bar I ate, there was going to be feeling of unsatisfactoriness at the end. Therefore, I directly understood the first Noble truth. That life is inherently unsatisfactory. The reason, which I also directly experienced, was that the good feeling from eating the candy bar was impermanent. This led to craving/attachment - I could never be truly fulfilled by a candy bar. That is the second Noble Truth.
On pain and negative emotions -
Think about how strange it is that you are aware of your thoughts. It is like having 2 minds with the second one able to watch the thoughts, emotions, feelings, experiences of the first mind!
The second thing to notice is that the ‘second mind’ is not caught up in the drama of the first.
From a good article called “Meeting Pain with Awareness” (https://www.mindful.org/meeting-pain-with-awareness/)
Have you ever noticed that your awareness of pain is not in pain even when you are? I’m sure you have. It is a very common experience, especially in childhood, but one we usually don’t examine or talk about because it is so fleeting and the pain so much more compelling in the moment it comes upon us.
Have you ever noticed that your fear is not afraid even when you are terrified? Or that your awareness of depression is not depressed; that your awareness of your bad habits is not a slave to those habits; or perhaps even that your awareness of who you are is not who you think you are?
If you move into pure awareness in the midst of pain, even for the tiniest moment, your relationship with your pain is going to shift right in that very moment. It is impossible for it not to change because the gesture of holding it, even if not sustained for long, even for a second or two, already reveals its larger dimensionality. And that shift in your relationship with the experience gives you more degrees of freedom in your attitude and in your actions in a given situation, whatever it is…even if you don’t know what to do. The not knowing is its own kind of knowing, when the not knowing is itself embraced in awareness. Sounds strange, I know, but with ongoing practice it may start making very real sense to you, viscerally, at a gut level, way deeper than thought.
This is not to suggest that awareness is a cold and unfeeling strategy for turning away from the depths of our pain in moments of anguish and loss or in their lingering aftermath. Loss and anguish, bereavement and grief, anxiety and despair, as well as all the joy available to us, lie at the very core of our humanity and beckon us to meet them face-on when they arise, and know them and accept them as they are. It is precisely a turning toward and an embracing, rather than a turning away or a denying or suppressing of feeling that is most called for and that awareness embodies. Awareness may not diminish the enormity of our pain in all circumstances. It does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative and can make all the difference between endless imprisonment in pain and suffering and freedom from suffering, even though we have no immunity to the various forms of pain that, as human beings, we are invariably subject to.
As we have seen, the challenge is twofold: first to bring awareness to our moments as best we can, in even little and fleeting ways. Second, to sustain our awareness and come to know it better and live inside its larger, never-diminished wholeness. When we do, we see thoughts liberate themselves, even in the midst of sorrow, as when we reach out and touch a soap bubble. Puff. It is gone. We see sorrow liberate itself, even as we act to soothe it in others and rest in the poignancy of what is.
In this freedom, we can meet anything and everything with greater openness. We can hold the challenges we face now with greater fortitude, patience, and clarity. We already live in a bigger reality, one we can draw from by embracing pain and sorrow, when they arise, with wise and loving presence, with awareness, with uncontrived acts of kindness and respect toward our self and toward others that no longer get lost in the illusory divide between inner and outer.