So, What IS "Mindfulness?"

Last night I had the pleasure of sharing an evening of discussion with psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Rubin at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Tucson. My “piece” was a summary of “mindfulness” as understood within the buddhist tradition and in particular how, with the mainstreaming of “mindfulness” in all sorts of psychological contexts, much of the subtlety of the concept is being lost. As several friends from the community there asked if I could provide copies of my notes, I thought I’d do one better and work them up into an essay. (My notes are – at best – little phrases and lists to jog my memory, written in a pocket-sized notepad!) So, here it is:

Research into “mindfulness” dates back at least 30 years or so, but it’s been only in the last decade or so that there has been a tremendous growth in interest, deeper research, application in various contexts (including therapies directed toward anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, eating disorders) and in marketing! It seems that many folk feel that if you can just slip the word “mindfulness” into whatever your packaging, you will guarantee greater acceptance of whatever it is you’re selling!

However, there’s a discrepancy between how mindfulness is described in the buddhist texts and how it is described by many contemporary buddhist teachers as well as in the psychological mainstreaming of mindfulness. Again and again, I read passages that describe mindfulness as “bare attention.” For instance, here’s how Sara Weber defines mindfulness in her essay, “An Analyst’s Surrender” from Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: “a cultivation of a moment-to-moment awareness of changing perceptions in a neutral, impartial way.” Carey Wong offers this succinct definition at the about.com website: “Mindfulness is a type of meditation that essentially involves focusing on your mind on the present. To be mindful is to be aware of your thoughts and actions in the present, without judging yourself.”

Note the common understanding that mindfulness embodies “present moment awareness,” and holding a “neutral, non-judging, impartial” attitude or perspective toward experience. Yet, this is not quite how mindfulness is taught in the earliest buddhist texts! In fact, this description more accurately fits the definition of another term, manasikara, which simply means “attention” or “mental engagement.” This would be the initial moments of bare cognizing before recognition, perception and conceptualization. This “bare attention” is actually considered a “neutral” mental factor, neither inherently wholesome or unwholesome.

The word that we generally translate as mindfulness in Pali is sati, which is a form of “recollection” and “non-forgetfulness” which includes: retrospective memory of the past; prospectively remembering to do something in the future; and a present-centered recollection as the unwavering attention to a present reality.  This kind of mindfulness may be used to sustain bare attention, but nowhere in the basic texts do we find mindfulness (sati) equated with bare attention (manasikara).

Indeed, for “right mindfulness” to be present, sati requires the concomitant presence of “clear comprehension” (sampajanna) which is a form of introspective awareness that includes: precise knowing (a knowing of discrete moments of experiencing); complete knowing (seeing impermanence, the not-self nature of phenomena; the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of phenomena; liberation); and balanced knowing (the observation of all phenomena with sati). In the Satipatthana Sutta (a key text on the practice of sati), the three factors of recollection (sati), clear comprehension (sampajanna) and ardency (atappa) together make up “appropriate attention” or “wise reflection” (yoniso manasikara).

Sati is understood as a wholesome mental factor that clearly distinguishes between wholesome and unwholesome mental states and behaviors, and is used to then cultivate and support wholesome states and behaviors and to counteract and diminish unwholesome states and behaviors. Nothing “impartial” or “neutral” about that!

When buddhist meditation is reduced to “bare attention” – as it so often is by many contemporary teachers and by almost all in the psychological community – what often gets neglected are ethics (sila), and practices such as the immeasurables. While “bare attention” as a calm, non-reactive awareness plays a crucial part in samatha (calming or tranquility meditation), it can also lead to profoundly liberating insights – but generally only for those with a fairly developed practice and understanding. An often-repeated story from the sutras is when the buddha tells a student “In the hearing, let there just be the hearing; in the seeing, let there just be the seeing.” What is overlooked is that this particular student was already highly advanced. Such an instruction for a beginner would be meaningless and not at all helpful! As it is often said of meditation in general: simple but not easy. Nothing could be “simpler” than “just hearing” or “just seeing,” but the difficulty of doing so is tremendous!

The potential danger of “bare attention” is that by itself, while it can suppress unwholesome mental factors, it can also prevent wholesome factors from arising. Remember that sati includes remembering the pain that a past action caused (for yourself or another), and prospectively remembering that you do not want to repeat such an action in the future. Such recollection would be impossible with “bare attention!”

Also, the four immeasurables: friendliness (metta); compassion (karuna); joy (mudita) and equanimity (uppekha) which are seen as wholesome mental factors to cultivate (bhavana, the word most used to refer to “meditation” in the early texts) can only be practices with mindfulness, not “bare attention!”

So, in an integrated practice of buddhist meditation that would include samatha (calming) and vipassana (insight), samatha would be the primary method of developing sati (mindfulness); then one would move on to vipassana, applying sati and its discerning intelligence to each of the four foundations of mindfulness (body; feelings; mental formations; dharma).

Briefly, the recollection of the body begins with the breath; and goes on to include the whole body; the postures of the body; the activities of the body (and nothing gets left out including shitting and pissing); the parts of the body; the elements of the body; and finally, the ultimate reality of the body: it will be a corpse!

The recollection of feeling investigates the felt sense of experience, seeing how all experience is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, arising physically or psychologically and that such feelings lead to reaction if sati is not present.

The recollection of mental formations includes emotions, discursive thinking, perceptions, etc. And the recollections of dharma investigates and categorizes experience according to aspects of the teachings of the buddha, including the five hindrances, the seven factors of awakening and the four noble truths. Alternatively, this can take the form of investigating the impermanent nature of all experience until the insight into not-self leads to “letting go” or “awakening.”

Again, its important to contemplate the fact that a sniper is practicing “bare attention” as he prepares for his kill. From the buddhist perspective, when mind is engaged in an act of harming, it is not even capable of sati (mindfulness). As the sniper waits and prepares, there will be heightened attention, vigilance, concentration and energy, but with an intention to cause harm, these factors are all under the sway of unwholesomeness. Free from its ethical matrix, mindfulness becomes “bare attention.”

For mindfulness to become “right mindfulness,” it requires the ethical and wisdom aspects, along with the meditation aspects of the eight-fold path. The eight limbs, divided into these three trainings (ethics, meditation, wisdom) are the yoga taught by the buddha.

Finally, I’d like to briefly touch upon the process behind the cultivation of mindfulness. It all begins with the arising of consciousness based upon the contact between a sense organ and a sense object. In buddhist thought (generally, there has been deviation from this understanding in some forms of buddhism such as much of vajrayana and zen) there is no “pure consciousness” that exists outside of causality. It always arises interdependently! And, there are six consciousness: one for each of the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting) and then mind consciousness.

This consciousness is understood as the mere cognizing of sense object by the sense organ. Then, supporting mental factors help to create meaning from this raw cognizing. For example, my tongue makes contact with chocolate and a feeling arises. I find it pleasant because of many factors, not least of which is my conditioned response to chocolate based upon previous experience.

Contact, feeling, perception, intention, attention are “universal mental factors” that arise in every moment of consciousness. Meditation doesn’t begin until we apply the initial application and sustained attention, supported by energy to keep us “focused.” Three ethically variable or neutral factors also are generally present while meditating: conviction or confidence; joy; the impulse to act. There are said to be “variable” because as you might imagine, these three factors can equally arise when doing something unwholesome!

But, with all these mental factors present, I may be meditating, but it won’t be “mindfulness meditation.” Sati is a wholesome mental factor which only arises under special conditions. It cannot arise in the presence of any unwholesome factors. If envy is present, for instance, there is no mindfulness. BUT, in the very next moment, there can be recollection (mindfulness/sati) of the previous moment that we can investigate. But only if we are well-trained and have developed this skill.

With mindfulness, the arising of eighteen other wholesome mental factors is said to arise including among them: equanimity; non-greed; non-hatred; self-respect; respect for others; tranquility; lightness; and malleability.

Finally, to the surprise of many when they hear this, mindfulness alone does not inevitably lead to liberating wisdom (panna). If mindfulness is not linked to the mental factor of insight, it will not in and of itself lead to any significant change in your understanding and behavior! This helps explain why so many long-term practitioners seem not to have the ‘breakthroughs’ that others may speak about. It’s also why even great teachers can so often fail to live up to their own teachings!

Real transformation comes from exposing and uprooting the deeply embedded tendency to project ownership onto experience; to take any phenomena as being “I,” “me” or “mine.” A key contribution to the larger yoga tradition is the buddha’s insight that meditative stabilization must be combined with the liberating discernment of the not-self nature of phenomena.

An old analogy has mindfulness being like the hand that takes a sheaf of grain in it’s grip and wisdom the hand that holds the scythe that cuts it down.

May all beings be free!

JANUARY DAILY PRACTICE: Just Sit

For the beginning of a new year (and new decade at that) I think it could benefit all of us to get back to basics. A daily practice of sitting meditation has been shown to offer numerable benefits – most recently, a study shows that meditators age slower than the general public, most likely because of higher levels of telomerase, an enzyme that has to do with longevity.

And yet, though we know sitting is “good” for us, we find resistance to actually doing it! But the other day I read the following from Cheri Huber to my Mindfulness Yoga class:

Sitting in meditation opens our hearts. What wants to sit? Who we really are. What wants to be still? Stillness. The quiet, the peace, the well-being wants to be with itself, wants to experience itself. So when we sit, even if it’s a fidgeting, wiggling, hate-every-moment-of-it sit, what is sitting is that deepest part of us.

Continuing to sit reinforces that part of us who wants to sit. It also reveals the nature of the ego onslaught. Seeing that, our hearts open a little bit, and as our hearts open, there is more kindness. There is more ability to be present, to be open to and aware of something other than the conditioned structure that is maintaining itself against the inherent goodness of life.

It can certainly seem as if the person who wants to sit disappears as soon as we hit the cushion. We are bombarded with everything in the world, all our conditioned patterns, all our resistance, all our suffering. But that is all right, because there is room on that cushion for all that to be there, along with who we really are.

I love this passage because it reminds me of what Dogen Zengi says: that our sitting is already the expression of our inherent buddha-nature. We do not sit to become buddha, but express our awakening nature by and through sitting – even if a storm of emotion and thought is also happening!

So, if you have been thinking of starting a sitting practice; or if you have one that feels ‘stalled’; or if you sit regularly, let January be the month you really commit to ‘just sit.’ Don’t even think of it as something special: “I’m meditating now.” You don’t have to sit on the floor. Sit on a chair if your uncomfortable sitting on the floor. Don’t make a big deal of it. Just sit.

Take the next 30 days as a “Sitting Challenge.” You can commit to whatever you wish, but stick to it. Your commitment might be to sit one hour a day, either in one 60-minute block or two 30-minute sits or even three 20-minute sits. You can commit to sitting for ten minutes or even five minutes. At the very least, you can commit, as Jack Kornfield suggests, to ‘get your ass on the cushion.’ You will most likely find that getting your ass on the cushion is the hardest part, but once you do get onto the cushion (or chair) you’ll find you can indeed sit still for at least five minutes!

Please share your experiences, insights and questions.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meaness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

-- Rumi

Book Club: "Body and Mind Dropped Away" Roshi O'Hara

The opening paragraphs of Roshi O’Hara’s essay articulates the primary place so many meditators get stuck: thinking meditation is merely about the mind! Joko Beck once described zazen as “exquisitely physical,” and Dogen’s emphasis on posture in the Fukanzazengi, the root manual of Soto Zen meditation makes this clear!

Roshi speaks about feeling/thinking of her mind as some kind of balloon floating over the body. Years ago, I used to think that most of the students coming to my classes lived from the neck up. Nowadays, I think it’s more accurate to say that most of us living today live from our eyebrows up!

The phrase, “body and mind dropped away” can be confusing to those new to “Zen speak.” I remember when I first heard the phrase, I interpreted it to be a reference to some trance-out state of numbness with no sensation of the body and no mental activity. This is why I am grateful that Roshi provides a clear example of what she means by “body and mind dropped away” at the bottom of page 32 into the top of page 33: “The dropping away of all concept of body and mind is like a distorting lens falling away and what is left is a realization that I am the snow, the ice, the earth and sky, while I have not stopped being myself.” I offer a similar example of this in my book, Mindfulness Yoga, where I describe the “dropping away of body and mind” in a hatha-class, where I was the sound of the teacher’s instructions, the music she was playing, the audible ujjayi breath of us students, etc. This experience is most certainly not the blocking or suppression of body and mind.

We all use words, concepts, and there is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with words and concepts. Our error is in forgetting that we are using them, and so they begin to ‘use’ us. Contemplate any weather related sentence: “It’s raining today,” “It’s really windy,” “It looks like it’ll be a sunny day,” etc. What exactly is the “It” that we are talking about? Is there really a subject separate from the rain, the wind, the sunshine? This is no different from the situation of using words such as “I,” “Me,” and “mine.” All serious practice comes down to “What is this ‘you?’”

The Korean Seon (Zen) Master, Chinul, would often exhort his students to ‘trace the radiance back.’ Illuminate the self to become clear about the nature of this ‘self.’ When you go beyond the labels you use to identify ‘yourself,’ (man or woman, teacher, poet, carpenter, liberal, conservative, white, black, yellow, Buddhist, Christian, atheist etc. etc.) what is left?

At the bottom of page 36, Roshi speaks of jijuyu samadhi, the samadhi of union. Many practitioners seek such a state, and don’t realize that striving for it can keep it from arising. But then, as she writes, “there is often an odd and surprisingly pleasant, joyful, and energetic feeling that arises. It is likely that in several tiny time spaces between effort and distraction there were moments of dropping away. The effort and distraction were never necessary, only the willingness to practice as it is.” These “drops of emptiness,” as Thich Nhat Hanh calls them, are indeed blissful moments of clarity, energy and joy. Over time, “we” find ourselves ‘dropping into’ such a natural state with greater ease and frequency.

Not to seem a killjoy, but the danger here is in becoming attached to this state of bliss; this state where body and mind drop into pure play. There are spiritual traditions that more or less drop us here and leave it at that. Roshi speaks for the Zen tradition in saying that this is not yet full freedom. As Chinul said, “It is not enough to be awakened; we must live an awakening life.” From here, we must step out and manifest the Body of Peace in all ten directions and nine times. The image Zen presents is the yogi who comes down from the mountain peak and enters fully into the market place. And goodness knows, the market place needs those who, having dropped body and mind, have seen through the delusion of separateness, and understand that we are all in this together! There is no way that your practice can be for yourself alone. Thinking that possible is itself based upon thinking you are encapsulated in the fathom-long skin bag.

So, thank you for your practice.

Metta,

Poep Sa Frank Jude

Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind Book Club: "The Introduction" by Michael Stone

Michael lays out his purpose in conceiving and editing this book in his very first sentence where he says that it is written for those who find themselves “compelled by the teachings and practices of both Yoga and Buddhism” who are “moved to better understand the porous border between them.” He goes on to affirm their “interdependent history,” and their shared goal of “recognizing suffering and bringing it to an end.”

Before going any further, we again need to clarify what it is that we are referring to by the term “Yoga” in this passage. If one is referring to what I call the “ocean” of teachings and practices originating in the sub-continent of India, I’d say to speak of “Yoga and Buddhism” is already inaccurate as Buddhism is a form of Yoga. If, however, one is referring to the so-called “Classical Yoga” of Patanjali, then we can most certainly compare these two Yoga traditions, but for accuracy, I’d write “Classical Yoga and Buddhism” for greater clarity. And, from this perspective, it is certainly true that the Yoga teachings of the Buddha and of Patanjali share both an interdependent history AND are their respective traditions are incredibly porous!

Michael makes a point that I find both important, and personally frustrating at times in its having to be necessary at all: Yoga has been reduced in the contemporary mind to being all about body practice, and Buddhism has been equally restricted to being an exclusively mental practice! Nothing could be further from the truth!

Michael makes an interesting analogy with trees, comparing (Classical) Yoga and Buddhism to an oak and a maple tree. They share many commonalities, and of course have many differences. He takes it through three levels of comparison. I too often make use of the tree analogy, but I have one tree: the Tree of Yoga. And one branch of this tree is Buddhist Yoga, and another is Classical Yoga (and others include Vedanta, Tantra and from that in turn Hatha.

What do you think? Does either of these models seem more relevant to your own understanding?

What may come as a surprise to many readers is just how little we know of the Buddha and Patanjali as individuals. Do you think this makes any difference as to how we should receive their teachings?

Finally, I would love to hear from any of you regarding what may be the most pertinent issue raised in the Introduction: Michael asserts a “fundamental affinity between mind practices and body practices.” What do you think of this statement? How does it relate to your own experience of meditation and/or sitting meditation? Is it accurate to conceive of meditation as being about the mind and hatha-yoga-asana to be about the body? Or do you agree that this is a simplistic reduction at best, and perhaps a broad misperception?