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Mindfulness
Mindfulness meditation expands your awareness. You discover the way you react to things, and you gain self-understanding.
To do mindfulness meditation, allow your sphere of attention to expand to include peripheral phenomena around the breath.
Your focal point remains the in-breath and the out-breath at the nostrils. The difference is that you allow yourself to become aware of whatever else is happening in your mind and body.
Noticing and naming
The basic practice is “noticing and naming.” Instead of returning immediately to the breath, take a look at what it is that’s drawn you away from the breath.
For example, if you hear a sound, make a mental note to yourself, “hearing,” and then come back to the breath. If you remember something, note “remembering.” If you imagine something happening in the future notice, “imagining.”
You can, of course, include the body in your mindfulness. For example, when you feel tension or pain in your back, just notice that this is what’s happening.
After noticing and naming, allow your attention to gently settle back on to the breath.
In the beginning it’s helpful to use words to describe what you’ve become aware of. As you become more skilled you can let go of the words. When you hear a sound you simply know that you’ve heard a sound, and come back to the breath. The change from verbal to non-verbal knowingness takes place in its own time and there’s no need to specifically work on it. If you find it helpful, you can always come back to the verbal naming at any time.
Mindfulness isn’t just a practice for formal meditation. It’s something to do throughout the day. Mindfulness is a continuous be-here-now awareness.
When you’re walking, know that you’re walking. If you’re reaching for a cup of jasmine tea, notice and name “reaching.” If you catch the fragrance of it, notice the action of smelling. If you taste it in your mouth, notice the action of tasting.
Sitting on your cushion to practice mindfulness meditation is called “formal” practice. The noticing-and-naming throughout the rest of the day is called “informal” practice.
The two are related. Formal practice builds up a momentum of mindfulness that carries over into your informal practice.
Concentration meditation and mindfulness meditation are also related. If you can focus strongly on the breath, you’ll be more aware of something that has distracted your attention away from the breath. If you can notice with precision what’s happening around the breath, it’ll be easier for you to come back to the breath.
Because they’re so closely related, you can combine concentration meditation and mindfulness meditation in a single sitting. A good strategy is to start with enough concentration meditation to clarify and strengthen your mind, and then allow your field of awareness to expand, so that you transition into mindfulness meditation.
To reach the correct amount of concentration for mindfulness meditation, sit until the mind settles down. It’s a bit like watching a lake where sand off the bottom has been stirred up by the wind. After a while the sand settles and you can see clearly into the water.
If your mind becomes too busy during mindfulness meditation, you can come back to concentration meditation for a while. The mind may roam around in past, present and future, but the body and the breath are always here and now.
Going deeper
The Buddha showed people how to go deeper into the mind. He called the underlying tendencies in the mind râga, dosa and moha.
In a strict sense râga means lust and dosa means ill-will or hatred. Sometimes these are the right words. But in a broader sense râga is any form of grasping and dosa is any form of aversion.
Grasping is pulling some experience toward you. It manifests in the mind as a belief that something is so important that you absolutely must have it.
Aversion is the opposite. You want to push some experience away from you, as though you believe it is something is so terrible that you absolutely must avoid it.
When grasping and aversion are present, there will always be some mildly painful sensation in the body. It might be an interruption of the breath, accompanied by a tensing in belly, or perhaps some pain deeper in the body, apparently in the region of the spine. Body awareness and awareness of mind flow into and support each other.
The term delusion needs some explanation. Delusion is not the same as pure illusion. Illusion would be seeing something that really isn’t there. Assuming that your psyche is reasonably well-ordered, pure illusion is rarely a problem.
Delusion is more subtle than illusion, and this makes it more difficult to detect. Delusion means seeing something that is there, but then misconstruing it. In the traditional Indian analogy, it is like seeing a rope and mistaking it for a snake.
The reason delusion is deceptive is that it is constructed on top of objects and situations that genuinely exist. The mind tell stories about the world and uses real events to construct those stories. Because those events genuinely exist, when you observe the mind, attempting to locate delusion, the mind can always say: No, I’m not deluding you, I’m telling you the truth. This is how things actually are—look and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.
When you then compare the stories your mind tells you with what we you see in the outside world you will not be effective in rooting out delusion. What you see in the world will be interpreted by the same mind as told the story in the first place. Your ingrained way of seeing the world will always confirm your delusions rather than illuminate them.
You need a more powerful tool. That tool is your awareness.
Threads: Spiritual Practice