The Essentials of Mindfulness

So I wanted to do some, a few introductory talks again this time of the year. And tonight I wanted to talk about the essentials of mindfulness and share some on that. And just get into the basics of practice again.

I think for some people who may be newer to the practice, it’s good to hear this. And for some of us who are very experienced with the practice, it’s always good to come back and hear it again with a new perspective. And kind of consider and return to what we’re working with in this practice and developing with mindfulness. So mindfulness Mindfulness comes up a lot as a word, as an experience, as a thing we’re cultivating as part of this practice of meditation that we do. And mindfulness isn’t solely a factor of meditation, but meditation gives us a way to kind of have a closed-off sandbox to help develop mindfulness. In many ways. That’s what this is doing. Part of it is strengthening that ability in ourselves to be mindfully aware of what’s going on inside our body and outside our body. With those we come into contact with. With all of our senses. And so the first key thing that we’re working with when we develop mindfulness is presence. And I mentioned this a little bit with Qigong, and Qigong embodies this in the same way. This presence of bringing attention to what’s happening right now. Are we present for what’s happening? Not in the past, not in the future, but just in this moment.

What’s going on? And it’s one of the reasons why many of the instructions around mindfulness meditation revolve around the body. I’ve said this many times, but your body can’t be anywhere else than right now. Your body, the sensations that you’re feeling in your body, the breath that’s happening in the body is right now. It’s not a future breath. It’s not a past breath. It’s this breath when we’re aware of those sensations. And so when we’re able to let our awareness rest on that breathing or on a sensation in our knee or our foot foot or the stomach or any of the senses. You know, the crickets that are— I guess it’s cicadas more. The cicadas that we’re hearing right now is happening right now. It’s not a memory of cicadas. It’s not future cicadas. No. We’re present.

The next factor of mindfulness is approaching it with a sense of non-judgment. Judgment. We need to be able to notice everything that’s going on without judging that this is good or bad or right or wrong, that I’m supposed to be doing things in this way or that way, that the mind should or should not be doing these things. Because if we leave something out of what’s going on, we’re kind of— we’re shortchanging our training in mindfulness. We’re shortchanging what we’re actually seeing in the mind. Again, this practice of meditation, we close down some of the senses, we come to a quiet space away from our everyday surroundings, and it gives us a chance to really notice the habits of the body and habits of the mind. And we may not like those habits all the time. It’s quite likely that something came up for each of us today that we wish didn’t happen. But if we approach that as an initial thing of like, I just don’t want to see that, then we’re not able to really work with it. We’re not able to really engage with it if we’re pretending or don’t want it to be there. Because it is there. Because it is happening right now.

The next thing to do any of this is we have to be aware. This is mindful awareness. We can’t— to be mindful is not to be asleep. To not be kind of zoned out, daydreaming, where we’ve kind of lost this awareness of what is happening right now. Now, at the same time, and there’s often this— I’ve heard this joke given where you can be mindful doing anything, but not everything you do is mindful. There’s a joke about 2 retreatants, you know, they’re at a retreat and one walks out, sits on a bench, the next one walks out, sits on the bench with him. First person takes out a cigarette and starts smoking. The second person who came out turns to the first person and says, hey, I just asked the abbot if I could smoke and he told me no. Why are you smoking? He’s like, well, I just talked to the abbot and he said I could. Well, what did you actually ask him? Well, I asked him if I could be mindful while I was smoking. He said, yes, you can be mindful while you’re smoking. And I, oh, well, I asked him if I could smoke while I was being mindful. And he said I couldn’t. And so, you know, it gets this thing. It’s like, can you daydream while you’re being mindful? No. But can you be mindful of the mind going off into daydreams and just sit there and observe it and watch it as the watcher seeing, wow, the mind is going off on some really weird images right now. It’s going off on a serious storyline. That’s strange. And watching it from third— you can absolutely do that.

So there’s this— it’s subtle. It’s subtle. Being able to see that subtlety is what we come here to practice to do. Because at first that may feel very hard to pull apart. And part of that is acceptance. It’s just— and this is a factor of mindfulness as well— is allowing the present moment to be like it is without trying to change what’s going on. We’re going to not get very far trying to pretend like the pleasant isn’t pleasant, pretend like the unpleasant isn’t unpleasant. If your knee is sitting there and it’s hurting, you can observe the sensation, but to pretend that it’s not hurting is not accepting what’s happening in the current moment.

And the last thing is returning. And I mentioned this in the instructions, but this is a habit that we’re working to build. It’s not the way our minds have been trained for most of our lives. Most of our lives have been spent training them to think about problems in the future, remember things in the past, think about what we’re going to say to somebody, plan to do something after this or after that, plan for next week, plan for next year. It’s not about being present in a non-judgmental, accepting way, aware of what’s happening in our bodies and our minds. That’s not how we’ve trained our minds. And so part of this is we’re returning over and over and over again to these factors and coming back to what is happening in the mind and body right now. Being present for it, being aware of it, not judging it, accepting it.

So there’s a simile of mindfulness of— and I’ll give the example of mindfulness of the breath because that’s what I gave the instruction on. But mindfulness of the breath being like a sentry at the gate of the mind. And it’s like a sentry at the gate of a walled city. And the walled city has 6 paths leading into it. And those 6 paths are the body and the sensations of the body, smells, tastes, sounds, sights, and the mind, the mind of ideas. This is all of our sensory stimuli. And this sentry is on the lookout for things coming in each of those sense doors. It’s present, it’s aware, and it’s noticing what comes in, what goes out, what comes in, what goes out all the time.

And it’s on the lookout, and this is where we start to get from mindfulness into energy and effort because it takes energy and effort to be mindful. We don’t just fall into mindfulness exactly. That it takes some— you know, we all had to put a little energy in to be here tonight, to sit here in silence and pay attention to something. And that doesn’t come just of its own accord. There’s some seeds of energy and effort in there. So part of this is, as we deepen our mindfulness and are aware of more and more things, this energy and effort gets turned towards noticing the things that are unskillful in the mind, body— feelings of anger, craving, sloth, and restlessness, and doubt— and beneficial skillful feelings around being mindful, being investigative and curious, being energetic and joyful, feelings of tranquility and equanimity. And there’s an interesting conundrum here between what I just said and what I said a little bit before that maybe you picked up on. Is that at one level we have to view what’s going on in our experience with acceptance and non-judgment. Because if we don’t, we won’t see what’s actually going on. But once we see what’s actually going on, there are things that we realize are not skillful. They bring us suffering. They bring others suffering. And starting to identify those and identifying where they’re coming in through what stimuli is a very, very important skill as we bring skillful effort into our mindfulness.

So again, the body— there are many, many ways to practice developing our mindfulness. The mindfulness of the breath is just one technique. Come again next week, there’s a different technique. Next week, you know, I move around what we’re teaching. If you listen to guided meditations, there are many, many ways of working with the body. But the body is— and there are ways of being mindful with the mind as well. But as we get started and getting, really getting traction in this practice, the body again is our gateway to being in the present moment. It’s always here. If you feel your foot on the floor, you’re here right now and nowhere else. It’s one of the suttas, to sit and know we’re sitting, to walk and know we’re walking. That’s it. But we get hooked on our delusions about how things go.

We let the mind spin out and go in many, many different directions. And as we sit there and are aware of our present moment experience, it becomes a little bit more clear, A, that the mind is kind of a madhouse that goes crashing down the tracks in different directions at times, and that it’s through our confusions about the way reality works that is what brings our suffering. It’s the layer that we add on top of what we’re experiencing that’s where that comes from. And as mindfulness deepens, it becomes more— you become more and more able to see a loud sound as a loud sound. It may not be pleasant, but it’s at one level of sound. And then the story we tell ourselves about that sound that comes after that. And this happens quite quickly. And so again, it comes from coming, sitting, practicing at home, here, in your daily life, moving around, being aware of our sensations of what comes in these gates to the walled city. And noticing, hmm, when this thing comes in, when this sense experience happens, this mind state comes right after it. It follows this person around. And that’s one of our habits of mind. And each of us have different habits of mind that shape our past, our conditions, our karmic dilemmas. But it’s this noticing and separating between the experience itself and what we add on.

You get this simile in the suttas of the 2 arrows that comes up quite frequently. There’s a guy on a battlefield, he gets shot with one arrow, and he sees and feels himself in pain from getting shot with one arrow, and he pulls his own arrow out and stabs himself with it. And it’s like, that’s seemingly bizarre to us. That anybody would do that. And yet that’s what we do to ourselves all the time. We have some unpleasant, sometimes even pleasant sensation, and then we heap the suffering on top of it. And that— so again, if your knee hurts, your knee hurts. That’s the first arrow. That’s just reality and what’s happening. And we can bring our awareness and mindfulness in a non-judgmental, accepting way to that. What we don’t have to do, and where skillful effort comes in, is taking away any story we have that gets layered on top of that. About how we don’t want it to be this way. Why did it happen to be this way? What caused this and that? Because all of that is outside of what’s happening now. And as we are able to do that more and more, we will You begin to notice that changing those habits of mind to separate the sense experience and the stimuli from our responses to it, it changes the way we habitually react to the world and it is a more pleasant way of being. It just allows us to be in the world in a way that is just a little lighter. It’s not quite as heavy.

And this is a gradual practice. This takes putting in drop after drop after drop of training this muscle, this habit of mind to be here, be present, be aware, and return over and over and over again. And slowly it gets easier and easier to return. You could go for longer and longer stretches without having to remember to be aware. And it begins to seep into all parts of our lives where we’re very aware of how we’re speaking to other people, very aware of how our body is, aware of our reactions to the speech and actions of others. It flows into, again, how we interact with everyone we encounter. Flows into how we interact with ourselves and our minds and allows us to see things a little more clearly. Because ultimately, as we begin to see deeper and deeper what’s going on, we see the ways that we suffer, and then we are able to notice that in other people as well. We notice how they have a response to a stimuli and then they add something onto it and you see them suffering. And again, it’s not being judgmental about, ah, I see what you’re doing and you added that suffering onto yourself, because that will not win you any friends. But it’s allowing your heart to open when you see that that same thing that happens to me that I’m working on chipping apart, I can see it happening in others.

And we all have this shared dilemma, this shared burden of suffering, of the way our minds habitually work. And so those are the insights that come from this practice, the vipassana, these insights of mindfulness practice. And they can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, but Again, it starts with something very simple, just being present, being aware, being accepting of what’s happening in this moment, being nonjudgmental about it, and returning again and again and again.

Thank you all for your kind attention. I open the floor up to any questions that may come up.