We have explored many different styles and applications of meditation throughout this book, and as you have learned, meditation is not simply sitting and doing nothing—it is actively training your mind to quiet so you can focus on your spiritual essence. It is training your mind to enter into a listening mode of being and awakening into awareness. The awareness you awaken to in meditation can be carried over into daily life by practicing mindfulness throughout the day—staying in open, receptive awareness of whatever is arising in the mind and body, moment by moment, throughout the day.
Mindfulness comes from the Pali word sati, meaning awareness or non-forgetfulness. With mindfulness practice throughout the day, you are not trying to avoid anxiety, sadness, fear, or any other undesired mental state; you are learning to accept whatever arises, with moment-to-moment awareness of the sensations of the body and the thoughts associated with the sensations, with an open, investigative attitude.
There are three components of practicing mindfulness. First, stay in the present moment. Second, cultivate the ability to observe yourself in action by staying consciously aware of the thoughts moving through your mind and the sensations arising in your body from moment to moment. Third, cultivate an open, receptive, and even loving attitude toward whatever is arising.
The third stage of cultivating an open, receptive, loving attitude is what melts away the fortress of old ways of being. Without this open acceptance, you can be observing yourself maintaining old patterns with a judgmental attitude, locking you into a battle with yourself and allowing the old patterns to persist. With loving acceptance, frozen patterns begin to melt and dissolve.
Instead of working on avoiding any mental state, you are expanding your capacity to tolerate all mental states, including discomfort, and even to bear adversity. With mindfulness, you are cultivating ease in your psyche, but not by avoiding anxiety or fear when they arise. In a sense, you lean into these undesirable feelings with an investigative awareness and discover that they will dissipate, much like an early morning fog burns off as the sun warms it. In yoga, we learn to breathe into the sensations/pain of the stretch—accept it—know what it is—and then on the outbreath, we relax the muscles further and deepen the stretch. Mindfulness is like this: Accept whatever sensations are arising in your body and emotions and breathe into them, then on an outbreath, relax further into accepting the sensations just as they are.
As you first begin to practice mindfulness throughout the day, you may be shocked to discover just how often you slip into mindlessness—engaging the mind’s tendency to dwell on the past or anticipate the future. You might discover that the vast majority of your day is spent lost in thought streams of either avoidance or grasping—trying to avoid something unpleasant or thinking of something more desirable than this moment. Each time you become aware that you are lost in your thoughts, gently pull your attention back to your breath and the sensations arising in your body. Focusing on your breath and body serves as an anchor, a touch-base for the mind, rooted in the present moment.
Be patient and gentle with yourself in your efforts to stay mindful throughout the day. Training your mind to stay in the present is like training a puppy to sit and stay on command. It takes patience and loving acceptance to teach the puppy, and this is also the best way to approach training your unruly mind to stay present.
With mindfulness practice, you learn
to take control of the one thing you
do have power over: how you react and
respond to life. Your happiness and
peace of mind are conditions within you
and your mind, and therefore the causes
for this inner well-being cannot be found
outside of your mind. With mindfulness
practice, you learn to break free of
the tendency to look to others and
conditions in the world as the causes
of either your happiness or your
unhappiness—you train yourself to
work with these issues at
their source within you.
One thing we all learn in life is that we have very little control of others and how they act. There is so much of life that you cannot control, with your share of joys and sorrows, losses and gains, successes and failures. However, with mindfulness practice, you learn to take control of the one thing you do have power over: how you react and respond to life. Your happiness and peace of mind are conditions within you and your mind, and therefore the causes for this inner well-being cannot be found outside of your mind. With mindfulness practice, you learn to break free of the tendency to look to others and conditions in the world as the causes of either your happiness or your unhappiness—you train yourself to work with these issues at their source within you.
There is a story about a teacher in times gone by who was traveling from village to village to share his knowledge of finding inner peace. It happened that in one village he visited, he attracted an unfriendly audience. As he began to tell his story, members of the audience taunted and jeered at him, seeking more lively entertainment. They continued their rude behavior while he calmly waited. After noticing his unruffled demeanor in the face of their taunting, one person in the crowd spoke up: “How is it that you do not seem to be bothered by us, while we clearly don’t like what you are saying?”
The teacher responded, “How you choose to act is up to you, and how I respond is up to me. Why would I let your choosing to be rude disturb my peace of mind?”
And this is what you learn through practicing mindfulness. You are able to be like the teacher in the story when your mind wants to react in a negative way to something or other, and you are able to observe this without getting pulled into the story.
Observing your mind and body’s reactions to life, in and of itself, changes your experience. However, simply watching and observing yourself is not enough to be considered mindfulness. You must also cultivate an open and accepting attitude. You could be observing yourself with a negative, critical eye. What you pay attention to grows, and without being mindful of your attitude, you could be fueling your negativity. Cultivating the attitude of staying mindful with an open and loving acceptance of whatever is arising will train the mind to stay at ease and free of reactions.
Mindfulness is not simply a passive approach to life— you will still have your goals, your drive to achieve, and your passions; but mindfulness does allow your true self to shine through so that your goals and passions are aligned with your true nature. Mindfulness allows you to be discerning about which thoughts and emotions to act on and which ones to pass on, allowing you to become more focused in all of your endeavors.
Another long-term benefit of mindfulness in daily life is how much easier it becomes to shed unwanted habits that were previously used to escape the moment. With your practice of staying consciously aware in open acceptance of this moment, you have seen through the illusion of attempting to escape this moment, this “now,” to find a better now. You have learned that there is nothing to escape from, and unwanted habits and previous means of distracting yourself can be shed with very little effort.
Mindfulness practice is staying aware of the thoughts and sensations arising in your body from moment to moment, just as is practiced in Vipassana meditation (discussed in Chapter Four). The connection between sensations arising in your body and the thoughts moving through your mind becomes a valuable monitor throughout the day. As you stay aware of sensations arising in the body and the attendant thoughts that are simultaneously occurring, you learn just how much your thoughts, feelings, and emotions are interconnected within you. When you feel a strong sensation or emotion arising in your body, take note of what you are thinking about in the very moment you notice the sensation. You will see specifically how certain thought streams stir particular sensations and emotional feelings, as well as the inverse: how certain sensations stir particular thought streams.
A sudden rush of anxiety is a familiar example of this connection. You can be going along with your day and all is well, when suddenly anxious feelings of inadequacy wash over you. Your pulse quickens and your breath is shallow, constricted, or held tight—your amygdala is pumping fight-or-flight hormones into your system and you feel like you want to jump out of your skin.
In this example of a strong sensation disrupting your ease of being, train yourself to notice specifically what you are thinking about exactly when you notice the sensations of anxiety. Pay attention to when you notice the thought stream associated with the sensations: Are you becoming aware of it at the beginning of the thought, in the middle of it, or after it has passed? Pay attention to specific sensations occurring within your body, your skin, and your breath.
By staying attentive to this connection between what you are thinking about and how you are feeling, you see how your mental processes have created much of the difficulty you have experienced in life. Knowing your mental patterns is the first step to altering those patterns, followed by training yourself to move away from thought streams that pull you out of a sense of ease.
Mindfulness training throughout the day helps you maintain a sense of ease in two ways. First, it expands your range of what is tolerable, allowing you to stay with experiences without needing to change what is going on. Second, by noticing what you are thinking about when sensations, feelings, and emotions arise in your body, you are able to name what you are experiencing, such as anxious feelings, memory, or anticipation, allowing you to essentially stand outside of the experience—if you can name “it,” you are not “it.”
You can sharpen your skill at recognizing these connections by training yourself to catch reactionary thoughts as soon as possible in the process, allowing you to make adjustments ultimately even before a disturbance in your mind begins.
There is a teaching in Buddhism referred to as the Eight Vicissitudes that everyone will experience cyclically throughout their life: loss and gain, disrespect and fame, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Each of these is an impermanent, temporary state.
All of us have had these experiences: some losses and some gains, times of recognition and times when our character is questioned, times of being praised and times of being blamed, times of great pleasure as well as times of pain.
The teaching behind the Eight Vicissitudes is that the wise person knows that attaching oneself to preferred states and avoiding the undesired states is futile—all is changing in cyclic measure. By cultivating mindfulness, you learn to abide in the place within you that is aware of these changing cycles, resting peacefully within, observing but not attaching yourself to the highs and lows of this human existence.
It is important to maintain a regular meditation practice of your choice to sustain the benefits; otherwise, it is very easy for the mind to slip back into its old ways. With regular practice, your clarity improves, enhancing your ability to see things as they actually are—without judgment. Defensiveness toward others transforms into empathy and curiosity about their experiences. By practicing regularly, you create new neural networks in your brain—neurons that fire together create new patterns of responding to others, making it easier and easier to sustain a state of calm awareness inside while engaging in life outwardly.
If you continue your meditation practice for the rest of your life, you will do much to preserve your brain and slow down its natural aging process. Gray matter is the tissue holding the neurons and circuitry of the brain, allowing the brain to communicate with all parts of itself. Although there is a natural loss of gray matter in the brain caused by aging, studies (such as the one by a group of researchers at UCLA led by Eileen Luders in 2014) show that those who have meditated for twenty years show significantly less loss of gray matter throughout their entire brains compared to those of the same age group who did not practice this inner discipline.
Changing the Inner Dialogue from
Chatter to Higher-Mind Coaching
Even after years of training in quieting your mind, the inner voices remain. However, you can change the source of your inner dialogue so that you are not listening to the chatter of your Lower Self—instead, you can rewire your mental circuitry to listen to the direction and promptings of your Higher Self. Sometimes called the still, quiet voice within, it is there, but it is often drowned out by the busy traffic of the everyday mind.
Your Higher Self can be your guide that is with you all day long—coaching you, encouraging you, and reminding you when you drift out of awareness. Train yourself to listen to that voice. If there is going to be an inner dialogue going on all day long anyway, let it be with your Higher Self.
When you are dealing with a difficult emotion, let your Higher Self encourage and coach your Lower Self back to a state of ease of mind. Tell yourself It’s okay, we can handle this. This too shall pass, and I can accept this. This is training yourself to move away from aversion. Aversion is just as strong as desire in skewing your perception of the truth of the moment. With aversion comes a tightening of your energy field, narrowing your range of what you can experience in life. By attempting to control life to fit in with what is acceptable to you, this narrowing of what is tolerable limits the highs as well.
As you continue with your meditation practice, your energy field begins to change and have a subtle influence on those you come in contact with. Even if only one person in a family is meditating, the whole family benefits from there being a peaceful center in the midst of all the family chaos. Even if only one person in a relationship is meditating, the relationship is benefitted by the increased openness and diminished defensiveness of the meditator. Even if only one person in a workplace is meditating, the entire workplace benefits from the peaceful, calm presence of the one.
Whatever your lifestyle, know that as a meditator you are becoming a demonstration of how to live in peace and ease with yourself in a world that is often troubled. With the changes that take place within you, you are in the same world as others but not of the same world. You are being sustained from a different source. Know that your efforts will have a ripple effect, supporting others seeking to soothe their troubled minds.
May you find inner peace and fulfillment from your meditation practice, and may you share your glad heart and peaceful presence with others in the world.