FOREWORD
What do we mean when we talk about “cultivating mindfulness”?
There is no question that mindfulness is one of the hardest things in the world for us humans to tap into consistently (even though it is not a “thing”), and even though we can taste it and recognize that experience of tasting in an instant, in any instant.
The invitation is always the same: to stop for a moment—just one moment—and drop into wakefulness. That is all. Stop and drop: meaning, drop in to your experience of experiencing, and for even the briefest of moments, simply holding it in awareness as it is—in no time, or to put it differently, in this timeless moment we call now, the only moment we actually ever have.
Luckily, if we miss this moment because we are distracted by one thing or another, caught up in thinking or in our emotions, or with the busyness of what always seems to need getting done, there is always the next moment to begin again, to stop and drop into wakefulness in this moment of now.
It seems so simple. And it is.
But it is not easy.
In fact, looked at one way, a moment of mindfulness, with no agenda whatsoever other than to be aware, is just about the hardest thing in the world for us humans to come to. And it is even harder for us to string two moments of mindfulness together.
And yet, paradoxically, mindfulness doesn’t involve doing anything at all. In fact, it is a non-doing, a radical non-doing. And right inside any moment of non-doing lies peace, insight, creativity, and new possibilities in the face of old habits of mind and old habits of living. Right in that or any moment of non-doing, you are already OK, already perfect, in the sense of perfectly who and what you are. And therefore, right in that moment you are already at home in a profound way, far beyond who you think you are and the ideas and opinions that may so shape and sometimes severely limit your view of the larger whole. Not to mention your own possibilities for experiencing that wholeness and benefiting from it. And most interesting of all is the realization that there is no “that moment” at some other time, except in thought. In actuality, there is only this moment for dropping in.
None of this means that you won’t get things done. In fact, when your doing comes out of being, when it is truly a non-doing, it is a far better doing and far more creative and even effortless than when we are striving to get things done without an ongoing awareness moment by moment. When our doing comes out of being, it becomes an integral and intimate part of a love affair with awareness itself, and with our ability to inhabit that space in our own mind and heart and to share it with others who are also engaged in that way of being as well—potentially all of us.
And none of this means, as is described in considerable detail in all four books in this series, that what you are experiencing has to always be pleasant—either during formal meditation practice or in the unfolding of your life. It won’t be. And it can’t be. The only reason mindfulness is of any value is that it is profoundly and completely up to the challenge of relating wisely to any experience—whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, wanted or unwanted, even horrific or unthinkable. Mindfulness is capable of meeting and embracing suffering head-on, if and when it is suffering that is predominating at a particular moment or time in your life.
We don’t learn much, if anything, about non-doing in school,* but most of us have experienced moments of radical non-doing as children. In fact, tons of them. Sometimes it comes as wonder. Sometimes it looks like play. Sometimes it emerges as concern for someone else, a moment of kindness.
Another way to put it is that mindfulness is all about being, as in “human being,” and about life unfolding here and now, as it is, and embraced in awareness. Therefore, it takes virtually no effort because it is already happening. All it requires is learning to reside in your direct experiencing of this moment, whatever it is, without necessarily thinking that it is particularly “yours.” After all, even “you” is just a thought construct when you put it under the microscope and examine it. If you do, you may discover that who you think you are is a very small and at least partially inaccurate account of who and what you actually are. In an instant, you can recognize how large the full dimensionality of your own being really is. You are already whole, already complete—as you are. And at the same time, you are part of a much larger whole, however you care to define it. And that larger whole, let’s call it the world, sorely needs that fully embodied and more realized version of you.
Our wholeness manifests in everyday life as wakefulness, as pure awareness. Our awareness is an innate human capacity, one that we hardly ever pay attention to or appreciate or learn to inhabit. And ironically, it is already yours, conventionally speaking. You were born with it. So you don’t need to acquire it, merely to familiarize yourself with this dimension of your own being. Your capacity for awareness is more “you” and more useful than virtually anything else about you, and that includes all your thoughts and opinions (important as it is to have thoughts and opinions, as long as we don’t believe them and cling to them as the absolute truth).
And since the paradox is that all of us are already who we are in our fullness, this means that in the cultivation of mindfulness, there is literally no place to go, nothing to do, and no special experience that you are missing or are supposed to have. The fact that you are able to experience anything at all is already extremely special. Ironically however, the truth of that is hardly ever recognized, as we quest for that special something that always seems to somehow elude or frustrate our desiring—perhaps that perfect meditative moment in your own fantasy of what meditation should produce if you were “doing it” correctly.
There is nothing to acquire because you are missing nothing and lack for nothing, despite what your habitual patterns of thinking and wanting might be telling you in any given moment. You are already whole, already complete, already alive in this moment, already beautiful just as you are. So no “improvements” are either necessary or possible.
This is it!
The only thing we are missing is recognizing the actuality of life unfolding in this moment—in the form of “you,” in the form of “me”—in every dimension of that unfolding in the timeless present we call now, and realizing it, allowing it to be apprehended and thus made real in its fullness. There are no words for this because words are merely, for all their power and beauty when strung together skillfully, elements of thinking about things and thus once removed from direct apprehension. At this point, we enter the domain of pure poetry, where we attempt to use words to go beyond words, to convey what is not possible to say in a prose sentence. At this point, we are tapping into what one colleague* tellingly calls implicational holistic meaning—much more akin to directly feeling something and knowing it in one’s bones, in one’s heart, way beneath the words and concepts we may apply to the experience later. Perhaps in the end, it is this capacity that makes us human rather than automatons. And it is precisely here that we intersect with the domain of embodied mindfulness practice.
The mystery of awareness is that it is truly beyond words. It is intrinsic to our being. We all already have it and we always have. It is closer than close. Yet paradoxically, I have already used an awful lot of words to direct you toward apprehending something that is already yours, and already you—who you truly are just by virtue of being human. I hope that my pointing to it in words resonates with you and in you at a deeply intuitive level, way beyond words and stories.
This book and the others in this series are full of words, thousands of them. And yet, none of them are anything but pointers, sight lines for you to look along, feel along, sense along as you stop and drop, stop and drop, stop and drop in, moment by moment. Into what? Whatever is most at hand, most relevant, most salient to you in the moment. Into the actuality of now, of things as they are.
Simple? Yes! Can you do it? Of course you can! Does it involve doing? Not really. Yes and no. It only looks like it involves doing. What it really involves is falling awake. And that, as we have seen, is a love affair with what is, and with what might be possible in the next moment if you are willing to show up fully in this one without any expectations or attachments to an outcome.
If you think of meditation as a doing, you might as well not pursue it—unless, that is, you also recognize that there is method in the apparent madness or nonsensicality of non-doing. In the ancient Chinese Chan [Zen] tradition, this is sometimes spoken of as the method of no method. This is where recognizing the unity of the instrumental (doing, getting things done) and the non-instrumental (non-doing) approaches covered in Book 1 comes in. Our intrinsic wakefulness can’t be hyped. It can’t be sold. It can’t be corrupted. It can only be pointed to and realized. And the only way to realize it is to get out of your own way for a moment and simply stop and drop in, stop and drop in, stop and drop in.
One convenient way to do that is by attending to experience via your senses.
So we can experiment: Is it possible for us to come to our senses right in this moment? Can we hear only what is here to be heard? Can we see only what is here to be seen? Can we feel only what is here to be felt? Is it possible for us to wake up to the actuality of this moment of now and to what we might call our truest nature—what lies underneath all our thinking, our concepts, perspectives, world models, religious teachings, philosophies, scholarship, etc.? None of that is essential to the process of falling awake—although, paradoxically, any and all of it might be beautifully relevant as long as you aren’t attached to it. The key is non-identification with anything as “I,” “me,” or “mine,” because we actually have no idea (or only ideas) about who and what those personal pronouns actually refer to. Thus, just asking “Who am I?” and then stopping and dropping into awareness, into not-knowing, underneath thinking, is the beginning and the end of all meditative practices. Stopping and dropping in. When? Whenever you remember. How about now? And now? And now? Nothing needs to change. You don’t have to do anything. Only remember.
As the world becomes more and more complex, and our days are filled with endless things to do and then cross off our to-do-lists, or moments when we are called to not just stand there but to do something, it is easy for us to become more and more entrained into narratives in our heads about what is going on and who we are in relationship to it all—about where we are going, or hope we are, or fear we might not be—and, in the process, lose touch with much of the beauty and wonder of being alive in the first place.
We construct identities, agendas, and futures for ourselves in our own minds, and then lose ourselves in those constructs, in our models of reality, and in our thoughts, which, even if they are true, are only true to a degree, definitely not entirely true, and usually not true enough. By that point, we are probably too busy, too caught up in the momentum of all the doing in our lives to remember that we could also be awake. We so easily default to an automatic pilot mode—descending into the familiar ruts in our thinking and our emotional life, getting caught up in going from agenda item to agenda item, and becoming more and more addicted to all the ways we have to distract ourselves through our devices and our so-called “infinite connectivity”—that we lose sight of what is right in front of us and of what is called for now, and now, and now.
The cultivation of mindfulness, both formally and informally, can pop that bubble right in the moment it arises, or as soon as we recognize what is happening. It can uncover and help us recover hidden dimensions of ourselves that we will need going forward more than ever if we are to be true to our own humanity and its full flourishing in the form of you. None of us wants to have “I should have spent more time working” or “I wish I had been more distracted” on our gravestone, but many of us act that way in how we allocate our energies and in the sum total of our missed moments. Mindfulness can be a counterbalance to all of that without forcing any of it to stop. It is only we who have to stop, and only for this timeless moment.
Since this book is about how to practice mindfulness in everyday life, let’s be clear about it… there is nothing other than everyday life.
Nothing is excluded from everyday life, including all the thoughts and emotions we might be having in any moment, no matter what is happening. In essence, if something is arising, whatever it is, it is taking place within the domain of our life. And so it becomes part of the “curriculum,” you might say, of mindfulness in that moment. (And if it is recurring, it becomes part of the curriculum in many many moments—because sometimes the curriculum doesn’t let go of us.) In the end, all our moments can be part of the cultivation of mindfulness, not just the times during the day that we carve out for formal meditation practice. Life itself becomes the curriculum. Life itself becomes the meditation practice.
Herein lies the very essence of the cultivation of mindfulness and of coming to our senses both literally and metaphorically. If we only have this one life to live, are we going to sleepwalk through it, lost in our thoughts and narratives and our emotions? Or are we going to find ways to wake up to the fullness of this moment and of what it might portend if only we were more in touch with and accepting of it and of ourselves in the face of anything and everything that can arise during a single moment or over the course of a day? This book invites you (and I should also say “us,” since I am no exception, and we are working together on this exploration and adventure, along with millions of others who choose to orient their lives in this way) to practice falling awake, moment by moment throughout the day. And also to practice it more formally at specific times, by setting aside stretches of clock time that are dedicated solely to being, with no agenda for doing or accomplishing anything (including even secret agendas for getting better at meditating!). The fullness of your experience in any moment is already complete, so there is no improving on it. The challenge is always, can we be here with it, for it, in it until we realize that whatever is unfolding in a particular moment is the curriculum of that moment? And thus realizing, as the old New Yorker cartoon of two monastics in conversation after a period of formal meditation suggests, “Nothing happens next. This is it.”
In these pages, from one end of the book to the other, we will be cultivating embodied wakefulness. Each chapter is really a different door into the same room: the room of your own awareness. Each doorway, and each of our senses of course, has its own unique and quite wonderful features. What unifies the practice though is that the room we are entering is the space of our own awareness, no matter which doorway we choose to enter through. We literally or metaphorically take our seat and ground ourselves in the practice without editing or judging whatever is arising in experience from moment to moment. As best we can, we do so without getting caught up in asking ourselves whether we are having a “good” meditative experience, or whether what we are experiencing is what we are “supposed” to be experiencing. If you are having it and you are aware of it, whatever you are experiencing is perfect for that moment—and perfectly what it is.
The real question is: “How are you going to be in relationship to whatever is unfolding in any particular moment that always turns out to be this one?” In other words, can you hold what you are experiencing in awareness without judging it in any way or creating a narrative that you wind up believing about your experience—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? The willingness to rest in awareness with whatever your experience of the moment may be (wanted, unwanted, or barely noticed; pleasant, unpleasant, or neither) invites a new way of being in relationship to experience altogether, including just how judgmental we are! It carries with it a new possibility of inhabiting a space of freedom far bigger than your likes and dislikes and your favorite perspectives on how the world works or doesn’t. And thus, for even the briefest of moments, it invites you to simply be who and what you already are—beyond your own name, your “story of me,” beyond thought altogether, or we might say, underneath your thinking.
What you will find is no secret, but at the same time it is a hidden gold mine. It is your own awareness embracing clear seeing, and thus greater wisdom. It is equanimity, and thus an unwavering stability of mind and heart, nurtured by deep caring and concern. It is an intrinsic love affair with life beyond our too-small narratives of who we are and how the world is. As we saw in Meditation Is Not What You Think, apprehending who and what we actually are in our fullness and how and what the world actually is in its fullness is a radical act of love and sanity. And this opens us up to the possibility of acting at least a bit more wisely in this world, and thereby experiencing the healing and transformation and liberation that come with those actions, moment by moment and day by day.
So the suggestion is to throw yourself into the formal and informal practices offered here as if there were no tomorrow, as if your entire life hung in the balance. Because in very real and important ways, your life does hang in the balance. And so does the full potential of your presence and effectiveness in the world, in your family, in whatever you chose to do, and in your very body and the way you carry yourself (and your body carries you) in the world.
This engagement takes a certain discipline and resolve. If you possibly can, it means to every day, whether you feel like it or not, both metaphorically and literally, get your rear end on a meditation cushion or a chair (or bed) and keep it there for longer than you feel comfortable doing so. It means putting out the welcome mat for the inevitable discomfort, impatience, boredom, mind-wandering, and plague of everything else that will arise. It means inviting them all to become your teachers and to help you shape how you choose to be in relationship with it all—the wanted and the unwanted, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the easy and the difficult. Herein lies not torture (although sometimes it can feel that way) but freedom—the freedom of not being caught in and possibly imprisoned by your own liking and disliking or endless narratives, none of which are true enough. In this mirror, the mind wakes up. It comes to know itself, to befriend itself and all experience. And in the process, you, whoever you are, come into being that knowing. In the process, you will know far better both how to be, and when doing is called for, what to do.
Have fun. And stay in touch. Especially with yourself. And know that you are not alone in cultivating wakefulness in all these various ways. We are all in it together, stretching the envelope, giving ourselves over to the practice formally and informally as best we can, and seeing/apprehending what emerges, and what is so for now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Berkeley, CA
February 20, 2018