CHAPTER
5

Mindfulness: Awareness in Everyday Life

In This Chapter

Sometimes life can seem to be whizzing by too quickly; before you know it, another year is gone. How much of your life do you actually notice? The cliché encourages you to “stop and smell the roses,” but how often do you manage to do this, particularly in the midst of routine or stress? You may have a particular rose you enjoy smelling when you get home from work, but do you tend to miss much of what’s going on before you get home?

If you end up being unaware of many of the moments of your daily life, you probably also miss many opportunities to do things like appreciate the presence of a loved one or make a choice to respond to a situation in a fresh, rather than habitual, way. Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of, and present for, your life.

Zen offers tools for cultivating mindfulness, which is an essential part of Zen practice—and not just because you’d like to stop and smell the roses more often. Mindfulness is like the practice of zazen except it’s done while engaging in your daily activities. Given the difference in mode, mindfulness feels and manifests differently than zazen, but it involves the cultivation of similar abilities: the ability to place and hold your attention where you want it, the ability to pull yourself out of commentary and return to the present, and the ability to perceive things, including your own thoughts and feelings, more clearly.

ZEN WISDOM

“You don’t have to go to a month-long meditation retreat or move to a monastery to restore peace and balance to your life. They are already available to you. Bit by bit, daily mindfulness practice will help you uncover satisfaction and fulfillment in the very life you are living now.”

—Zen Teacher Jan Chozen Bays, MD, from How to Train a Wild Elephant: And Other Adventures in Mindfulness

The Effort to Be Mindful

Mindfulness takes work, and unlike meditation you can work on it all day long. First, you try to notice the ways you dismiss certain of your activities and experiences as unworthy of your attention or care, and work on valuing all parts of your life. Then, as in meditation, when you realize you’re daydreaming, worrying, planning, analyzing, or fantasizing, you return your attention to your present experience. Finally, you work on strengthening your habit of mindfulness in order to be able to remember to pay attention more often. This is often the hardest part, but over time there can be a great increase in the number of times a day your awareness opens up to your present experience.

Nothing Is Beneath Your Attention

The first step in mindfulness practice is to generate a willingness to be present for activities or times in your life that you might normally consider boring, burdensome, useless, annoying, or even uncomfortable. It’s easy to pay attention to something you like or something that interests you—a fascinating book, or a beautiful sunset. It’s much more difficult to pay attention to driving your thousandth trip home from work, sitting through an overlong meeting, or going to the dentist.

Still, do you really want to “check out” from parts of your life when you only have so many hours left on this earth? And, if you only pay attention to the interesting and enjoyable stuff, what happens if the conditions of your life change and the boring and unpleasant parts start to outweigh the good parts? Then it can seem like you’ve lost your life.

When you start to pay closer attention to your life no matter what, you’ll find that simple activities can be very pleasant and onerous ones are richer than you might think. For example, when you’re mowing the lawn, you can feel the vibrations of the mower in your hands and the way the vibrations travel up your arms but don’t quite make it to your shoulders. You can appreciate how the noise of the mower is loud but in a certain sense it’s peaceful—no distractions from your task because you can’t hear anything else. The fresh smell of cut grass fills your nostrils, and there’s a strange level of satisfaction you get from making perfectly parallel and barely overlapping diagonals across the lawn.

In another example, while sitting in a long, inefficient meeting you can recognize that there’s much more going on than a bad meeting. The rain outside is hitting the windows and cascading down the glass in a shimmering sheet. A friend makes you laugh inside because his eyelids are drooping despite how hard he’s trying to pay attention. The attempts of the meeting facilitator to get things moving reveal a great deal about the group’s dynamics. And through it all, miraculously, your body continues breathing. If you had simply decided to check out of the meeting mentally because it was a waste of your time, you would have been unlikely to have noticed any of these things.

ZEN WISDOM

“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance … we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes …. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

—Zen Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, from The Miracle of Mindfulness

If you’re like most people, you pay attention when you’re fully engrossed in a task or some kind of entertainment, but the rest of the time you let your mind wander. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; thinking can be very enjoyable, stimulating, and productive. It may be one of your life’s pleasures to ponder deep questions, imagine creative solutions, or play in your mind with words and images.

However, when your mind is free to wander, how much of the time is it actually doing enjoyable or fruitful things? Most likely, much of the time your mind is engaged in semiconscious, pointless activity like delivering judgments on each thing you encounter, rehashing scenes from last night’s TV show, or rehearsing speeches to your archenemy that you’ll never actually deliver.

Many people are shocked when they start meditation and mindfulness practice because they suddenly realize how chaotic and busy their minds are. Once you recognize the low quality of most of your mind-stream content, just being present with whatever is going on starts to seem much more attractive than just letting the mind buzz all day long.

Wholehearted Activity

Three levels of mind were described in detail in the previous chapter on zazen: pure perception, naming, and commentary. Just as in zazen, when you practice mindfulness you make the effort to let go of the commentary and return to the first and second levels of mind, which involve directly perceiving what’s going on around and within you. Mindfulness can be even more challenging than meditation, though, because generally speaking the more active your body is, the more active your mind gets. As a result, when you’re going about your daily activities, you’re likely to get caught up in a long chain of comments on comments and rarely pay attention to the incoming data of your moment-to-moment reality.

As you continually turn your attention to what’s actually going on around you, it’s important to realize you are not trying to do zazen while you’re walking around, driving, or working. Another name for zazen is shikantaza, or “just sitting.” When you’re doing zazen, this is all you’re doing—just sitting there. Keeping your awareness focused on the present in zazen involves awareness of an extremely simple activity in which you can set aside almost all of your volition (all you have to do is stay awake and upright). Because there isn’t much else going on, you can pay very close attention to what arises and falls in your own mind.

DEFINITION

Shikantaza means “only (shikan) precisely (ta) sitting (za).” This refers particularly to themeless zazen, as opposed to meditating with koans.

In contrast, mindfulness is cultivating awareness during activity; you don’t do zazen while washing the dishes, you wash the dishes. The experience is going to be very different from your experience of meditation, although you might say that mindfulness is a kind of meditation in motion. Ideally, mindfulness feels more like wholeheartedness than an effort to realize a self-conscious state of hyperawareness while doing something. When you’re wholehearted, your attentiveness and energy flow naturally into your effort.

At first your mindfulness practice might feel a bit like adding a level of self-conscious observation to your life, like “I am taking a walk, I am noticing the sensations from my feet as I walk.” That’s okay at first, but eventually you’re aiming for an even more complete engagement in your walking. This allows you to engage in more complicated tasks and experiences with mindfulness. You can wholeheartedly construct a database or get your children off to school, but it will probably prove awkward to effectively do a complex, demanding activity while adding to it a more self-conscious practice like intense awareness of the breath.

Remembering to Be Mindful

How can you remember to do something like mindfulness when you’re forgetting to do it—and thus, by definition, aren’t paying much attention to things outside of the content of your thinking? You have to be mindful in order to realize you’re not being mindful!

The hardest part about mindfulness can be simply remembering it. If your habit is to spend lots of time in the third level of mind (commentary), chances are good that you will get caught up in a train of thought before you even know it, and only later realize you’ve spent hours or even days rather oblivious to what’s been going on around you. When you finally realize you haven’t been practicing mindfulness, you might feel some frustration and wonder how on earth you can make yourself remember more often. There’s no quick, easy solution to forgetfulness, but every time you return your attention to what’s in front of you, you reinforce that action as a habit. Eventually you remember to pay attention more often, and for longer periods of time.

There are also tools you can use to support your mindfulness practice. The most important of these is the use of rituals, or patterns of behavior you can create around regular daily activities. Mindfulness rituals can be very simple, like making a habit of holding your coffee mug with two hands, taking a long breath before picking up the telephone, or spending the first five minutes of your morning commute in silence. Go ahead and get creative! Devise simple routines around mundane activities that remind you to be mindful and are conducive to the practice.

If you’d like some ideas, Jan Chozen Bays’ book How to Train a Wild Elephant is full of mindfulness exercises you can try in the midst of your daily life, like taking one bite at a time while eating, or paying special attention to sensations of hot and cold. The use of verses as mindfulness tools dates back at least 2,000 years (mindfulness verses appear in the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra, which was compiled in the first or second century A.D.). The verses are tied to specific activities or experiences, and generally include some kind of generous intention. For example, “As I fall asleep, I wish for all beings to be safe and at ease.”

There are ready-made verses available for your use in books like Thich Nhat Hanh’s Present Moment Wonderful Moment, appropriate for times like brushing your teeth, throwing out the garbage, or drinking a cup of tea. You can even post your verses in the places where you’re likely to use them.

Whether you’re using a ritual or verse, doing it along with the activity to which it is attached will eventually help you remember to be mindful. Sooner or later it will feel strange to brush your teeth without saying your mindfulness verse, or to balance a cup in one hand while trying to do two tasks at once. The rituals encourage you to pay attention.

Awareness of the Body

Mindfulness practice generally begins with cultivating awareness of the body. The body is a subject for your attention that is always present, available, and relatively uncomplicated. Body awareness encourages simple attentiveness at the first or second level of mind, rather than commentary and analysis (although anything can inspire active thinking if you let it). For mindfulness practice it simplifies things even further to concentrate on a single aspect of your physical experience, such as the sensations and movements of your hands, the breath, or simple, repetitive movements.

Hands

You’re almost always using your hands, so noticing what your hands are up to is a mindfulness practice you can do anywhere, anytime. You either watch your hands as they go about their task, or pay attention to the sensations in the hands, or both.

Even a moment or two of attentiveness to the hands each time you remember to do it means you can incorporate mindfulness into your day many times: when your hands rub your eyes in the morning, when they bring food to your mouth at breakfast, when they shift gears in your car, when they type on a computer keyboard, and when they pet your dog. There’s usually plenty of sensory input around the activities of your hands to keep your mind occupied for at least 10 seconds or so, and maybe longer.

One of the fascinating things about being mindful of your hands is that they often seem to belong to someone else, or to be operating on their own. They go about their complicated tasks with very little input from you—or, at least, the self-conscious part of yourself with which you usually feel identified.

In fact, if you start to consciously think about what the hands are doing, they often slow down or falter in their task, as if you’re getting in the way. This phenomenon in itself can be a useful subject for mindfulness practice, as it reminds you that your conscious self is only part of a larger flow, and you don’t have to mentally orchestrate the whole world. It can be calming to gently attend to the hands and feel like part of something greater.

Breath

Breath is probably the original Buddhist mindfulness object. As long as you’re alive the breath is with you, and it involves an intimate, complex sensation of repetitive movement that provides plenty of input to which you can pay attention. In addition, it’s an automatic bodily process that occurs without your conscious effort, so even though it’s a physical experience it’s fairly easy to observe the breath as if it’s entirely outside of your sphere of volition. This can make simple awareness of the breath—as opposed to analysis or control of the breath—easier.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

You may be tempted to think breath practice sounds too simple, or like it’s just a beginner’s exercise. In fact, breath awareness is a practice that can last a lifetime and has many levels of depth. One of the most ancient Buddhist texts, based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (after he became Shakyamuni Buddha 2,500 years ago), is called The Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing, and proposes that full awareness of breathing can be a gateway to enlightenment.

There’s nothing special about being mindful of your breath; you can turn your attention to it in an instant, and it can be a very simple, natural experience. You don’t need to get absorbed in your breath, and you don’t want awareness of it to shut out awareness of other things. Intense attention to the breath in meditation is different. In that case your whole awareness might be filled with the breath, and there’s no limit to the level of detail you can notice in the sensations of the breath.

In mindfulness of the breath, you simply become aware of being a breathing organism in the midst of your conditions. Although the practice sounds simple, it can be extremely useful to be able to settle into awareness of the breath at difficult or stressful times; many people find it grounds them and helps them deal with their circumstances more effectively.

Movement

Another classic object for mindfulness is simple physical movement. Movement of any kind can be used for mindfulness practice, but slow, careful movements like stretching or very slow walking are the most conducive to calm, sustained attention. Generally, the faster your body is moving and the more complicated the movement, the faster your mind will be tempted to “move.” However, an all-consuming physical activity like dancing or running can also be a good opportunity for mindfulness practice.

The classic Buddhist mindful movement exercise is slow walking meditation, which in Zen is called kinhin. (You can take the description of kinhin given here and apply it to other movements you would like to use as an object of mindfulness.) In kinhin you coordinate your walking with your breathing and take very small steps. Don’t alter your breathing, and start with one foot about half a foot-length in front of the other.

At the beginning of your inhalation, start to shift the weight off your back foot. At the end of the inhalation, that foot will end up free to move forward about one foot-length (ending up half a foot-length in front of the other foot). As you exhale, gradually shift half of your weight onto the front foot. Then as you inhale, shift the weight off your back foot, as before. Repeat the process for as long as you would like to do walking meditation. Walk around the perimeter of a room, or choose two points and walk back and forth between them.

DEFINITION

Kinhin is walking meditation. It can be done slowly and timed with your breathing, as described in the text, or very quickly. In either case the goal is to keep the attention entirely on your movement. Kinhin is often done in Zen groups between periods of zazen.

If you practice mindfulness of faster movements, you’ll need to pay more attention to flow and energy, but if you’re doing something slow like walking meditation, the idea is to strive for your entire attention to be on the movement. In zazen you are just sitting, in kinhin you are just walking.

A similar intensity and continuity of attentiveness can be attained when practicing mindfulness of a slow movement. To do this you use the movement to anchor your attention in the same way breath can be used to anchor your zazen. Allow the movement to be either the object of your concentration, or the center of your expansive awareness (see Chapter 4 for more about this technique for cultivating attention).

Taking Care with Everything

Another way to think of mindfulness is taking care of each and every thing (or person, or situation) you encounter. While the effort to pay attention to activities and experiences increases the strength of your attention “muscle” in the same way seated meditation does, you can approach the practice with more feeling. If you’re trying to take care of, or be with, something, you have to pay attention to it. At the same time, you have a chance to give up a bit of your self-centeredness and cultivate appreciation for each thing you encounter in your life.

Valuable, Not Valuable

If you think something is very valuable, you naturally handle it very carefully and mindfully. If I hand you an earthenware vessel from a museum and tell you it’s worth five thousand dollars, you’re going to be sure to clean your hands before you touch it, handle it with both hands, and pay close attention to it the whole time you have it so it doesn’t accidentally fall and break. On the other hand, if you grab a cheap garage-sale bowl out of your cupboard for your cereal, you probably won’t even think twice about where you set it except to make sure it doesn’t spill cereal on your floor.

When you think something is unimportant or easy to come by, you tend to have an attitude of dismissiveness toward it. This dismissiveness is a thinly veiled rejection of part of your life, which you will subsequently miss because you aren’t paying much attention to it. When you discriminate too much between valuable and cheap, rare and common, important and unimportant, beautiful and ugly, delicious and bland, you start to see everything in the whole world through a filter: how much does it matter to you?

Even if selflessness is not your goal, looking at everything through this filter of self-concern sets you up for lots of agitation and disappointment when you are deprived of the things (or people, or experiences) you value, and are instead surrounded by what you categorize as junk.

Respect and Attention

You can practice taking care with everything, regardless of how you might objectively value it. In a Zen Center you take your shoes off when you come in to spare the carpet, even if the carpet is kind of old and shabby. You place your shoes on a shelf, side by side, lined up in a row with everyone else’s. Doing so, you take care of your shoes and show respect for the place of practice.

At home you can try to use only one paper towel to dry your hands, and then place it mindfully in the can for compost instead of the can for garbage. You can try not to slam doors, bang pots, or waste water. In this culture of care and respect, you quickly learn not to dismiss or be careless with anything. You end up paying close attention to each thing—voilà, mindfulness!

If you’re in a room full of people—and mindful yourself—it quickly becomes obvious which people practice mindfulness and which do not. The unmindful person will accidentally drop a wrapper and not even notice. The mindful person next to them will quietly pick it up and throw it away. The unmindful person will stand smoking under a no-smoking sign, or neglect to pay attention while their dog leaves an unpleasant surprise on someone else’s lawn. The mindful person will notice these things and behave more respectfully and carefully, but not because they’re morally superior; the unmindful people would probably say, “Oops!” if they realized what they had done. It’s just that mindful people are much more likely to perceive what’s going on around them and be thoughtful about how they respond.

The Least You Need to Know