Welcome to the practice of mindfulness. You may not know it, but if you are coming to the systematic cultivation of mindfulness for the first time, you may very well be on the threshold of a momentous shift in your life, something subtle and, at the same time, potentially huge and important, which just might change your life. Or, to put it differently, you may discover that cultivating mindfulness has a way of giving your life back to yourself, as many people who get involved with mindfulness practice through mindfulness-based stress reduction tell us it has for them. If mindfulness does wind up changing your life in some profound way, it will not be because of this book, although it could possibly be instrumental, and I hope it will be. But any change that comes about in your life will be primarily because of your own efforts — and perhaps in part because of the mysterious impulses that draw us to things before we really know what they are: intimations of what might be emanating from a deep intuition that we discover is truly trustworthy.
Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. It is one of many forms of meditation, if you think of meditation as any way in which we engage in (1) systematically regulating our attention and energy (2) thereby influencing and possibly transforming the quality of our experience (3) in the service of realizing the full range of our humanity and of (4) our relationships to others and the world.
Ultimately, I see mindfulness as a love affair — with life, with reality and imagination, with the beauty of your own being, with your heart and body and mind, and with the world. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is. And that is why it can be so valuable to experiment systematically with cultivating mindfulness in your life, and why your intuition to enter into this way of being in relationship to your experience is so healthy.
In the spirit of full disclosure, this book started off as a Sounds True audio program — one that people found useful over the years. One CD included guided meditation practices, and these are the guided meditations that you will find accompanying this book and described in Part 5. As you will come to learn, if you don’t know it already, the transformative potential of meditation in general and mindfulness in particular lies in engaging in ongoing practice.
There are two complementary ways to do this: formally and informally. Formally means engaging in making some time every day to practice — in this case with the guided meditations. Informally means letting the practice spill over into every aspect of your waking life in an uncontrived and natural way. These two modes of embodied practice go hand in hand and support each other, and ultimately become one seamless whole, which we could call living with awareness or wakefulness. My hope is that you will make use of the guided meditations on a regular basis as a launching platform for an ongoing exploration of both formal and informal mindfulness practice, and see what happens over the ensuing days, weeks, months, and years.
As we shall see, the very intention to practice with consistency and gentleness — whether you feel like it or not on any given day — is a powerful and healing discipline. Without such motivation, especially at the beginning, it is difficult for mindfulness to take root and go beyond being a mere concept or script, no matter how attractive it might be to you philosophically.
The first CD in the original audio program described the practice of mindfulness and explained why it might be valuable to engage in its cultivation to begin with. That material nucleated the text of this book, which now goes far beyond the original program and content in terms of scope, detail, and depth. Still, I have kept more or less to the original order of topics. I have also kept the voicing mostly in the first- and second-person singular and the first-person plural, on purpose, in the hope that it will maintain the quality of a conversation and mutual inquiry.
In both the text and in the audio program, we will be exploring together the subject of mindfulness as if you’d never heard about it and had no idea what it is or, for that matter, why it might be worth integrating into your life. Primarily, we will be exploring the heart of mindfulness practice and how to cultivate it in your everyday life. We will also touch briefly on what its various health benefits might be in terms of dealing with stress, pain, and illness, and on how people with medical conditions make use of mindfulness practices in the context of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs. We will point out new and exciting areas of scientific research showing that mindfulness training in the form of MBSR actually seems to change both the structure and the functioning of the brain in interesting and important ways, and what some of the implications of this might be for how we relate to our thoughts and our emotions, especially our most reactive ones.
Of necessity, we will only touch on many of these topics. Their elaboration and flowering is an ongoing adventure — and the work of a lifetime. You can think of this volume as the front door to a magnificent edifice, like, say, the Louvre. Only the edifice is yourself and your life and your potential as a human being. The invitation is to enter and then explore, in your own way and at your own pace, the richness and depth of what is available to you — in this case, awareness in all its concrete and specific manifestations.
My hope is that this book will provide you with an adequate conceptual framework for understanding why it makes sense to engage wholeheartedly and on a regular basis in something that seems so much like nothing. While mindfulness and the current high levels of public and scientific interest in it may indeed appear to some to be much ado about nothing, I think it is much more accurate to describe it as much ado about what might seem like almost nothing that turns out to be just about everything. We are going to experience firsthand that “almost nothing.” It contains a whole universe of life-enhancing possibilities.
Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world.
Once you establish a robust platform of practice using this book and its guided meditations, there are practically endless resources available if you want to explore mindfulness further. Connecting with the writings of superb teachers, past and present, can be invaluable at one point or another as your mindfulness practice matures and deepens. And if you make the effort to go on retreat with some of the great teachers of today, that could also be an essential catalyst in strengthening and deepening your practice. I highly recommend it.
Much of what I will be saying here is mapped out in much greater detail in other books that I have written, in particular Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; and Coming to Our Senses. Mindfulness for Beginners is meant to provide a straightforward, convenient portal into the essentials of mindfulness practice, including its formal cultivation and the essence of applying it in everyday life. Both will wind up being part of your ongoing work if you decide to say “yes” to the invitation.
The chapters here are by design brief rather than comprehensive. They are meant to stimulate reflection and encourage you to practice. Over time, as your practice takes root and deepens, as it will if you keep at it, these words may take on different meanings for you. Just as no two moments are the same and no two breaths are the same, each time you reflect on a chapter and bring what it is pointing to into the laboratory of your meditation practice and your life, it is likely to strike you differently. As you will come to know through your direct experience, there is a certain trajectory of deepening in the practice that will carry you along like a river. As you are carried along by the momentum of practice, you may discover, over time, an interesting conjunction between your own experience and what the words here are pointing to.
In launching yourself into the practice, you might want to experiment with choosing a particular guided meditation and playing with it for a few days to see how it feels and what it evokes in you. It is not just a matter of listening to it. The invitation is to participate, to give yourself over to the practice wholeheartedly moment by moment by moment as best you can. You can then use the text to round out the experience by investigating and questioning your understanding of what you are actually asking of yourself as you make the effort to pay close attention to aspects of life we so often ignore entirely or discount as trivial and unimportant.
In a very real sense, you are embarking on what I hope will be an ongoing adventure of inquiry and discovery about the nature of your mind and heart and how you might live with greater presence, openheartedness, and authenticity — not merely for yourself, but for your interconnected embeddedness with those you love, with all beings, and with the world itself. The world in all its aspects may be the greatest beneficiary of your care and attention in this regard.
Deep listening is the essence of mindfulness — a cultivating of intimacy with your own life unfolding, as if it really mattered. And it does. More than you think. And more than you can possibly think.
So, as you embark on this adventure in living, may your mindfulness practice grow and flower and nourish your life and work from moment to moment and from day to day.