Once you have established a foundation in formal practice and in allowing life itself to be both the real teacher and the real practice, you may discover that your natural creativity and imagination find many ways to carry the practice of mindfulness into different areas of life.
If you are a teacher, you may realize that it could be beneficial to teach your students the how of paying attention and to encourage them to cultivate greater awareness of the body, of their thoughts, and of their emotions both in the classroom and at home. You could think of it as teaching them to tune their instrument (of learning, creativity, and social connectedness) before expecting it to work optimally when they play it. This tuning and the actual playing that arises from it in all the forms that learning and inquiry, investigation and imagination take, reinforce each other over days, weeks, months, years, and indeed, an entire lifetime. The music keeps getting richer.
Exposure to mindfulness training by a skilled teacher can nurture greater emotional balance and intelligence in children, adolescents, and young adults. It can foster greater stress resilience and greater social intelligence and cooperativity — just what one would hope for from an enlightened and engaged citizenry. Many college professors are developing innovative curricula that incorporate mindfulness practice as a “laboratory” requirement and that investigate traditions of contemplative practice and their creative applications across a very wide range of disciplines in the humanities and in the sciences.
So if you are a teacher at any level, from preschool through graduate school, mindfulness may be a valuable ally in so many different aspects of your work and calling. It may also satisfy something deep within yourself that hungers for authenticity, connectivity, and a creativity that emerges as more than the sum of its individual components. It is profoundly satisfying indeed to feel the love of learning and a sense of adventure in discovery come alive in the classroom and see it manifest in your students’ work and lives through the cultivation of mindfulness. As teachers, we live for this.
For similar reasons, mindfulness could be an ally in virtually any profession. Very few performance-based jobs would not benefit from greater awareness brought to the critical elements that lead to optimal productivity and staff satisfaction. Training in mindfulness is now being used by Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies to optimize performance in team-based projects, and to catalyze embodied leadership, innovation, creativity, emotional intelligence, and effective communication.
The military is also making use of mindfulness training to deal with the huge social costs of multiple deployments on troops and families, as well as to refine training that instills in soldiers greater stress resilience and greater discernment and restraint in counter-insurgency situations. This training is in part to hopefully dramatically reduce civilian casualties during combat operations in which the enemy doesn’t wear uniforms, civilians are everywhere, and the soldiers themselves might be terrified.
Presumably mindfulness could be of profound use in the political process, where the intrinsically toxic forces of greed, aversion, delusion, and selfing often hold sway and may all too often obliterate any good intentions, intrinsic wisdom, integrity, and civility that may have originally inspired our political office holders to try to make a creative contribution to the well-being and betterment of our country.
Closer to home, bringing mindfulness to one’s parenting — whether with newborns and small children, or with older children — can provide a vast and powerful universe of options for nurturing our children while continuing to develop and grow in our lives ourselves. The same can be said for mindful childbirth, mindful care of the elderly, mindfulness brought to the domain of sports and recreation, and mindfulness in the domain of the law and other social institutions.
So whatever your work, whatever your passions in life, you may find that mindfulness shows you new ways to enhance and optimize both your effectiveness and your enthusiasm for your work, ways that feed your innate creativity and fulfill your need for satisfying human relationships based on authenticity and good will. Those impulses — if brought to fruition through deep reflection and ongoing cultivation through practice and experimentation — can transform the world in ways little and big. In that sense, every single one of us is an agent of wisdom and transformation, of insight and healing, of creativity and imagination in this inter-embedded network we call humanity.
We have, in our brief lifetimes, all the moments we need to take responsibility for how we choose to be in relationship to what is and to what might be if we follow our hearts and our intrinsic wisdom. This opportunity invites us all to engage wholeheartedly, each in our own way, in an ongoing adventuring in the domain of the possible and the not yet realized.