In addition to the ethical foundation on which mindfulness practice rests, there is also a complementary attitudinal foundation.
I have been alluding to it all along when speaking of the affectionate quality of attention and the need for being gentle and non-judgmental with ourselves. There are many more than seven, but these seven attitudes are fundamental. The others — including generosity, gratitude, forbearance, forgiveness, kindness, compassion, empathic joy, and equanimity — develop through the cultivation of these seven: non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.
We’ve already seen why a non-judging attitude is so important if we are to see past the automatic and usually unexamined ideas and opinions we have about pretty much everything. When you begin paying attention to what’s on your mind, you rapidly discover that basically everything is a judgment of one kind or another. It is good to be aware of this. No need to judge the judging or try to change it. Just seeing it is enough. Then true discernment can arise, a seeing things as they are. Not-knowing is akin to not judging. When we don’t have to immediately know everything, we can be open to seeing with fresh eyes.
So when you begin to practice the guided meditations, notice how frequently judgments of various kinds arise. You only need to recognize them.
We are always trying to get someplace else. We have a strong need to be on the way to some better moment, some better time when it all will come together for me. We can so easily become impatient and driven. Of course, this prevents us from being where we already are. The classic example is the child who wants to make the butterfly come out of the chrysalis sooner because it would be so nice to have the butterfly. So he just innocently peels apart the chrysalis, without any understanding that things unfold in their own time.
Patience is really a wonderful attitude to bring to mindfulness practice because the practice of mindfulness is already, in some fundamental sense, about stepping out of time altogether. When we are talking about the present moment, we are talking about now; we are talking about “outside of clock time.” We’ve all had moments like that. In fact, we have nothing but moments like that, but we ignore almost all of them, and it’s just once in a blue moon that we will experience a moment when time stops for us.
But actually, we can learn how to step out of clock time, how to drop into the timeless quality of now through the practice of mindfulness itself. This can give us a lot more time in our lives. Why? Because when we are mindful and inhabit each moment, we have, to a first approximation, an infinite number of them between now and the time we’re going to die. That is a lot of time for living. So there is no hurry, and we can remind ourselves of this periodically and thereby embody greater patience.
We’ve already touched on the value of this attitude. We may need to call upon our beginner’s mind over and over and over again, moment by moment, because our ideas and opinions and our expertise so easily cloud our ability to recognize what we don’t know. As we’ve seen, resting in the awareness of not knowing is incredibly important in seeing with any clarity, with any creativity, and for living with integrity.
In your very first encounter with this program, you may have still had a beginner’s mind. But somewhere along the way, and it is pretty much inevitable, you may lose your beginner’s mind for a time.
Perhaps with continued practice and reading, you will come to think you know something about meditation. If that occurs, you have probably already lost your beginner’s mind momentarily. So it may be wiser to keep in mind how little anybody really knows about meditation. If you meet senior monks or nuns, even high lamas in the Tibetan tradition, or monastics and teachers — men and women — in other traditions, they will invariably tell you that they know very little. They typically display great humility and modesty. They might say, “You should really be studying with somebody else.” Lamas with decades and decades of meditation training and practice and teaching may say, “I don’t really know anything.” And they’re not joking, it’s not false modesty — it’s a signature of a beginner’s mind. One Zen Master is famous for having described his forty years of teaching as “selling water by the river.”
Beginner’s mind is an attitude. It doesn’t mean you don’t know anything. It means that you are spacious enough in that moment to not be caught by what it is that you do know or have experienced in the face of the enormity of what is unknown.
If you think about the beauty and joyfulness of young children, some of that comes out of the freshness of beginner’s mind. The challenge for us as adults is to see whether we can meet each moment and recognize it as fresh and therefore interesting — after all, we’ve never seen this one before. If you take a “you’ve seen one moment — or one breath — you’ve seen them all” attitude, you’re going to get very bored cultivating mindfulness. Of course, even that doesn’t have to be the end of the journey. You can just be aware of how bored you are watching your breath or your thoughts, for instance. And as we have seen, in that awareness you can ask yourself, “Is my awareness of my boredom bored?” If you investigate carefully, the answer will likely be, “Not at all.” Your awareness isn’t caught by your boredom.
In fact, with the attitude of beginner’s mind, boredom can become unbelievably interesting. As you watch it, you might find that it dissolves into something much more interesting, another mind-state. That is equally true for virtually every mind-state, including the ones that we feel completely tyrannized by or are so terrified of that we don’t even acknowledge to ourselves that we experience them: “Who me? Frightened? Scared? Tense? Not me.” Can you hear the story of “not me”? That’s the story of “me.”
The fourth attitudinal foundation of mindfulness is trust. Again, this is not some dime-store, goody-two-shoes notion of trust. We can ask: What is worthy of trust? Can we trust what we know? Can we trust what we know we don’t know? Can we trust that things unfold in their own time and that we do not have to fix everything or even anything? Can we trust our own intuition in the face of contradiction by others? Can we trust that we are our own person?
On another note, can you trust what you think? Can you trust your ideas and opinions? Often they are unreliable because it is so easy for us to misperceive, misapprehend, mis-take what is actually going on. Maybe what you think is true is only true to a degree. Could that be so? Might it not be that we can be blinded to new possibilities by the unexamined assumption that our view is absolutely true?
If you can’t entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it’s proven to be inaccurate — and then trusting that discovery?
What about trusting your senses? As you know, every sense can be tricked. So we may not be able to place an absolute trust in the senses, or in appearances. Still, perhaps we could experiment with training ourselves to be somewhat more in touch with the senses and see if we can develop a greater intimacy with what they reveal if we are attuned to them. This, of course, is akin to trusting the body.
Can you trust your body? Do you trust your body? What if your body had cancer in the past or has cancer now? Is there still room to find trust? Is there a sense that there might still be much more right with it than wrong with it — no matter what is wrong? Perhaps your attitudinal orientation can mobilize what is right with your body to live life as fully as possible while not knowing what is going to happen. Can we trust that not knowing? Sometimes yes, perhaps; sometimes no, sometimes we don’t know. That “don’t know” might itself be something you can trust.
The fifth attitudinal foundation — this is a real kicker for Americans — is non-striving. Non-striving? What are you talking about? This sounds really subversive, even un-American. We are the proverbial go-getters, megadoers. We could re-name our species “human doers.” As a culture, we are really into doing, making progress, and always needing to get somewhere. So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious — even foreign — to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.
Non-striving is related to the timeless quality of the present moment we call now. When we inhabit the present moment in the formal practice of meditation, there really, really, really is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain. Meditation is not like anything else you’ve ever taken on, such as learning to drive a car, where once you learn it, it becomes automatic, a skill that you use and never think about. That may be why there are fifty thousand fatal traffic accidents in the United States every year. At any given moment, perhaps the majority of us drivers are off someplace else, hardly in the car at all. We may be driving around but not really paying attention, maybe absorbed to one degree or another in a cell-phone conversation or what we are hearing on the radio. And even if you are not on the phone or distracted in some other way, well, in a sense the mind is often lost in thought, talking to itself. So perhaps if it is you behind the wheel, it would be a good idea to give yourself a call — via your internal “mindfulness network” — and remind yourself to stay in touch with what is unfolding out the windshield in front of you moment by moment.
Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There’s no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now. It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters. If you don’t pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India, said, “You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.” T. S. Eliot put it this way in “Four Quartets,” his last and greatest poem: “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.”
Even the tiniest little bit of reminding ourselves that “this is it,” that we are alive now, that we are already here, can make a huge difference. For in fact, as we have seen, the future that we desire to get to — it is already here. This is it! This moment is the future of all the previous moments in your life, including those in which you thought about and dreamed of a future time. You are already in it. It is called “now.” How you are in relationship to this moment influences the quality and character of the next moment. In this way, we can shape the future by taking care of the present. What a remarkable opportunity.
What is the purpose of living? Is it only to get someplace else and then when you’re there realize that you are still not happy and you now want to be someplace else? If we are not careful, it may always seem like there is some better time over the horizon: “when I retire, when I graduate from high school or college, when I make enough money, when I get married, when I get divorced, when the kids move out.” Wait a minute … This is it! This really is your life. You only have this moment. All the rest is memory (which is also here now) and anticipation (which is also happening here and now). This moment is as good as any other. In fact, it’s perfect. Perfectly what it is. And this includes everything that you might think of as its imperfections.
As we’ve seen, non-striving certainly doesn’t mean you don’t know how to get a lot done. Many long-term meditators manage to get a great deal of excellent and important work done in the world in a variety of ways and venues, in every conceivable job and calling. The challenge for all of us is whether our doing is coming out of being, at least to some degree. That is an art form all its own: the art of conscious or mindful living. Again, as we’ve already seen, life itself becomes the true meditation practice.
This is not to idealize the practice. It is very real and often messy. It is not about attaining some special state of bliss or quietude. It is perpetually challenging us, always revealing new and more subtle areas of self-identification and clinging, just like life itself. It is hard.
However, the alternative to mindfulness is likely to be a lot harder, and a lot more problematic. At least intending to live mindfully offers a chance, renewable in every moment, for greater emotional balance, greater cognitive balance, and greater clarity of mind and heart. It is also a form of relational intelligence and therefore, to the degree that we embody it, we are less trying for those who live with us or around us.
This brings us to the sixth attitudinal foundation, acceptance. This one is very easily misunderstood. People might think that it means that whatever happens, they should “just accept it.” No one is saying, “Just accept it.” As we have seen, especially with horrific occurrences and circumstances, coming to acceptance is one of the hardest things in the world. Ultimately, it means realizing how things are and finding ways to be in wise relationship with them. And then to act, as appropriate, out of that clarity of vision.
Acceptance has nothing to do with passive resignation — far from it. If things are going to hell in a handbasket, then that knowing — that awareness — of things going to hell in a handbasket can give you a place to stand, an orientation for taking appropriate action in the next moment. But if you don’t see and accept things as they actually are, you won’t know how to act. Or you might be overwhelmed by fear, and that fear might cloud the mind just when you most need clarity and equanimity, or at least, if clarity and equanimity seem elusive, just when you need to be aware of the fear so that you can find ways to work with it rather than have it work against you. So acceptance is a whole universe in and of itself, and really a lifetime’s engagement.
Let’s say you have a chronic back condition and you’re continually saying to yourself, “My life is over.” Perhaps you are looking back to a time before you had the chronic back condition and thinking, “This has ruined my life.” It may all be true to a degree, but can you see that this attitude closes down options for both the present and the future? Can you see that it makes for a very small story that you can easily become trapped in and that could readily lead to depression and despair — a story that could feed on itself and perpetuate itself, going on and on and on with no end and no significant change in sight? This thought-stream is known as depressive rumination. It is not a healthy path to pursue.
On the other hand, imagine that you simply take this moment, the one you are in, and hold it in awareness as it is, including any discomfort you are experiencing. Can you see that now the story is no longer the small, limited, inflexible story of you? That story may still be here, and it may still be true to a degree. But now you have a much bigger story, with a much broader perspective, admitting of many more possibilities. Can you see that if you can accept how things are now, the very next moment is already different? Can you see that it is instantly liberated from all the narratives we constantly saddle ourselves with that aren’t the full story? The practice can bring us back to how it is in the body right now. It is experience based, somatically based, present-moment based. It is generous, wise, and open to possibilities, to not-knowing.
Acceptance, as we are defining it, is an expression of lived wisdom. Not that it is easy to accept what is unfolding, especially if it is highly unpleasant. But you can see that the shift to awarenessing with acceptance immediately frees us from the narrative in our heads that says: “I’ve got to have conditions be just so in order for the moment to be a happy moment.” Such an orientation persists in clinging to ideas, opinions, and thoughts. But clinging is the opposite of acceptance. When we let go of having things have to manifest exactly the way we think we need them to in order to be happy or in order for us to even show up with awareness in the present moment — when we can hold whatever is unfolding, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, in awareness and allow things to be exactly as they already are, however they are — then all of a sudden it becomes possible for us to stand fully in this moment without it having to be any different. As we have seen, this rotation in consciousness itself is freedom, is already a moment of liberation. It comes from acceptance, but it is not mere acceptance. It is certainly not passive resignation, nor is it turning yourself into a doormat and letting the world or life or other people trample all over you. It is apprehending the actuality of things so you know what is what — or know you don’t know.
Then in the next moment, if it is appropriate to act, you act. But you will act out of mindfulness, out of heartfulness, out of some kind of emotional intelligence instead of being hijacked by whatever your feelings are about what you feel you cannot accept. Or you won’t, or it won’t be as mindful as you hoped it would be, and you will learn from that.
It can take a long time to come to acceptance around certain issues — usually the hardest ones, the most traumatic ones. Sometimes you may have to go into and experience denial for a time; sometimes you may have to experience anger or rage; sometimes you may have to meet and accept your grief. But ultimately the challenge is, “Can I accept things the way they are, moment by moment by moment?” “Can I accept things the way they are now?”
The last foundational attitude of mindfulness practice is letting go. Letting go means letting be. It does not mean pushing things away or forcing ourselves to release what we are clinging to, what we are most strongly attached to. On the contrary, letting go is akin to non-attachment, and in particular, nonattachment to outcome, when we are no longer grasping for what we want, what we are already clinging to, or what we simply have to have. Letting go also means not clinging to what we most hate, what we have a huge aversion for. Aversion is just another form of attachment, a negative attachment. It has the energy of repulsion, but it is clinging just the same. When we purposefully cultivate an attitude of letting things be as they are, it signifies that you recognize that you are much bigger and more spacious than the voice that keeps saying “This cannot be happening,” or “Things have to happen this way.” When you let things be as they are, you are aligning yourself with that domain of being that is awareness itself, pure awareness. In this way, you are affirming for that moment that you are no longer the product of your thoughts and their endemic fixation on the personal pronouns. As we have seen, even thinking and selfing can be held in awareness. They do not need to be either pursued or rejected, nor feared for that matter. They are just thoughts, events in the field of awareness. Still, awareness can hold them in such a way that they don’t have to imprision us anymore. We do not have to be a victim of our endless and unquenchable desires. When we see this, we can let go of both our cravings and our fears, we can let things be as they are, we can drop into being — and being this knowing. We no longer have to push anything away.
We may gradually come to see that this option may be the only sensible, sane, and healthy approach to experience available to us. It is immediately liberating. The more we let go in this way, the deeper our well-being.
The attitude of letting go, of letting things be as they are, of non-attachment, does not imply a condition of reactive distancing or detachment, and is not to be confused with passivity, dissociative behaviors, or attempts to separate yourself even the tiniest bit from reality. It is not a pathological condition of withdrawal adopted to protect yourself. Nor is it nihilistic. It is exactly opposite: a supremely healthy condition of heart and mind. It means embracing the whole of reality in a new way. But like mindfulness, and all the other attitudinal foundations, it is not an ideal or a special state. It is a way of being that is developed through practice.
As with all the other foundational qualities, we get plenty of opportunities to practice.