What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

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The word Mindful or Mindfulness has a specific cluster of meanings, but it is not all that far from the way mama uses the word when she said “mind your manners.” To be mindful is to pay attention. To be mindful is to pay attention in order to cope with life and live in the NOW. But being mindful is more than just paying attention. For example, I can be aware that I’m acting like an irritable jerk, but still not be mindful of my irritable jerk-dumb-ness. To be mindfully irritable I would have to be deliberately conscious of where the sensations I’m labeling as irritations are located. If I were just aware that that I was irritated, my mind might also wonder around jumping from thought to thought. I might be rerunning the incident that sparked this irritation in me, and imagining me saying or doing something different this time and crushing my opponent, or I might also be watching TV, or answering my wife when she asks a question, and I have the ability to do several of these things at once.

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There are benefits of being mindful that come only from mindfulness. You see, when you practice mindfulness you can study yourself, what you are feeling at the very moment you are feeling it, and you can explore that feeling without getting all mired by the guilty past or entangled in your worrisome future. Just thinking is not good enough. If you just think, then the mind will wander, and unleash all sorts of negative thinking and raw emotions including anger, yearnings, jealousy, self-hatred, depression, and every shade and shape of fear that resides within the folds of your brains. If you practice mindfulness you harness and manage your thoughts, which in turn promote insightfulness and inner calm.

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Unless you are practicing mindfulness there is no purposefulness to your awareness. There is no conscious effort to bring your attention back to the irritation, or the joy, or the walking, or the eating, or whatever it is that you are doing in the NOW. Being purposeful is an essential aspect of mindfulness. Having the purpose of staying with our experience of NOW keeps us in the present moment. Being in the present moment is a cure to all the negative emotions we feel. Mindfulness keeps us from chewing on the past or the future, regurgitating our guilt [the past] and worry [the future] and then chewing on them some more.

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If I am irritated and become mindful of how I am feeling in the present, in my NOW, the irritation eventually dissolves because irritation sprouts from the past and mindfulness is always in the present. If irritations are in the past and if the past no longer exists, then by being mindful you become aware that the irritation in your NOW is based upon nothing, and it is easy to let go of nothing. Mindfulness is a good way to live.

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If this were my only life, I would also want to live with mindfulness, so as not to miss anything. And I would want to live with generosity and compassion because they bring happiness here and now, and because I will not be able to keep anything in the end. ~Kornfield
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My ole shrink Dr. Frank Shultz use to tell me when I got upset, to: take two or three deep breaths, relax my belly, and then asking myself, “Am I safe?”

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Almost always the answer is going to be, “Yes.” If the answer is “No,” then it’s time to call 911 or run like hell. Almost always, in the present, in your NOW, you are safe. Mindfulness is where our calm, contented self lives.

Introduction to the gentle journey

". . . we easily get stuck in believing . . . that the way we've framed everything in our thoughts is how things actually are."

Steve Hagen

Four days after moving from central Florida to Oklahoma City, I failed to yield, our car was hit by a truck, and my wife has spent 6 days in the hospital and faces follow-up surgery to get back to a repaired self. We left Florida with great hopes that things would be a lot better when we returned to the place where we met and were married. Often the journey of life looks anything but gentle. Problems follow problems. Our pain makes it difficult to remember painlessness, and as for pleasure, forget about it if you're in pain. But if life is difficult it is because my mind brands it as difficult.

"Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is. . . . In yearning for anguis to be assuaged in such a ways, we reinforce what creates anguish in the first place: the craving fro life to be other than it is. . . . The more acute the anguish, the more we want to be rid of it, but the more we want to be rid of it, the more acute it gets."

Stephen Batchelor

Nothing that happens is as significant as what I think about what happens. Wanting, craving, desire, yearning are thoughts that turn the events of life into good or bad. Without want, craving, and desire, nothing that happens is good or bad, it is just what happens.

This does not mean that I don't suffer. It doesn't mean that I am not hurt by events, or that I am pained and unhappy by certain consequences and outcomes, because I am.

". . . look for moments of rest between waves of tears and anger and . . . rest in the awareness."

Kornfield

Living in awareness that good and bad are mental concepts will not eliminate our human reactions. We will still think, and feel that this event or that happening is either good, or bad. We still suffer. We still die. But even when we suffer, if we live with awareness, or what the Buddhists call mindfulness, we can't suffer in ignorance. There will remain at some place in our brain, this thought that it is our thoughts that are hurting us. We can suffer and surrender to hopelessness, or we can take on our problems and pains to gain insight, awareness, mindfulness, strength and peace.

"It is from hardship rather than ease that we gather wisdom. We need to develop the capacity to draw strength from our hardships . . . to ignite the thunder flame of our own heart and let it illuminate the stormy night."

Aung San Suu Kyi