Although it is associated with meditation, the
Buddha taught his followers to practice mindfulness all the time. Mindfulness
can help us perceive the illusory nature of things and break the bonds of
self-clinging, help us overcome grief and sorrow as well as end pain and
anxiety.
Mindfulness in the Buddhist sense
goes beyond just paying attention to things. It is a pure awareness free of
judgments and concepts and self-reference. Genuine mindfulness takes
discipline and the Buddha advised working with four foundations to train
oneself to be mindful.
The four foundations are frames
of reference, usually taken up one at a time. In this way, a student begins
with a simple mindfulness of breath and progresses to mindfulness of everything.
These four foundations are often taught in the context of meditation.
Mindfulness of Body
The first foundation is mindfulness
of body. This is an awareness of the body as body - something experienced as
breath and flesh and bone. It is not "my" body. It is not a form you
are inhabiting. There is just body.
Traditionally, the "introduction
to mindfulness" exercise is a focus on just breath. This is experiencing
breath and being breath. It is not thinking about the breath
or coming up with ideas about breath.
As the ability to maintain
awareness gets stronger, the practitioner becomes aware of the whole body. In
some schools of Buddhism, this exercise might include an awareness of aging and
mortality.
Body awareness is taken into
movement. In this way we train ourselves to be mindful when we aren't
meditating, too.
Further, the practitioner compares his own body with a corpse
which he imagines he sees thrown onto a charnel ground; all that is left is a
collection of bones scattered here and there; in one place a hand bone, in
another a shin bone, a thigh bone, a pelvis, a spinal column, a skull, and he
observes, “This body of mine is of the same nature. It will end up in the same
way. There is no way it can avoid that state”.
Mindfulness of Feelings
The second foundation is
mindfulness of feelings, both bodily sensations and emotions. In meditation,
one learns to just observe emotions and sensations come and go, without
judgments and without identifying with them. In other words, it is not
"my" feelings, and feelings do not define who you are. There are just
feelings.
Sometimes this can be
uncomfortable. What can come up might surprise us. We humans have capacity to
ignore our own anxieties and angers and even pain, sometimes. But ignoring
sensations we do not like is unhealthy. As we learn to observe and fully
acknowledge our feelings, we also see how feelings dissipate.
“There is feeling
here,”we acknowledge until understanding
and full awareness come about. We remain established in the observation, free,
not caught up in any worldly consideration. That is how to practice observation
of the feelings in the feelings.
Mindfulness of Mind
The third foundation is
mindfulness of mind or consciousness. The "mind" in this foundation
is called citta. This is a different
mind from the one that thinks thoughts or makes judgments. Citta is more like consciousness or awareness.
Citta
is sometimes translated as "heart-mind," because it has an emotive
quality. It is a consciousness or awareness that is not made up of ideas.
Another way of thinking of this
foundation is "mindfulness of mental states." Like sensations or
emotions, our states of mind come and go. Sometimes we are sleepy; sometimes we
are restless. We learn to observe our mental states dispassionately, without
judgment or opinion. As they come and go, we clearly understand how
insubstantial they are.
We observe the mind from both the inside and the outside, remain
established in the observation of the process of coming-to-be in the mind or
the process of dissolution in the mind or both in the process of coming-to-be
and the process of dissolution, free, not caught up in any worldly
consideration. We are mindful of the fact, ‘There is mind here,’ until
understanding and full awareness come about.
Mindfulness of Dharma
The fourth foundation is
mindfulness of dharma. Here we open ourselves to the whole world, or at least
the world that we experience.
This foundations is sometimes
called "mindfulness of mental objects" because all of the myriad
things around us exist for us as mental objects. They are what they are because
that is how we recognize them.
In this foundation, we practice
awareness of the inter-existence of all things. We are aware that they are
temporary, without self-essence, and conditioned by everything else.
“There is an object
of mind here,”until understanding and full awareness come about. We remain
established in the observation, free, not caught up in any worldly
consideration. That is how to practice observation of the objects of mind in
the objects of mind with regards to the six sense organs, six sense objects, seven
factors of awakening, etc.
