Mindfulness (2)

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.