If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Tranquillise Him

I marvel at the subtle and slippery nature of mindfulness in all of its guises, whether that be as a theoretical construct, a psychological process or a set of practices. Mindfulness resists all efforts to be pinned down. It presents itself as a vast canvas for our projections.

And project we do. The fields of health, education, business, politics, sport and entertainment are awash with mindful-this and mindful-that. Do such manifestations herald a kind of cultural transformation? What kind of future do they point towards? It has been 40-odd years since the ‘mindful revolution’ began and 20 years since it gained traction, yet any semblance of a ‘mindful society’ appears as far away as ever.

Cultural Appropriation

Ronald McBuddha

This is not to undervalue the many good-hearted and well-intentioned mindfulness practitioners in western societies or the growing army of trained facilitators who help stressed and struggling people through teaching meditation skills. But the evidence base for any systemic change is meagre. What we are witnessing is hardly a revolution, is it? The last 20 years demonstrate considerably more success at monetising mindfulness than mastering it.

What might the West have missed in the uptake? Answers to that pressing question can be found in both the forces that shaped mindfulness’s journey westward and the toxic influence of contemporary neoliberal ideology it contacted along the way. These would fill a book. Since this is a blog post, let me contribute just one image that captures something of the current predicament. Like all archetypal symbolism, this image shows up all over the place but rarely receives attention.

Unconscious Awareness

Meet the ‘crouching buddha’ (sometimes called the ‘resting buddha’). In the UK, where I live, statues like these can be found in gardens and on mantelpieces across the land. Even without any knowledge of Buddhist iconography, one might guess that this is a non-traditional form.

Crouching Buddha

Curiously, nobody seems to know when or where this form originated. I canvassed a selection of world-renowned scholars of Buddhist art, museum curators and antique dealers. None of them could say for sure. 

However, they did make highly uniform and educated guesses: the form is contrived; it is most likely between 20 – 40 years old; it was probably first manufactured in East Asia for the western consumer market. All asserted that its function is purely decorative, unlike traditional Buddha forms. As a symbol for western mindfulness, it’s a neat fit.

Ambivalent Attachment

‘Mindfulness’ may not be ‘Buddhist’ but Buddhism is fundamental to understanding mindfulness. Put on the spot, few western mindfulness ‘experts’ (trainers, researchers, advocates etc.) now dispute this. Yet many convey an ambivalent or confused relationship with Buddhism. When I have probed such people on this matter, their prevailing tendency is to retreat, one way or another, into the comfortable certainties of a secular-materialist worldview that has gone largely unexamined.

Each to their own. But the irrational part is these people are equally unwilling to disregard the Buddhist fundament. They may have a limited grasp of how contemporary subdivisions of traditional, secular and immanent Buddhism contextualise much of what they do, but they love the rootsy legitimacy that ‘ancient wisdom’ confers upon their work and so are happy to employ the B-word in fast and loose ways.

I wonder if these people privately worry that mindfulness de-ethicised and reduced to proficiency in present-moment attentiveness doesn’t make great sense. Perhaps they even intuit that the tangible, pragmatic benefits of meditation are necessarily linked to larger philosophical and spiritual enquiries that go beyond all isms. If so, such thoughts are rarely shared.  

‘Code-switching’

This ambivalence about the origin and complex nature of mindfulness often takes the form of ‘code-switching’ (read all about it in this important book). It works like this: the mindfulness advocate when engaging people in a secular setting (e.g. a school, boardroom or a funding organisation) deliberately downplays (‘switches off’) any reference to Buddhism. 

When that same advocate is around others open to Buddhism or where there is a perceived benefit to promote the spiritual aspect of mindfulness, they will ‘switch on’ the Buddhism to declare their mindfulness programme to be a vehicle for teaching the dharma.

I have been running mindfulness courses in secular settings for 14 years and can attest to how easy it is to ‘code-switch’, often without realising I’m doing it. It is deceptive and misleading. It leads to confusion for all concerned. It is not a good look for practices supposedly grounded in honesty and mutual respect. I feel relieved – a little embarrassed too – when my words are challenged and my insincerity is brought to my attention.

I wonder, too, if ‘code-switching’ might provide a clue for understanding some of the current dislocation of western mindfulness. For it is the kind of psychological sleight-of-hand that we tend to resort to when we don’t totally understand what we’re dealing with, or we haven’t thought things through, but we’re not willing to admit it. Rather than acknowledge our inconsistencies, we will obfuscate, prevaricate, complicate – do anything, in fact, to ensure that we remain in a state of comfortable ignorance. The crouching buddha nicely symbolises such a state of wilful clouding over.

Wakey Wakey

Sitting Buddha

Traditionally, Buddhist statues serve a purpose: to remind the observing human of wholesome qualities – joy, compassion, wisdom and serenity – they already possess and may further cultivate. Statues come in numerous styles and postures but they commonly display a certain vigour and grace. 

Statues symbolise not just the historical buddha but your inner one. ‘Buddha’ is an honorific title meaning ‘one who is awake’. It refers to the wise and compassionately aware aspect of you. How ironic that the crouching buddha form is ‘one who is not awake’ – a representation of a being who holds nothing in mind and is ignore-ant of the world.

An interesting thing you can do with Buddhist statues is to imitate them. For example, if you sit like the buddha in the adjacent image – grounded through the sitting bones, upright spine, shoulders relaxed – over time you will notice an energetic balance of mental calmness, stability and alertness. These qualities lay a solid foundation for the development of one’s practice. 

By contrast, try sitting like the crouching buddha. When I tried it, I felt confined and detached. It’s the sort of posture I could easily slide into if I were feeling listless or bored. It’s a posture that also engenders a certain self-consciousness and conceit, which are shadow qualities of mindfulness.

Crouching Buddha Hidden Meaning

On the upside, here’s a little scoop about the crouching buddha: he may be contrived but he has a precedent. According to Dr. Christian Luczanits, senior lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art at SOAS, there is a unique representation of the historical Buddha leaning on his knee from the Gandharan period (3^rd century BCE – 1200 CE), which resurfaced in a modified form in 13^th century China. It signifies the moment after enlightenment when the Buddha is reflecting on whether or not to teach his experience.

Thinking Buddha

It is, therefore, a thinking posture, not dissimilar to more recent sculptures such as Rodin’s The Thinker. Note that the head remains alert. It seems that even at his most vexed and in need of a bit of self-propping-up, the Buddha was regarded as a person concerned with how best to engage with the world. 

Alas the same cannot be said for his crouchy descendent, who is not thoughtful, regards only himself and is, therefore, a fitting symbol for all forms of McMindfulness that have wheedled their way into our lives over the last two decades.

So, the next time you see an advert for mindful baking, or read about soldiers improving their kill rate through meditation practice, or hear some ‘expert’ explaining how they can plot your mindful awareness on their new graph, you may want to pause to consider the subtle and slippery nature of mindfulness in all of its guises. And breathe. These are the proverbial blind men surrounding the proverbial elephant, knowledge slipping through their fingers. Be careful around them because they have the power to blind you too.

In these testing times, navigating the world of mindfulness is a job in itself. Know that you are not alone. There are many of us, sheltering indoors, doing our best to wise up. In idle moments we prop ourselves up on our knees in front of Netflix and watch Headspace: Unwind Your Mind the way you can’t not look at a car crash, while out in the back garden our little buddha statues doze quietly, cold as stone. It’s no revolution but at least it’s a wake-up call.

Origin of the Species

With its assimilation into popular culture as an everyday life practice, the story of where mindfulness came from often gets obscured, if not ignored. If you live in the West and are curious as to how you wound up sitting cross-legged on a cushion while watching your breath, here is a very potted history of mindfulness (in reverse chronological order).

It makes sense to begin with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the American molecular biologist who is sometimes regarded as a founding father of mindfulness due to his development of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme at the University of Massachusetts in the 1980s. It is true that Kabat-Zinn offers a significant starting point for the so-called ‘mindfulness movement’, but in terms of how mindfulness came to the West, he is merely the latest fresh-faced star in a much older and richer epic.

The Burmese Connection

Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues took their cue directly from Eastern meditation teachers – the kind whom westerners first began having large-scale contact with during the 1960s when travel to South-East Asia and the Indian subcontinent became a focus of counter-cultural interest. A significant point of contact here was the vipassana (insight) meditation movement. This was a popular outgrowth of Burmese Theravada Buddhism that distilled and democratised formal practices of mindfulness whilst retaining the ethical framework and social vision in which they were embedded. This movement went on to guide and influence many of today’s senior meditation teachers, including Kabat-Zinn’s, in Europe and North America.

Follow the mindfulness trail back further and two interlinking stories come to the fore. First, there is a revival of interest in particular meditation styles and techniques in late 19th/early 20th Century Burma, which was engaged in a counter-imperialist struggle against Britain at the time. The figureheads of this revival were the teachers who taught the teachers who taught the westerners of the 1960s.

The same colonial period also gave rise to the first serious western interest in ‘Buddhism’ – a term invented by British academics and missionaries. Some of these westerners ordained as monastics and became the first Europeans to self-identify as Buddhists. Others took up the subject for the purposes of academic enquiry, which would later prove just as significant. These developments took place in the context of what became known as Buddhist Modernism: the cultural fusion of traditional Buddhism and Western-style critiques of religion.

The Indian Connection

All Buddhist traditions, Burmese or otherwise, naturally trace their roots to the historical Buddha of ancient India. By virtue of curiosity, determination and liberal doses of good luck, European explorers in Asia during the 19th Century did the same by initiating a rediscovery of a longstanding tradition that had all but died out in its homeland.

Through chance detections of long-buried ruins, laborious excavations and the piecemeal deciphering of inscriptions on ancient relics, they wove together a tapestry of irrefutable facts about a distant past. This helped to give flesh and bones to a historical figure that many had, until then, thought a myth. Siddhattha Gotama, also known as ‘the Buddha’ – an honorific title meaning ‘one who is awake’ – turned out to be an Indian sage from the 5th Century BCE and, as it transpired, the architect of the core methods and forms of mindfulness in use today.

The Global Connection

In the centuries after his death, Gotama’s teachings were passed on, first by word of mouth, then in written formats, and later translated, reclassified, interpreted and reinterpreted. They travelled in all directions and in numerous forms. 

To the north, they melded with Taoism in China and also came to dominate religious life in Tibet. To the east, they manifested in what became known as Zen. From here, they would eventually sail the Pacific to pop up in North America, decades before Kabat-Zinn was born. Kabat-Zinn did not invent anything, rather he blended pre-existing Theravada and Zen practices with American Transcendentalism. He rebranded this composite as a scientific method that would be palatable to Western healthcare paradigms. The success of this rebranding exercise is what makes him deserving of a place in the story of mindfulness.

It would appear that Gotama’s teachings also went west during the Hellenistic period (1st - 3rd Centuries BCE), where they mingled with some of the practical philosophies thriving in ancient Greece, such as the Stoicism and Epicureanism.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Noble Action

Living in awareness cuts through erroneous divisions the human mind makes between ‘me’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. Anxiety loses its primary foothold when we learn to trust and be trustworthy. We can relax. As we come to know more of our innate connectedness to other beings, we are more considerate in how we treat them.

We incline to activities that align with our values, rather than being swayed by fads and fashions. We reflect on how we make a livelihood and the impact it has on others. We see the sense in rejecting association or involvement with destructive behaviour. When we witness mistreatment, cruelty and injustice, we more readily take a stand against them.

Taking Care of Life

Active engagement with this troublesome world is as much part of ‘practice’ as appreciating its joys and wonders. True mindful living is not reducible to watching the breath on a meditation cushion; it means being dynamically in the world, with eyes wide open.

Such a comprehensive ‘taking care’ of life is what links mindfulness organically to friendliness – the willingness to move close to, respect and connect with. To be discerning about what we consume, physically and mentally, and thoughtful about what we produce, in both word and deed, is to approach life with open hands and an open heart.

Becoming more discriminating in how we take in the world, and cognizant of what we put into it, leads to a more nourishing experience for everyone. Mindfulness takes the form of a rapport with other beings and greater tolerance of the vicissitudes of life. Whatever shows up, we breathe with it, respond intentionally, observe what happens and learn from experience.

Good Practice Guidelines

Mindfulness is rooted in an ethical foundation for living. Cultivating awareness goes hand-in-hand with freeing oneself from destructive habits and careless acts. A traditional five-fold scheme to support one’s practice is:

• To avoid harming living beings
• To avoid taking what is not freely given
• To avoid causing suffering through sexual behaviour
• To avoid speaking untruths
• To avoid indulging unmindful states through alcohol or drugs.

These are not commandments. They are training guidelines. They underscore the aspiration to live harmoniously with oneself and with others. They encourage awareness of one’s actions and the effects of these actions. For example, the point concerning intoxicants that cloud the mind is not a moral judgement on intoxicants, but a caution about their potential impact on the other four guidelines.

These five guidelines, expressed above as abstentions, also have a flipside. When lived by, they express themselves in their positive aspect, which are, respectively:

• To act with kindness and compassion
• To act generously
• To practise contentment in one’s relationships
• To communicate truthfully and recognise falsity
• To act mindfully.

Designed to foster a particular attitude to life, such guidelines are the symptom and product of authentic mindfulness practice. Interestingly, practitioners often spontaneously develop such ethical sensibilities despite having no intellectual knowledge of these traditional guidelines.

From: Mindfulness for Unravelling Anxiety, 2016.

Vintage Roots

As modern conceptualisations of mindfulness evolve and expand and, occasionally, stretch to the point of near meaninglessness (mindful mushroom-picking, anyone?), revisiting first principles is a journey worth taking.

Early Buddhist psychology, from which major elements of contemporary theory and practice derive, offers a range of concise definitions and colourful similes to illuminate precisely what the mental quality of mindfulness is and what it does.

Here is a short summary of just one of the numerous categorisations of sati (the term for mindfulness in the Pali Canon). This list relates to the key characteristics of sati’s activity:

Monitoring: Mindfulness is understood to monitor, supervise and steer other mental qualities. It is described as a ‘watchful charioteer’. This simile highlights sati’s qualities of steering and supervision of other mental faculties together with its vigilant nature, which can note specific objects on a journey (inner or outer) whilst simultaneously maintaining a balanced and broad awareness that serves the smooth and successful passage of the journey as a whole. 

Integrating: Mindfulness is a regulative, organising activity in meditation, which notes any lacks and deficiencies, brings in appropriate qualities and suitably applies them.

Stabilising: Mindfulness exerts a stabilising function in regard to sensory distraction, as described in the ‘simile of the post’, which likens six animals to the six sense organs of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. These sense organs can be restrained by the ‘strong post’ of sati, which exerts a stabilising function in regard to sensory distraction through its ability to tether the senses and ‘keep them near’. In this way, mindfulness remains aloof and impartial, but also connected to what is happening at the sense doors.

Protecting: Mindfulness guards the mind by helping to prevent the arising of unwholesome states through its clear view of a situation, as highlighted in the simile of the gatekeeper. Such a protective role comes about through sati’s ability to exert a controlling influence on thoughts and intentions.

Applying ‘detached’ observation: Mindfulness is a calm and non-reactive type of attention, which ‘stands back’ to observe phenomena, rather than interfere with them. It helps one experience all feelings with a detached outlook. This offers a more objective stance towards one’s experience. It is sometimes referred to as ‘bare attention’, a key aspect of sati in that it both encourages sense-restraint and allows one to see things as they have come to be, unadulterated by habitual reactions and projections.

Life By Autocue

As outlined in the previous post, it can be tricky to fully know what the mind is up to, moment to moment, as life unfolds in its typically novel, mundane, stimulating and ambiguous ways.

Investigating this process through mindfulness reveals intriguing truths about the behaviour of the mind. Many mental responses, such as reactivity to perceived threats, are hardwired. Learned habits and tendencies can seem equally fixed. Through practising awareness, we come to realise that we routinely operate in automatic ways.

Automaticity is not a bad thing. It confers advantages through allowing mental attention to dexterously flit to phenomena unrelated to the task-in-hand. Hence we can walk down a street and fiddle on our phones and make plans for next week because the act of walking down a street is not something we need to figure out or perfect anymore.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

The downside to automaticity is that we fail to show up for the occasion of our own lives and so rob ourselves of its innate vividness and many of its joys. You probably know the experience (retrospectively at least) of becoming so distracted that you lose all sense of what happens next, only to ‘come to’ sometime later.

The potential for profound disconnection from present moment experience is all the greater in this age of the internet and social media. With powerful technologies at our fingertips, we are encouraged and seduced into consuming information speedily and superficially. How our minds love to skim vast directories of language and inexhaustible banks of imagery in their quest for instant gratification.

Even when we are relatively undistracted and alive to our sensory experience, it is easy for our minds to unconsciously react to a flutter of boredom, a pang of desire or an unpleasant sensation and, before we know it, our fingers are swiping screens and our eyes or ears are glued to some arbitrary object in a virtual world. Before smartphones came along, the possibilities for such mental hijacking weren’t quite so endless.

Non-Superficiality

When we get distracted, we act without awareness of acting, that is, we do not see and comprehend what is happening as it is happening. Often it goes something like this: a subtle feeling arises, either pleasant or unpleasant (e.g. sensual desire, boredom, restlessness) => the mind reacts by seeking to either maintain or build up the feeling (if it’s pleasant) or to flee from or get rid of the feeling (if it’s unpleasant) => the reaction conditions a behaviour, such as the physical act of reaching for a phone or the mental act of going into thought and fantasy.

By contrast, when there is an awareness of the initial feeling, this chain reaction does not happen in the same way. The mind does not run off. It stays with the felt experience. Blind reactivity abates. Ensuing actions arise out of clear intentions. There is a sense of stability and agency.

This is mindfulness: the ability to stay with experience for a prolonged time, and to really investigate it in detail. It is the opposite of distractedness. In fact, one of the classical characterisations of mindfulness (from the Abhidhamma, an early collection of teachings in the Buddhist tradition) is ‘non-superficiality’. This is the understanding of how mindfulness does not skim over the surface or ascertain in a shallow way. It sinks into an object and facilitates a deeper knowing of it.

When you are mindful, experience deepens. This is a natural capacity you have, which is cultivated through practice. It is a lot more likely to happen when your phone is switched off.

The Social Value of Mindfulness (II)

There is something inherently conscientious about mindfulness. Practitioners often spontaneously clarify or develop ethical sensibilities despite having no prior intellectual knowledge of this side-effect of practice. Such experiences reflect pre-modern formulations of mindfulness.

The English word ‘mindfulness’ is a rendering of the ancient Indian term sati (more on that here), which means ‘recollection’. To recollect, expressed in the negative, is to be non-forgetful and non-distracted. The implication is that sati denotes the empowering of qualities of alertness and care.

This is neatly encapsulated in the Buddhist simile of the gatekeeper. A gatekeeper needs to be watchful and diligent in order to do the job. The job here is understood to be ‘guarding’ the mind, that is, being circumspect with what is passing through the mind, what is being constructed in the mind and what the effects of this will be.

Such a gatekeeper is envisioned as a sort of naturally wise, ethically sensitive, health and safety officer, who helps to keep out the foolishness and carelessness we are prone to while granting ready access to all the beneficial and wholesome mental qualities at our disposal.

Heedfulness

In Buddhist psychology, conducting one’s life in a resolutely mindful fashion is called appamada, which translates as ‘non-neglect or non-absence of sati’ or, expressed in its positive, ‘heedfulness’. Sati, established as appamada, is understood to have a social as well as an individual value – others necessarily benefit from one’s own practice of mindfulness.

How so? By being aware of one’s motives, thoughts, words and deeds, and their impact of oneself and others, one becomes clearer about what needs to be done, and what should be left undone. That is, one begins to relate to life appropriately by making clear ethical choices. One becomes more ‘response-able’.

Such a comprehensive taking care of life is what links mindfulness organically to friendliness – the willingness to move close to, respect and connect with. Whatever shows up, we breathe with it, respond intentionally, observe what happens, and learn from the experience.

Click here for Part 1.

The Social Value of Mindfulness (I)

Sometimes touched upon in contemporary training courses, but more often ignored or overlooked, is the ethical dimension of mindfulness. What, you might ask, has individual mind-training and solitary meditation got to do with ethical action?

In its simplest sense, to meditate is to develop your capacity to be on better terms with yourself. The intention, therefore, is to empower a harmonious and authentic relationship with one’s psycho-physical organism. Meditation is a friendly activity directed towards oneself.

Similarly, regardless of whatever you’re doing the rest of the time, while you are meditating you are neither engaging in nor intending to harm anyone or anything else. Meditation is, even by this minimal measure, a friendly activity towards other beings.

But the ethical dimension of practice goes much deeper. When we pay close attention to our experience, we invariably begin to discover more about the many shades of our mind, some of which are not so bright – the selfish impulses, the harsh judgements and distasteful prejudices that trickle through it and, indeed, cloud over it.

Guilt, shame, animosity, resentment, fear and hate… Oh yes, the whole toxic emotional cocktail resides within! Can we be honest, at least with ourselves, about that? Can we be on friendly terms with it all? Being honest and being friendly are what this practice patiently demands of us.

Cause and Effect

The intimacy of meditation can bring into stark profile the confusion, not to mention moral ambivalence, of the average human mind – all those “should I or shouldn’t I?” questions that nibble at the conscience.

As we pay attention, we begin to see and feel how certain movements in the mind, or the recollection of past actions and styles of behaviour, create mental disturbance in the here-and-now. We can experience this presently and directly in meditation.

The paradox is that such an experience is liberating. We become more attuned to cause and effect – how the way we act affects our mind, and vice versa. This leads to making healthy, skilful choices or, at least, to minimizing the painful impact of selfish, ignorant ones. We might already know, in our heads, that it is difficult to have a peaceful meditation practice if we are heavily invested in lying, stealing and abusing others. But to know that in our hearts is revolutionary.

In this way, the influence of mindful awareness extends from the solitude of formal meditation to quietly effecting change in the world. Behaviours adjust naturally towards the benign. Minds gravitate naturally towards the skilful. We come to realise, beyond doubt, that acting in friendly, fair and compassionate ways is better for everyone, including ourselves.

Click here for Part 2.

The Inner Gatekeeper

Modern and ancient perspectives on mindfulness broadly agree on its function as a protective mental quality.

This humble mental quality allows us to have a ‘clear view’ of the moment-to-moment flow of events in order to be ‘on guard’ for potentially negative and injurious psychological states. It is important here to distinguish between protectiveness and defensiveness, which is a ‘not wanting to know’. The quality of mindfulness always inclines towards ‘wanting to know’.

Mindfulness as a protective factor was first outlined in the ancient Buddhist simile of the gatekeeper:

“Imagine a fortress, at a frontier, which has a wise and experienced gatekeeper. The function of this gatekeeper is to keep out those he doesn’t know and to let in those he does. This is for the protection of those within and to ward off those without.

“In the same way, someone who is mindful is alert and able to call to mind even things that were done and said long ago. With mindfulness as his gatekeeper, such a one maintains what is helpful and benevolent, abandons what is unhealthy, and looks after oneself well.”

You can find a translation of the original discourse, which includes this simile, here.

Here, ‘being mindful’ connotes ‘taking care’. This is also the word’s most common English rendering despite its recent and gradual shift in meaning towards something more akin to ‘awareness’.

Staying Well

Not by coincidence, protective care-taking is the rationale for modern mindfulness-based psychotherapies, which predominantly aim to prevent the relapse of mental distress.

Take one example: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). This is a well-established, evidence-based treatment for depressive relapse first developed in the 1990s. Here, the researchers were seeking a ‘final solution’ to the repetitive nature of depression.

They found that, for people who had been depressed in the past, a small change in mood led to a large change in negative thinking, which could easily trigger a downward spiral into further depression.

They then discovered that this could be prevented if people were able to recognise their thought patterns relatively early on, so that they were able to ‘stand back’ and get some perspective on their experience.

It was the combination of these two discoveries that led them to adopt a fully-fledged mindfulness-based programme, which they would later name MBCT.

Such a programme, in effect, allows you to deliberately access and empower your internalised gatekeeper, cool-headed and wise, who quietly monitors your interactions with the world to enhance your sense of ease and to diminish your potential for suffering.

As a result, life smoothes out and becomes an easier ride.

Getting Tranquillised

In this so-called ‘age of anxiety’, there is a notable and understandable tendency to view calm states as desirable. There can be an equally strong tendency to conflate ‘calm’ with ‘mindfulness’.

For sure, there are connections between the two terms. But they have quite different meanings. The confusion seems to lie in a distorted view of mindfulness meditation as being some kind of bliss technology. Mindfulness has more to do with waking up to reality than with calming down*.

The prevalence of this confusion was brought home to me when I was asked to write a ‘puff piece’ about mindfulness for a glossy magazine on behalf of a health clinic I work at. Not that anyone asked me for a ‘puff piece’, of course, these things always go without saying. Feeling conciliatory, I duly obliged.

What mattered to me when writing the piece were two related things. First, to do my best not to mislead any readers new to mindfulness. Second, to dispel the misunderstanding that mindfulness is meant to be a way of calming down.

The latter seemed easy enough. I simply wrote: 'Mindfulness is often misunderstood as a way of calming down.' For good measure, later I noted that 'mindfulness is not about trying to maintain tranquil states.'

Flower Power

When the piece was published, I wondered why I’d bothered. On the front cover, the editors had used the cover line ‘Mindfulness and Calm’. On the page adjoining the article, there was a full-page exercise entitled ‘Colour Me Calm’ (it was a flowery pattern that you colour in, presumably to calm you down).

The image chosen to accompany my piece was of a woman gracefully jumping off a log in a field. This was no ordinary jump. She was looking skyward, with arms outstretched, as if divinely inspired and on the verge of ascending to the heavens, rather than merely plummeting to the grass.

The combined effect of these editorial inputs was to strongly imply that mindfulness is all about achieving or abiding in a state of serenity. On the bright side, it was a good lesson for me in how little control I have over other people’s preconceptions, no matter how hard I might try.

The irony was that I felt a lot less calm when I saw the published piece. This was a nice glimpse into how I go grasping after definitive truth and conceptual clarity, taking my own words oh-so-seriously in the process. How my mind loves to get lost in its thicket of views and opinions! Perhaps I should be grateful to that editor for the wake-up call.

* Tranquillity is generally understood to be a beneficial quality in classical and contemporary mindfulness practices, but it is not considered to be an end in itself. That said, there has always existed a path of practice called ‘calm-abiding’. This is characterised by an emphasis on developing one-pointed concentration in such a way as to be conducive to accessing refined mental states. Such methods are not commonly taught as part of generic eight-week programmes (an exception being loving-kindness meditation). 

Remembered Words

Mindfulness is often misunderstood as being solely concerned with the present moment. It is also deeply connected to memory, as indicated by traditional terminology.

When we are mindful, we are able to ‘hold things in mind’. It is only the remembering of what we are attending to that enables us to maintain an unwavering attention towards it.

Consider how your mind might ‘drift off’ when doing something, such as meditating, reading or eating. At some point you realise that your mind has wandered. This is a moment of ‘recollection’ (literally meaning to ‘bring together’ or ‘find again’). You have become aware of what is actually happening and remembered what it is you that are supposed to be focussed on.

In one magical moment, you have stitched together your past, present and future into one secure and cohesive unity: directly seeing what has happened (past), bringing attention to immediate reality (present), and prospectively reminding yourself to focus again on what you’re supposed to be doing (future). This is mindfulness in action.

Modern psychological research has shown that attention comes in discrete moments. That is, we are only able to be attentive to something for the briefest time, after which we have to remind ourselves to keep on being attentive.

Mindfulness allows us to bypass the fogginess and forgetfulness our minds are prone to by weaving our attention into a seamless continuity over longer stretches of time. Stabilizing the attention in this way has profoundly clarifying effects.

Past Connections

If you are interested in clarifying and deepening your mindfulness practice, it can be useful to know something of the origin of this fascinating term.

The word ‘mindfulness’ is an English translation of the ancient Indian (Pali language) word sati, a noun closely related to the verb sarati, which means ‘remember’.

Sati can be understood in two related ways:

(i) as an aspect of memory, that is, of ‘calling to mind’ and ‘remembrance’, where such recollective activity facilitates greater awareness and sense of purpose for one cultivating awareness;

(ii) as awareness of the present moment, such that the manifesting of sati implies a ‘presence of mind’ that allows one to be awake to the present moment. Such ‘wakefulness’ in turn supports the recollective function of (i).

Clear Seeing

In this way, sati is an alert yet receptive awareness, which brings a quality of breadth to experience, and is thus an awareness of things in relation to things.

Therefore, not only does sati have the ability to notice what is occurring, it also brings a wider vision of mental objects in their relationship to other mental objects.

Additionally, it may be useful to know that, in classical Buddhist psychology, a clear distinction is made between mindfulness (sati), perception (sanna) and discriminative consciousness (vinnana). In this model, it is sanna that processes and labels sensory and mental objects, i.e. sanna identifies an object and ‘gives it a name’ by conceptualising it.

Discriminative consciousness (vinnana) is that which is aware of a sensory or mental object, and which discriminates between its basic aspects, which have been recognised by sanna.

But it is sati which brings an awareness not just to objects in their relationship, but one which is untainted by the subjective bias of there being an essential, unchanging ‘I’ that is doing the recognising and the knowing.