meditation coaching
clients that were essentially stuck in mindfulness and wanted to move forward. The practice they were doing is the most common these days which is a modern mindfulness practice of paying attention with bare attention to the present moment during the day and watching your breath or sensations in the body with a similar attention in meditation. Also co-incidentally I had a conversation with a close friend last week who is a mindfulness teacher and she told me her mindfulness practice was actually stressing her out.
Mindfulness Stuck in Meaninglessness
Firstly I’d like to bring up a distinction between what is being taught as secular mindfulness championed by Jon Kabat-Zinn who gives the definition as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally”. And Buddhist mindfulness which is a translation of the Pali word ‘Sati’ which actually has more of a connotation of remembering or recollecting and is part of a richer complex context of right mindfulness found in the Buddhist eight-fold path.
The modern mindfulness practice of bare awareness of the present moment is ethically or value neutral and herein lies the first issue that Buddhists have with modern mindfulness practice and an area you can get stuck in. Just paying attention to the present moment enables clarity and concentration and is also a ‘circuit breaker’ of usual conditioned responses which gives some space to act more intentionally. But how you act is not prescribed in modern mindfulness it only teaches the first aspect of focus. I wrote more about this in
Meditation is Just the Beginning
where I outlined how a popular mindfulness based therapy called ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy) does include the secondary aspect of commitment to your values and is therefore more of a complete practice.
According to the Dalai Lama the art of happiness is to cultivate positive states of mind like compassion, loving kindness, patience and generosity. Mindfulness in these Buddhist terms means being mindful or remembering to act in ways that will bring happiness to yourself and others. This also includes restraining from harming others which is the essence of ethical behaviour. Alan Wallace, a brilliant Tibetan Buddhist teacher reminds us – “In the Pali Abhidhamma, where mindfulness is listed as a virtuous mental factor, it is not depicted as bare attention, but as a mental factor that clearly distinguishes positive from negative mental states and behavior.”
Alan Wallace goes on to say “…if we stick to bare attention alone, it can also prevent wholesome thoughts from arising! For example, meditations for the cultivation of the four sublime virtues of loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity are all practiced with mindfulness but not bare attention.
Modern mindfulness, while valuable in creating a calm state of mind, is not a complete practice on its own. It is important to move beyond bare attention to a discerning mindfulness that includes directing actions and attitudes. This type of mindfulness, as described in the Buddhist eight-fold path, involves remembering the right attitude and desire to do things skillfully.
Furthermore, modern mindfulness, often criticized as McMindfulness, can be ethically neutral and used to make individuals well-adjusted in toxic environments. However, there has been a shift towards including loving kindness, known as heartfulness, in modern mindfulness practices. This addition allows for a sense of warmth and kindness towards oneself and others, moving away from a robotic self-centered witness of the present moment.
While modern mindfulness is similar to Buddhist practices such as ‘shamata’ or ‘samadhi’, which focus on stable and pliable attention, it may not lead to true liberation from suffering. Gautama Buddha warned against being stuck in this type of mindfulness practice, as it only temporarily pacifies mental and emotional afflictions. He continued by emphasizing the importance of developing wisdom to understand one’s true nature in order to achieve liberation from suffering in this world.