"Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
I will be writing more here in the future in my own words. In the meanwhile, I will paste below a great write-up by Daniel Rechtschaffen passed along to me...
(I highly recommend you attend the conference that he leads at the Omega Institute's Rhinebeck campus. Click here.)
What is mindfulness? A better question is what isn't mindfulness? When we are not mindful, we are distracting ourselves from what is happening in our direct present moment experience. In other words, whenever we are trying to make our experience other than it actually is, we are being mindless. Let's say you are walking down the street, it is a beautiful summer day and the leaves of the oak trees are rustling in the breeze; but instead of noticing the warm day, or the sound of the leaves, you are frantically thinking about the business meeting you are late for. In this example your mindlessness would limit you from experiencing the world around you. This is not to say that you cannot be mindful of stressfully walking to work. If the person in this example was mindful, they would have noticed that their mind was frantic, they could probably feel some stress and tightness in their body, and with this awareness they may be able to bring some awareness to their breath and the beautiful day around them.
So, if mindlessness is based on distracting ourselves then mindfulness is being aware of our experience directly. The practice of mindfulness begins with the body. As you need your car or bicycle to get from one place to the other, your body is your vehicle when it comes to the journey of mindfulness. Everything we feel, taste, see, and even think, happens in the body. We were born with these bodies, and have lived our whole lives in them, but we rarely stop and listen to what our bodies have to say. Mindfulness is the practice of attending with focus and openness to the phenomenon that we experience in the body.
This sounds rather easy. What could be so hard about attending to the experience of having a body? Well, it turns out that as humans we do nearly everything to escape from the direct experience of being in the body. We have this strange idea that the point of life is to get something different than the life we already have. We want a life that is better than the one that has been given to us. Even people who are rich and privileged still frantically look to have a different life.
The core of our desire to change our present life brings us to one of the keys of mindfulness. Much of our lives are filled with suffering. Regardless of our external possessions or positions, we still suffer inside. We work day and night to change our predicament of suffering. The mistake we so often make is trying to free ourselves from suffering by changing our external circumstances. External change may relieve our pain for a moment, but it never holds true liberation. The truth is that not only is it impossible to be liberated by external means, the attachment to externals is exactly what creates our own suffering. If you are heartbroken, usually it is because you have attached the idea of love to one person. It is like we have put a spotlight on that one person. If that person leaves, the spotlight then we are filled with a deep emptiness. Often we chose one person that we decide is going to make us happy for the rest of our lives. When this person cannot do the impossible, often we get angry or very let down. Our attachment to external people and objects create great suffering because we assume they will complete us, though they never fully can.
The other key suffering point is our aversion. There are always those things in our lives that we don't want to be there. Maybe you are sick, or there is someone at work who annoys you, or you look at the newspaper and see any of the tragedies occurring around the world. Of course, none of these things are desirable and no one would want them. However, just the fact that we can all agree that these things are always happening, more than we want them, shows us that this is a universal. Things happen that we don't like, this is a truth of life. Usually we react to this phenomenon with great resistance and frustration. We tense our muscles and try our hardest to change the inner and outer world, usually with little success.
So where does mindfulness come in? Though we cannot be liberated by external means, true liberation is possible through the practice of being aware of your self and your world directly. Pain is a truth of life that all must experience, but suffering is optional. When sickness comes, frustration, and even tragedy, we have the option to meet these experiences with interest and with open eyes. Mindfulness is the practice of witnessing each experience that arrives at the sense doors as a welcome visitor. Thousands of medical patients, using Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, have learned how to feel pain without resistance. The truth is that when you feel pain directly, the heat, pulsation, and tightness, then it's not half as bad as when you resist it. The resistance to what is real creates far more pain than the pain itself.
This brings us to the core of mindfulness. Mindfulness is about being real. What does real mean? Real is an exploration in the present moment. Our thoughts can be very clever and come up with great theories, but they can never become solid truths. Only direct experience is true. If I have an experience of tightness in my shoulder, no one can argue with that. Our direct experience in the body, without judgment, is real. In this way we learn how to come back to the wisdom of our bodies. Instead of looking outside for peace, wisdom, and love, we stop and realize that these things are already present within us. With mindfulness we cultivate within ourselves the qualities they we had been seeking in the outside world. As Thich Nhat Hahn says, “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.”