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There’s no question that mindfulness is a form of meditation, and it’s universal because awareness and attention and kindness and compassion are universal. But it’s most articulate expression, I think hands down comes out of the Buddhist tradition. It’s a cultivatable skill. It’s not something that you’re necessarily born with, which you’re born with is the capacity to be mindful, but you have to cultivate that capacity and learn to inhabit it and befriend it. In the same way as if you want to grow a stronger bicep, you’d need to exercise the muscle, challenging it with weight, with some kind of resistance. So there are many different ways to cultivate mindfulness. And I try to steer as far away as possible from using the word technique when I’m talking about, “And I saw this technique, that technique and so forth.” I consider all those kinds of methods, so to speak, under the rubric of practices.
And so these are the classical four ways of cultivating mindfulness that were taught originally by the Buddha.
1. Lying in bed in the morning
We can cultivate mindfulness say lying in bed in the morning. We wake up every morning, we’re horizontal lying in bed or curled up or whatever. But before you jump out of bed, because your day is already gotten started, could you simply rest in awareness of the body, say lying on your back in bed, letting the bed do all the work of holding you. And then actually ask yourself, “Am I fully awake?” Just because the alarm’s gone off or whatever it is. But to actually allow your awareness to suffuse the body and check in on what’s going on in your mind and how much anxiety there might be already, and you’re jumping out of bed and you are already running through your calendar or checking your phone. But could I just take a few moments to drop in on the actuality of my life unfolding in this moment, lying down. So there are a whole range of different lying down meditations, and then you could do them for one in-breath and out-breath, or for 45 minutes or for several hours. So those, again, are exercises that practices, that cultivate greater moment to moment nonjudgmental awareness.
2. Sitting
You could also do it sitting. And that’s the kind of classical one, if some version of cross-legged, sometimes full Lotus posture, with an erect and dignified spine and head elevated on the spine, and as you’re like a sitting mountain, really grounded. And so there are a whole range of different things that one might do with one’s attention sitting still. But really what we’re doing is we’re learning how to fall awake.
So that means being fully present to the only moments we ever have. Since it’s very hard to actually just be aware, because the mind so habitually gets caught up in its own gyrations and permutations, and so we get carried downstream in thought, and we speak about it as the thought stream. And a lot of it’s totally unconscious. So even if you intend to be awake and present in this moment, there’s all sorts of stuff competing for your attention. So in the early stages of this, it’s really helpful to decide in advance, I’m going to pick out an object for my attention, and I’m going to just kind of anchor on it as best I can, without being contracted or sort of forcing anything. The breath is a very useful object because your life depends on this in-breath, and this out-breath. But we tend to take it really for granted unless we’re choking or have a bad cold or something like that. And can I just feel the breath in the body as it comes in, and as it leaves the body.
So that would be the object of attention, and we’d sort of surf or ride on the waves of the in-breath and the out-breath. And it doesn’t take long before you’ll notice that this is quite challenging because even though part of you intended to just surf on the breath sensations, the mind after a while will say, “Well, what’s next? That’s stupid.” Or, “This is boring.” Or whatever it is. And pretty soon you’ll be thinking about something else and you’ll have totally forgotten that the challenge was, “Can I simply be here, with this moment, in this awareness of breathing.”
3. Standing
Standing, waiting for the elevator, waiting for the bus, but we’re always like, “Everybody’s on their devices, what about just standing like a tree?” And just simply being present, bus comes, bus goes, elevator comes, elevator goes, people come, people go, are you actually aware of this? Or are you perpetually self distracting?“ And there’s virtue in this, there’s value in it, as I was suggesting.
4. Walking
And then the fourth one would be walking. People are walking through the valleys of the streets of New York and the skyscrapers and so forth. But most people are actually on their phone or self-distracting in one way or another. Can you just walk, or as the Zen-people like to say, “When walking, just walk. When eating” … Another form of meditation, mindfulness of what do we put in our mouths? “When eating, just eat.” It turns out the just is an enormous challenge. But when you do exercise the muscle, then life itself becomes your meditation teacher or your mindfulness teacher. And it is remarkably revealing about how much richer and more full of possibilities, and more transformative and healing in our relationships with ourselves and with others and the world, things are when we’re actually here for our moments rather than waiting for the next vacation to check in, which will never be long enough, and can’t come soon enough.