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Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness (3 of 6)

Today, I'm going to continue on this longer series on the Eightfold Path, focusing on Right Mindfulness, the seventh step of the Eightfold Path. Mindfulness is a great joy. It's a great pleasure and such a wise teacher for us. It brings so much wisdom and freedom; it's just a fantastic thing. Here we're calling it Right Mindfulness. What makes it right? We have to go back to the first step of the Eightfold Path, which is Right View. Right View indicates or points to how all these other steps are right, complete, or invaluable for the purpose of becoming free of suffering.

Right Mindfulness is that mindfulness, that attention that's used to help us live a wholesome, mentally healthy life—a life that supports us in the direction of bringing suffering to an end, to alleviate suffering, and to discover some kind of profound peace. Right Mindfulness is the mindfulness that we cultivate or live in as we discover freedom from suffering. That freedom from suffering is a reference point for the growing of this mindfulness. To have an awareness that has no suffering in it, that is without any attachment or clinging to it, is a phenomenal thing. To have a taste of it, and then to know that taste clearly enough that we keep coming back to that way of being aware, helps us to become free of suffering. It's the awareness that is an expansion of that freedom into the fullness of our lives. So that's what Right Mindfulness is.

There's plenty of wrong mindfulness, in the sense that there are ways of using attention that don't really contribute to us being free. One example recently, and maybe still today, is the way some people's attention gets pulled into the world of politics. Politicians are sometimes experts at getting our attention, having people wake up in the morning and regularly check throughout the day what's happening. The attention that goes into politics, or into other areas of life like the entertainment industry, or into our greed and our hatred—when that precious resource of awareness goes into those things, that would not be considered Right Mindfulness. It's not leading to freedom; it's not bringing an end to suffering.

We want to learn how to use this attention, this awareness, in a way that brings an end to suffering. The Buddha provided four different areas—some people call them frameworks—in which we can apply our attention or awareness to be present for our experience, regardless of what it is. Whatever is going on in our experience, whether we are reading about politics or involved in whatever else it might be, Right Mindfulness is applying our attention to these areas for the purpose of freedom. These four are the body, feelings, mind states, and mental activities. I'll talk about each of these over the next four days, today being the body.

The way that we know we're coming into the fullness of this mindfulness, this awareness that's going to move towards freedom, is when awareness has been freed enough from its attachments and from all the identifications we have about who we are. Awareness can settle back, in a sense, and just observe phenomena. Observation doesn't interfere with what it looks at; it's just there and just sees. The awareness of seeing is not usually impacted by what is seen, unless it's a bright light or something; the impact goes deeper into the mind. But to have the inner mind have no attachments, so the seeing is just seeing clearly and fully—that is the ability to observe. In some of the deepest states of meditation the Buddha taught, he uses the verb observing to describe how to be with those experiences. He doesn't talk about watching or observing earlier in practice, but he does when the mind is really well established.

One of the great metaphors for this that I love is of a cowherd. During the growing season, when rice is growing in India, the cowherd has to be very close to the cattle in order to keep them from eating the farmers' rice. But once the rice has all been harvested, there's no longer a need to be so careful. So now the cowherd rests against a tree and looks out across the land at the cows, keeping track of them in a very relaxed way. The cows can wander where they go, back and forth, and the cowherd can just rest there and observe without having to stay close and stop them from going into the fields.

At some point, as the mind gets settled and the mind's "cows" are not going around eating everything or causing damage, we can just relax, settle, and observe. How we get to this mature observation is what the exercises in the four areas, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[1], are about. It's how to develop an acute, strong, and effective way of being present and attentive here and now.

In mindfulness of the body, there are a variety of different ways that stimulate or evoke a heightened sense of awareness. This is why we're trying to develop a heightened, and eventually lucid, sense of awareness. One way is to practice mindfulness of breathing^[2]. This is really central, and first and foremost, how the Buddha taught mindfulness: to settle into the breathing, to start noticing it, and to be intimate with the experience of breathing. We notice how the body is tense, and then as we're breathing, we relax the body. Some of you know that when I do guided meditations, this is often the basic thing that I start off with. Almost as a kind of preparatory work, we relax the body, breathe, and then relax different places of holding on the exhale. It's a variation of what the Buddha was teaching.

He also taught about being carefully attentive with clear recognition, a presence of mind—to knowingly live our daily activities of life. When you're walking, clearly know that you're walking. When sitting, know you're sitting. When lying down, know you're lying down. When standing, know you're standing. In all these different ways, clearly know it. The contrast to that is just walking down the street, completely lost in our daydreams, our thoughts, and our concerns. There's no real attention given to the fact that we're walking. It's so effortless to walk when there are no obstacles, and we're not really paying attention to the walking itself.

The Buddha taught that for Right Mindfulness—the mindfulness that we want if, and that's a big underlined if, what we want more than anything else is to really get to the bottom of our suffering, uproot it, and discover how to live an effective and peaceful life for ourselves and the world around us—then when we're walking down the city street, knowingly know that you're walking. Walk with the awareness of walking as part and parcel of what you're doing. You can still think about things that are important, but a very strong sense of presence is there in the body. You're really connected as you walk, and as you think of other things, you're not lost in daydreams.

He said to do the same thing in all kinds of daily activities. When you're stretching your arm to do something, when you're picking something up, or when you're caring for whatever you're taking care of—he even talks about defecating—do it mindfully. Bringing attention to all the activities of life is Right Mindfulness, meaning that's the mindfulness that's useful to cultivate if what you want is freedom. Remember always that the background of this whole enterprise of the Eightfold Path is this big if. These are the right approaches if you want freedom. And if you really want it, pay careful attention to this.

There are also other ways in which the Buddha talked about heightening attention, and I think we can probably stretch these or apply them in different ways. He talked about reviewing, visualizing, and imagining all the different parts of our body. I know some people who have gone to morgues to see cadavers. There's something about really appreciating, reviewing, and thinking about our body and all its physical detail that is fascinating, somehow sobering, and opening. It encourages us: Yes, stay here. This is special. This is precious.

He also talked about reviewing or understanding the body not as a unified whole, but as made up of component parts, the four elements^[3]. To really sense this is not necessarily to understand the physics of the body, but the elemental physics. It is to understand anything that supports us to remember to be here in this body, to have awareness become stronger. That's all for the purpose of waking up.

He also uses the language of comparing. There's a way of comparing that can also heighten awareness, and the example he gives is comparing our body to that of a corpse: We will become like a corpse someday; we'll die. This is not supposed to be a morbid reflection. It's supposed to somehow—and for each person maybe it's a different way—have that comparison give a spark: Oh, I'm alive. I'm animated now. The whole feeling of being conscious, the whole capacity of consciousness, exists only when you're alive. This whole body won't have consciousness in it when you're dead; the mind won't have consciousness in it when you're dead. By comparing ourselves to a corpse, the hope is that you start appreciating being aware and are willing, allowing, or inspired to live an aware life—a life aware through the body, an embodied awareness.

And so this First Foundation of Mindfulness is to begin cultivating a heightened, embodied awareness, an awareness of the body. It is an awareness that grows as we connect to the body in different ways: meditating on breathing, being aware of our body as we go through daily life, reflecting on how the body is made up of all these component parts, or comparing ourselves to a corpse. This is all for the purpose of heightening awareness, encouraging us to stay in a field of awareness, to stay in the continuity of awareness, until the awareness becomes more lucid^[4]—until awareness is something that can just peacefully observe what's going on without reacting to what's happening. All these practices lead to sati^[5]; they lead to being able to abide in awareness.

That ability to abide and to observe is a form of freedom in itself, and it's the foundation for the deepest kind of freedom: the release. Relaxing and letting go prepares the ground for our heart to release where it is held, where it is constricted.

The Buddha emphasizes mindfulness of the body repeatedly, over and over again. It is very powerful and very central to what the Buddha was teaching. It takes a lot of compassion and a lot of care in how to do this because of what goes on in the body for people, but it is the First Foundation of Mindfulness. Thank you.