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Everyday Mindfulness

My name is Jim Podolske, and I'm going to give a talk tonight about what I call everyday mindfulness.

The word mindfulness gets used more and more these days, certainly more than back when I first started this practice, and it's used in a lot of different ways. When I use the word, a very simple and probably incomplete definition would be: it's knowing what's happening as it's happening. It's a present moment awareness practice.

I'm curious how many of you have taken some kind of mindfulness meditation class, whether it's an hour long, a day long, or a couple of weeks? Okay, looks like almost everyone has. Of course, I don't know about the people who are online, so I thought I'd give a very brief description of mindfulness meditation as we teach it here at IMC^[1].

There are basically four postures that you can take for meditating: sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. We teach primarily sitting meditation since it works best for a group. It really just consists of sitting down, taking an alert and upright posture, bringing some relaxation to the body, gently closing the eyes if you'd like, and then bringing the awareness to the breath. Just noticing the sensation of the breath wherever in the body it's most accessible for you, where it's most noticeable. That's really the beginning of it: bringing the awareness to the breath, noticing it, noticing when the awareness wanders off, and gently bringing it back.

Over time, other experiences may arise. You may have bodily sensations that arise, and those for the most part you might just leave in the background and stay with the breath. If they become compelling—much more compelling than the breath—then you can bring your awareness to those bodily sensations, and when they're no longer compelling, come back to the breath.

Other experiences that might arise are emotions. Notice when emotions arise, and again, if they're the most dominant experience, then you'd bring your awareness for a while to the emotion. Watch it as it arises and passes.

Likewise, thoughts: all of the mental activities, the planning for the future, remembering the past, stories, fantasies, beliefs, and opinions. Let your awareness go to them in a very conscious way, in a very intentional way, and then when they're no longer dominant, come back to the breath.

So in this 21st-century Western Insight way, we let the awareness rest on one of those four categories: the breath, the body, the emotions, or the thoughts. The other characteristic is that we often decide ahead of time how long we're going to meditate. We usually set some kind of a timer for maybe fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour, and then just set the intention to sit still and be with whatever arises until the timer goes off. I think that's a very wonderful practice. It's very helpful to do it every day, setting aside some time to sit and meditate.

On retreats, it's much more intense than that. Rather than just doing one sitting a day, you alternate between sitting meditation and walking, and sitting, and walking. Then there are some meals in there. But again, mostly they're kind of fixed length, and of course, the retreat is a fixed length. At the end of the retreat, you go back to your everyday life. The effects of either a daily sit or a longer retreat usually can last for some time, and eventually are no longer as noticeable.

During retreats, there's often an instruction after the first maybe three, four, or five days to bring some more continuity to your practice. So rather than just sitting and then stopping meditating, getting up, going back to your normal state of awareness, and then doing walking meditation and taking breaks between each one of those activities, the instruction is often to see if you can bring some continuity of practice between the sits and the walks and the sits, at least maybe for a couple of hours, and see what that's like.

I've had the opportunity to do that a number of times. I often wish that I could do it differently, but my life was such that I was working to earn a living and pay my mortgage and everything else, so I couldn't go on a retreat continuously. So I started to think, how can I develop this mindfulness in everyday life, off the cushion, off retreat?

On retreats, they sometimes say, "Well, when you go back into your daily life, you might find a few cues, a few things that might help you remember to pay attention." For example, turning on and off light switches might be a cue to really notice what that's like. Or going through doors—ordinary things that we do every day that we could use as cues to simply amp up the awareness, at least momentarily.

In the last few years, certainly since the pandemic, I live alone and I've been doing a lot of my work remotely. So I am seldom really rushed or constrained in time. I've started developing more and more ways of cultivating mindfulness throughout my day. I thought I would walk you through a "Day in the Life of Jim" and point out some of the potential places where I can practice mindfulness. I'm not going to say that I do it all the time and never miss a beat—there are plenty of gaps! But there are also many parts of my life that don't require a lot of interpersonal interaction or cognitive activity to try to figure out what I'm going to do.

My day starts with waking up. Often, waking up isn't just one event; I don't just wake up and then that's it. I sometimes fall back asleep. But eventually, there's one time that I wake up and think, "Okay, it's time." I tend to dream a lot, so the very first thing I do is notice: Was I just dreaming? What was going on in my mind just before I moved from unconscious to conscious? Oftentimes, I can remember something. I can be aware that there were thoughts and images going on even though I wasn't wide awake for them.

Some psychotherapists think that there's a lot of meaning in dreams and they encourage people to journal their dreams, and I used to do that in the 80s. Now, I use it more as a mindfulness tool. When I wake up, my first intention is to pay attention to what was just in my mind. I find that by doing that, a little bit more energy immediately comes up—a little bit more awareness, a little bit more focus. If I don't, then my awareness is often kind of floating around, not quite sure where to land. So if I let it land on dreams, that immediately brings some focus to awareness.

The next thing that I do—not every morning, but most mornings—is a short period of loving-kindness^[2]. Even before I get out of bed, I just let whatever being, beings, or people come to mind, and I say some phrases of well-wishing for them: "May they be safe. May they be happy. May they be healthy. May they be tranquil." I repeat those phrases a number of times for one person, and then maybe someone else will come to mind and I'll do that. I don't set a timer for that. Usually, I do at least five minutes of loving-kindness, but sometimes it could be thirty minutes.

The value of that practice for me is that it helps set an intention for the day. I've noticed over the years that this mind is fairly prone to aversion—kind of finding what's wrong with this picture. So by doing loving-kindness when I first wake up, it shifts things so that the old patterns of thinking get challenged a little bit. I notice, "Oh yeah, there's a certain happiness from wishing well for others." So that not only helps wake up the mind and the awareness, but it helps wake up the heart. It brings some energy to the body, and it sets an intention.

And this is a pretty easy practice. I'm not sitting on some cushion on a hard floor; I'm still in a nice, warm bed until I decide to get up. When I get up these days, the house is kind of cold—I leave the temperature at about 56 degrees—so there are all sorts of sensations in the body. Going from lying to sitting to standing, feeling the coolness of the air.

From there, now that I'm awake, I wake up my computer. I turn it on, and it takes a while to connect to the internet and do VPN and single sign-on and certificates and all sorts of things to get my work computer ready to talk to the world. Then I go into the kitchen to have breakfast, and that's quite an enjoyable experience.

Let's see, I forgot one part. When I talked about mindfulness meditation, the categories that I use for experience are the breath, the body, emotions, and thoughts. What the Buddha taught as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[3] are: the body, but also feeling tone (is the experience you're having pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant?), and then the third one is mind states—the mood of the mind. Is the mind contracted or expanded? Is it irritable or is it happy? Is it kind of fuzzy or is it clear? You can probably think of your own labels for the states of your mind that you find, but it's helpful to be able to recognize the mood in the mind right now. And then the fourth one is mental activities, thoughts, mental formations—much like the first list that I gave. So those are the four that the Buddha gave us.

Going back into the kitchen and preparing my breakfast, I always have oatmeal with blueberries, raspberries, pomegranate arils, walnuts, a banana, and a dollop of Greek yogurt on top. It's kind of the same every day, so it doesn't take a lot of thought and planning. I can let that be a time to just notice. What's it really like to hold a bowl of hot oatmeal? What's it like to slice the banana?

And then sitting and eating. Eating meditation is one of the formal practices on retreat. They really encourage you to realize that when you eat, just eat. Just notice all of the sensations: the taste, the texture, the smell, the visual of it. Even the sounds, like the spoon hitting the Corelle bowl. It's quite a sense experience.

If you decide that you want to do this, you can just let everything else be in the background. All of the thoughts that my computer may have generated from looking at email, all my plans for the day are still there, but they don't have to be what I'm attending to. What I can attend to is just this process of eating.

I go back to the computer, look at email some more, and also notice: How am I sitting? What's my posture like as I'm sitting at the computer? I often find that my shoulders tend to move forward and I hunch over, so I might make a decision to sit a little bit more upright.

The next activity of the day is going to the bathroom and getting clean. I use a Waterpik, floss, brush, gargle, and shave with a safety razor. There is a lot of sense experience going on there! To the extent that I can let my thoughts and my plans relax a bit, I can just notice what it's like. Is it pleasant when I'm shaving? Is it pleasant when I'm brushing my teeth? Letting whatever simple activity I'm doing be the focus of awareness really makes a difference.

And then, of course, taking a shower is almost a body scan^[4] type of mindfulness practice. Starting from the head and shampooing my hair, all the way down to my feet. The warm water that I use sparingly, the cold air when the warm water stops. Drying off, taking the towel—it's another whole body scan from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. It's very easy to do all of these things automatically and kind of tuned out, doing them and not really knowing that you're doing them. So many mornings, I do shower meditation. Then getting dressed, feeling the cloth as it covers my upper and lower body, putting on my socks, and then going off for the day.

There are several categories of simple practices. One area that I think is very important for mindfulness—and it's so important that I'm not going to try to cover it tonight—is mindfulness of speech. More generally, mindfulness of speaking and mindfulness of listening, or mindfulness of communication. Really paying attention when you're talking to somebody, when you're listening to somebody, when you're reading an email, or writing a text or a letter. Those, in some ways, are advanced mindfulness practices in my view.

There have been a lot of talks given about that kind of thing. Just yesterday afternoon, there was an Eightfold Path^[5] class that was all on right speech. There's a teacher named Gregory Kramer who often holds workshops on Insight Dialogue, which is a way to help bring more awareness to the way that we communicate with each other. I won't say more than that about mindfulness of communication, but it is a very important daily practice.

As for the simpler practices, the ones that don't take quite so much practice: My office is at one end of the building, and both the restroom and the break room are at the other end. When I get up to either use the restroom or refill my water bottle, that's an opportunity to do a sort of mini walking meditation. I allow myself to say, "Well, for this next couple of minutes that I'm walking down and back, I don't have to figure anything out. I don't have to compose an email, understand some obscure concept, or figure out how I'm going to solve a problem." For those few minutes, I can take a break and notice what it's like to be walking. The feeling in my feet, my lower legs, maybe the breeze on my hands as I walk. Just getting in touch, and staying in touch, with the body.

Another place that I practice mindfulness, at least some of the time, is driving. I'm at an age now where my reflexes are slower than they used to be, so it's really crucial that when I'm driving, I'm just driving. I'm just paying attention to the road, to the car, and to other drivers. I don't play music, I don't listen to talks, and I don't use a hands-free phone to talk to other people. I just drive. I let the awareness stay partly in the body and partly on the road ahead.

I don't go on any really long drives. Almost everything I do is within about an hour of where I live, so being mindful while driving for an hour is not that challenging. As much as there's a desire for the mind to be entertained with music, talk radio, or Dharma talks, for however much time I'm in the car, I can just forego that and let it be a mindfulness practice.

At the end of the day, it's the same thing: brushing my teeth, changing into my pajamas, and going to bed. So that's a "Day in the Life" for me, highlighting the simple ways that mindfulness is accessible.

When I decided to give this talk, I asked a number of friends in my Kalyāṇa-mitta^[6] groups, "How do you cultivate everyday mindfulness? What are your practices, or what are your cues to kick it up a notch?" One person in the group talked about going out to the mailbox each day. They use that as a mini, micro walking meditation. Now, they didn't tell me whether, once they get the mail, they start to read it on the way back or whether they stay with the walking. I suspect it's the latter.

Taking out the garbage to the dumpster is another one. It's an everyday thing where you can bring your awareness primarily to the body, but also to the feeling tone. Is this pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? You may also notice the mood of the mind or the thoughts in the mind.

For many years, when I would drive up here on Monday nights, the traffic on 101 would often be bad. It almost never failed that I noticed when I left work to head here, the mind was irritable. By the time I left here, it was completely different—much more energetic, relaxed, and tranquil. I'd often wonder, "Why couldn't my mind state have been different when I got in the car to come here?" I don't know, it could have been that I hadn't eaten, or I was just tired. In any case, those are some of the things that I've come up with.

Other people told me something that surprised me at first, and then I realized it made perfect sense: their cue for kicking up mindfulness was when they were suffering. When there was dukkha^[7]. It could be anything from as mild as feeling like something is kind of off, feeling awkward, uncomfortable, dissatisfied, or irritable, all the way to fairly intense pain. They said when they noticed that, they realized, "Ah, the response is to shift into a higher gear, awareness-wise." To bring more mindfulness, to bring more attention to what's going on.

For me, it's not just attention; it's a particular kind of attention that has kindness and curiosity. Greeting the experience with a certain openness, and also some curiosity to want to know, "Is there something going on here that I'm missing?" That sense of openness, of welcoming, and wanting to be curious and investigate, are also important parts of a mindfulness that will help when things get tough. When things are challenging, when you're not having a nice pleasant bowl of oatmeal, but when you're having an experience you just don't want to have. "No, not this, I don't want things to be this way."

For many years, and still to this day, although not as much, my instinct when an unwelcome experience showed up was to try to somehow escape. How can I get out of this? Can I just physically get up and leave? Can I just zone out? Can I ignore it? Can I distract myself? Can I distract others? Is there some fantasy, some other place in the imagination I can go, so that I don't have to see what's happening? After all the years that I've been alive, I've found that never works. It might kind of work a little bit, but long term, it never works.

Developing an ability to be present in those times of challenge, suffering, and experiencing the unwanted—paying attention and meeting it—can often be a much better approach than trying to make something go away.

I talked to a friend recently who is subject to having migraine headaches. They said that when the pain is really intense, the only thing that really helps is mindfulness—just paying attention to the experience. What they told me was that when they really paid careful attention, they found that it wasn't constant, solid pain. There were moments of relative ease that were interspersed with moments of intense unpleasantness. They found that there was almost a wave nature to the pain; it would come and go. By seeing that, it became easier to work with. The mind wasn't trying to push it away or escape. It was actually possible to stay with that experience, and over time, it dissipated. (When I was told this story last night, there was no migraine operating!)

Cultivating mindfulness in everyday, simple experiences can give us a capacity to be present when much more challenging experiences arise. Cultivating mindfulness in itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's developing mindfulness so that we can see more clearly what's going on and respond to our experience in a more wise and beneficial way. Practicing mindfulness can be beneficial in the moment, and it can be beneficial as the challenges in life present themselves to us—which they always will. I don't know that I've ever met anybody who hasn't faced challenges.

Thank you all for listening. If anyone has any questions or might want to share their experience of mindfulness... Sally, could you give him the microphone?

Q&A

Question: Thanks Jim. You mentioned that there are times, of course, where you're not mindful. Do you find that happens by accident, out of weakness, or do you find that you make a decision, "Now I am going to opt for entertainment rather than mindfulness," and how do you make that decision?

Jim Podolske: That's a great question. I'm not sure that I ever consciously decide not to be mindful, but it happens. I'd say mindlessness happens! And I don't think there's anything wrong with entertaining the mind. I don't have a television; my television broke during the pandemic and I just decided not to get a new one. But I have the internet, and so I listen to music from my youth, from the 60s and 70s. Some of those songs just bring up a lot of memories and a lot of emotion, and I think that those are fine to enjoy. I don't think that the practice is about some strict asceticism, sitting in a cave all your life.

I'd say there's still some mindfulness operating when I do those things, like listen to old music or watch old movies, which is seeing that they can't be clung to. I can listen to a song that I really like, and then I might listen to it again and again, and after a while, it's like, well, songs end. Often they end in just a few minutes. So being able to enjoy and not cling is maybe the practice to do in those situations.

Have you had an experience of consciously dropping awareness?

Questioner: If I have a long drive, sometimes I will drive mindfully and try to pay attention to my hands on the wheel, and sometimes I'll listen to a podcast. Or if I've had a difficult experience, like a hard day at work, I feel like I don't have the capacity for mindfulness at that time.

Jim Podolske: Yeah. Well, I don't want any of the practices that I described to be presented as "this is what you should be doing." These are just opportunities. This is something that you might want to try.

Okay, well it's nine o'clock, so thank you all for coming. I hope if any of this is helpful for you, please take it with you. And if it's not helpful, just let it go.