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Why Mindfulness

So again, my really warm welcome. Even if the AC is on and it's kind of chilly, I have a warm welcome.

So tonight I thought I would talk a little bit about mindfulness, and recognizing that this is foundational. Maybe it even seems kind of like kindergarten teachings or something like this. But this is something I appreciate so much about the dharma and the teachings, is that we get to hear things again and again, and then often we discover something new. It's not like there are these secret teachings that are wildly different as we progress on the path. To be sure, there are things that start to unfold and become known as we continue on this path that aren't obvious or available at the beginning. But how we practice with them and be with them really builds on this foundation of mindfulness. Which of course makes sense, so much about what the practice is about is being present for what's happening, noticing what's happening. And in some fundamental way, that's just what mindfulness is.

I'd like to talk about this a little bit also because mindfulness is one of the Seven Factors of Awakening^[1]. It's the first factor. It's kind of like the foundation that supports all these other factors, and the Buddha pointed to these factors as really being supportive, if not required in some form, for awakening, for enlightenment. Sometimes, as I said, we tend to think, well, maybe mindfulness is just some nice-to-have, something to make our life better. And to be sure, it is that, but it's also pointed to as an integral part of this path towards greater freedom, towards greater ease, greater peace. I'll be talking a little bit more about the Seven Factors of Awakening in some subsequent talks, but right now I'm just going to introduce the idea of it and start with the first one: the foundation, mindfulness.

It really is quite something to think about, what is mindfulness? We might say that it's a unique capacity that humans have to direct our attention intentionally. Of course, other beings, other creatures, have attention, but as far as I know, humans are the ones that can choose: "Okay, I'm going to pay attention to this particular thing and not pay attention to that particular thing." So this is something that we can really use to support our lives, to support the way we show up in the world, the way we show up for ourselves.

And so for me, and in the context of this talk, I will use the words attention, mindfulness, and awareness as synonyms. Sometimes teachers tease them apart and have other ways they want to separate the different ways that the mind is aware—consciousness or something like this. Some teachers do, some teachers don't. I've given talks a little bit where I tease them apart, but for here I'm not going to really tease them apart. I'm going to say it's just like noticing, paying attention, being aware of, being conscious of, being mindful—kind of put those all together. For anybody who has ever tried mindfulness practice, one of the very first insights you have is like, "Oh wow, I had no idea that my mind was going everywhere except where I wanted it to go. I had no idea that this actually was not going to be so easy." Even though it might seem simple and straightforward to place our attention on an anchor. For example, often we choose the breath. It can be the body, sounds, emotions, thoughts. Those are often the typical things that we place our attention on, that we're mindful of. But we have this insight like, "Oh, I had no idea my mind was like this until we started practice." I think this is true for everybody, just the way that humans—or certainly humans in the modern West, I don't know about other cultures, other societies—but we have a certain busyness or a little bit of agitation that keeps our minds busy.

So with mindfulness, we just bring our attention back to the anchor—the breath, for example—again and again and again. And it absolutely does not matter how many times you have to do that. A hundred, one thousand, one hundred thousand times, it's just this practice of bringing attention back to the anchor again. We do this in a way that's, "Okay, this is what practice is." As best we can, we do it without judgment. Without this idea like, "I wish it were different. Dang it, why am I doing that? I'm never going to get it. Everybody else is so quiet and I'm not." These thoughts that sometimes can arise in our minds, that's extra. It can be a habit to do this too, for the inner critic to arise or to be comparing ourselves to others. That's just part of what it means to be human also. As best we can, we just bring our attention back in a simple, gentle way, letting the judgment, the inner critic, and all those things—letting them just soften and go to the side. We don't have to get rid of them, just let it be there on the side.

In this way, mindfulness is really about being present for our life. I talked about the breath being the anchor, but we can just in our daily life have this intention of being present for what's actually happening. It might be that we have this insight early like, "Wow, I had no idea my mind was like this." And then we might also have an insight regarding our daily life, this recognition: "Oh, in some kind of way I was sleepwalking, or disconnected, or not really engaged with my life." The practice of mindfulness in our daily life, in whatever it is that we're doing, provides the opportunity, the encouragement, the setting, or the intention to actually be with our life. Engaged with our life, not so much with our ideas or our conceptions, but the actual experience. Bringing this sense of aliveness to the moment, whatever it is that's happening, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, what we wanted or what we didn't want. Just to have this aliveness like, "Yes, this is my life." This can be beautiful, just the being present for what it is, even if it is unpleasant.

One thing I want to highlight here is that I'm talking about bringing attention to things that help to bring some aliveness. Notice how I'm not saying that mindfulness is getting rid of thoughts. It's easy to fall into this trap of thinking like, "Okay, as long as there's thoughts, I'm not meditating, I'm not mindful, and this whole meditation thing doesn't work, or I can't do it," or whatever it might be. To be sure, dharma teachers sometimes talk about the space in between the thoughts, or the space around the thoughts, or no thoughts. Sometimes they talk about this, and that is available, but usually that's only on retreat for some time. This isn't so accessible certainly if we just have a daily meditation practice as opposed to being on retreats for long periods of time. Instead, mindfulness is just knowing what's happening in the mind. When we're lost in thought, we are lost in thought. Okay, it's not a problem, because we're lost in thought, so there's no problem with whatever's happening. But then there's a waking up that happens like, "Oh, I was just lost in thought." At that moment, you're mindful. There's nothing else you could have done while you were lost in thought, but when that ends and you're mindful again, you just know, "Oh, now I'm mindful, and I just wasn't a moment before."

As an aside, I'll say, what makes it more likely that these moments of waking up happen while you're lost in thought, is a moment of mindfulness preceding it. So the more mindfulness we do, the easier it gets, the shorter the duration we're lost in thought. Probably all of us have this experience, whether it's a daily practice or being on retreat or daylongs. Maybe we'll say then that rather than this idea that we have to get rid of thoughts or something like that, you might think about it as keeping something in mind. If we're on the cushion, we're keeping our anchor—the breath, the body, whatever it might be—in mind. In daily life, it's returning to whatever's compelling, whatever is easy to be mindful of, whatever is drawing our attention. We don't necessarily have to put it on anything specific.

But why would we do this? This is a legitimate question. Sounds nice, maybe, but what are the advantages or the benefits? Why would we do this? Maybe you'll recognize some of these in your own life. I know for me, this first one had a big impact on me: that we can understand things when we are aware of them. It seems so obvious to say, but we start to understand ourselves. We start to understand our lives, which isn't always pleasant, right? We don't necessarily see only rainbows and hearts and that kind of stuff. But I remember at the beginning of my meditation practice, this whole idea of, "Okay, I guess I'll try this mindfulness when I'm not formally meditating. Let's see."

And of course, I so rarely remembered to be mindful when I wasn't sitting on the cushion. But for some reason, this one incident really stood out to me. I was standing in line—I don't remember where it was, if it was the grocery store or something like this—and I noticed, "Oh, look at that posture I'm standing in." I had my hip out, had my hand on my hip, I was really impatient, and I had this little bit of self-righteousness going on. But I didn't even notice it until I noticed my posture: the way I had my hand on my hip, my hip jutted out, like, "You better get going," or something like this. And that was so astounding to me. If I hadn't noticed what was happening in my body, I wouldn't have really noticed that I had this attitude or this stance.

This happens so much, that our body can inform us. Just being aware of what's happening in our body can help us be aware of what's sometimes more subtle. For me, something that still happens today is that when I have a little bit of a feeling like, "Oh, I'm not sure what I've got to do," I wring my hands. Sometimes from wringing my hands I'm like, "Oh, okay, I guess I'm a little bit nervous. I don't know what the next thing to do is here." So these are just some broad examples, but I'm sure probably all of you have some examples as well of how just being mindful of things, of your posture for example, helps you to understand yourself better.

Emotions—maybe feeling just generally out of sorts. If we have this idea of keeping it in mind, like, "Well, okay, I'm feeling out of sorts," and if we just stay with feeling out of sorts, we might notice that maybe there's a heaviness. Sometimes, like the shoulders are drooping, or whatever we're doing with the posture, there isn't an alertness or uprightness. Being with that, we might notice that there's a little collapsing around the chest or the heart, and then we might be like, "Oh actually, I'm a little sad. Yeah, there are these sad thoughts. I hadn't really noticed it before. I am sad." So one of the reasons why we have this mindfulness, or keeping things in mind, is just to help us learn about ourselves, learn about what's happening, so we can just better understand. Not so that we can beat ourselves up, not so that we can insist that we be different, just so that we can understand ourselves.

Also, being present for our experiences is actually grounding, right? To be with the simplicity of the experience, the actuality, the reality of what's happening, helps us to feel a bit more rooted and grounded. A little bit less like being pushed around and like we can't find our way. Instead, we feel connected. Connected to our bodies, connected to the experience. Maybe mindfulness helps us with our social connections, the people that we love, that we care about, people that we work with. Being present also helps us feel connected to our environment, to nature. It helps us to feel grounded, and this groundedness could help provide some stability in our life, which can be a tremendous support.

Being mindful, relating to grounding and keeping things in mind, is also calming. We have all noticed this, and this might even be part of the reason why some people start a meditation practice—this recognition that it does have this calming effect on the mind and the body. Often, when we're formally meditating, we're not moving around that much, but there's this way that we often don't even notice how busy we are, literally and figuratively. How entangled or caught up we are with thoughts, or this never-ending to-do list, or whatever it might be. You might just be caught up in it and feeling like it's a certain type of rat race. But if we can be mindful of that experience, again and again—maybe if we're feeling really agitated we can choose an anchor, the breath, the body—just bringing the mind there allows some of the busyness, the agitation, to soften. Not because we're forcing it; it just kind of runs out of steam as we're again and again bringing the mind to the present moment, to whatever's happening. This is one of the things that's worth developing in our life. It's something that can be developed and is worthwhile developing: this capacity to just return again and again and again in a way that's calming, settling. In a way that helps us to disentangle from those things that maybe aren't supporting us, disentangle from those things that maybe aren't in our best interest.

Another reason to practice mindfulness is that every time we bring the attention back to whatever it is we're paying attention to, as best we can in a simple, gentle way, we're not feeding that habit of jumping on judgmentalism and running with it. I'm not going to say that the judgmentalism is going to just stop immediately, but if we're not feeding it, then we start to see, "Oh, there's another way to be with my experience, to just accept that this is the reality of the moment." I'm not saying that we have to accept everything and never do anything and be completely passive. I'm talking about allowing the reality of the moment to show itself, for us to align with that reality. So often we're a little bit like sleepwalking, kind of not really connected to what's really happening. This mindfulness with this non-judgmentalism gets developed. This idea of, "Okay, this is what's happening. That's it." We don't have to add extra busyness around it. So some of these things are just to help us have an easier, more fulfilling, happier life.

But of course, mindfulness is part of the Buddhist tradition too. In this tradition, the most common way that the Buddha talked about mindfulness was in the context of the freedom from suffering, the context of wanting to find more ease, more peace, more well-being. This was in the context of the Eightfold Path or the Satipatthana Sutta^[2], the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. For those of you who are familiar with that, there's a relationship between them, of course. Maybe I'll just say this, that the Eightfold Path is really a roadmap towards awakening. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness are also a roadmap to awakening. But to point out that mindfulness is just one part of this, the Buddhist practice has many different elements including all aspects of our lives, but mindfulness really supports all elements, whatever it is that we're doing. This freedom from suffering is finding greater ease.

But mindfulness also addresses this drive or hunger for truth and for understanding. We might have this real wish to know what's real. For me, I'll say that this wanting to investigate or to understand, or to really be with what's really happening, has been really important. I didn't even realize how important it was to me in my life in general; I was just forever pursuing knowledge or something like this. But I think it's more about just wanting to connect with some reality, some truth, as best as I could. I think this is not unique to me; all the philosophers talk about this through the millennia, this idea of truth. We can talk about personal truths—and I talked about understanding ourselves, understanding our psychology, understanding how conditions in our lives get played out later in our life. Of course they do, how could they not? But also about some of these universal truths about how things are. They don't last forever. Things are in flux, they're changing. They are impermanent, inconstant. There's nothing as a lasting source of happiness. We haven't found that yet; it doesn't exist, something that's going to make you happy once and for all, forever. And this recognition that there actually isn't a separate, enduring, constant self that's at the center of the universe. It often feels like that, seems like that, but when we go to look for it, we can't find it. So mindfulness helps us with this, addressing this drive, this hunger for the truths about ourselves, about our experiences, about the world.

As we continue to practice—and maybe this is true for some of you—the motivations, the benefits, or the reasons why you practice start to shift. The more we practice, maybe in the beginning it was just to alleviate some difficulties or find some ease. But as we start to practice more and more, we discover that maybe it's not only freedom from suffering just for ourselves, but for others, for all beings. This recognition that we don't want anybody to suffer; we want everybody to have some well-being. Maybe it starts with just trying to solve one problem, but then there's this opening that happens, this unfolding, this expansion of our care, of our concern. Maybe there's also a recognition of some love that we feel like we've glimpsed, or that we've had a little taste of, where there's a recognition that our hearts are capable of this greater, bigger love. I'll use this word, love. Maybe mindfulness is a support for that, or maybe that's the motivation for continuing our mindfulness practice, our meditation practice.

We could say that one of the signs of somebody who's had some deep practice is kindness, is care, is love. Sometimes we don't think about that when we think about mindfulness. Instead, we might think there needs to be some precision about exactly what we're being mindful of. But there's also this tremendous softening and opening. I spoke earlier about how part of mindfulness is this allowing, this acceptance, this non-judgmentalism about our experience. As we do this often enough with meditation practice, the mind and the heart just adopt this habit of being non-judgmental, of being with the present moment in a way that has this openness to it. That openness is a type of warmth, a type of caring, a type of open-heartedness. As we become less entangled, there's a little more space. As we become less knotted up with whatever is happening, there is a little bit more space around or during our experiences, and in that space is some well-being and some happiness. It's often what is found there. This well-being and happiness nourishes and supports us, so then we don't have to defend ourselves or try to get more. Instead, there's this warm-heartedness, this love that's there when we put down this trying to get happy or trying to defend ourselves or trying to prove ourselves. We don't have to do that because now there's this happiness. And we got this happiness because there's more space, and we got this more space because we were just being present for what was happening as best we could in a non-judgmental, simple way.

So mindfulness also has this quality of warm-heartedness. As we practice, it has this—I'm using this word love, maybe that's not the word that resonates with everybody, maybe there's some other word that feels more comfortable. But this openness, this warmth, as well as this general receptivity to what's happening, allowing ourselves to be touched by the beauty, sometimes the difficulties too. Awe and appreciation kind of arise, just noticing the simple things of our lives. And yes, I'm not going to say it's all Pollyanna beautiful, but there is a way in which we also have the capacity to hold the difficulty. So they're still painful maybe, but the "problem-ness" kind of drains out of the pain. It's not as much something that has to be fixed right now with a sense of urgency, like the world's going to end if this pain doesn't go away. I wish I could say it would take away all the pain, but it doesn't. It just allows us to be with it in a way that's not insisting^[3] that it be otherwise.

So this movement of mindfulness practice turning to some appreciation, simplicity, some warm-heartedness—some of these things maybe weren't our initial intentions of why we started mindfulness practice. But just this natural unfolding of practice leads in this direction, and then these qualities themselves support the lessening of suffering, the increase of freedom. As we move towards this completely non-violent way of being, we start to see how so many things open up for us. It creates the conditions for even more opening, for more letting go. Letting go and shedding everything that's extra and unnecessary and that's getting in our way, so that we can do the biggest letting go that leads to complete awakening. Mindfulness, even though we might think of it as this ordinary, simple, foundational practice, is really so powerful, amazingly powerful. So with that, I'm wishing all of you the mindfulness that supports your path towards greater and greater freedom and peace. Thank you.

Q&A

Audience: When they ring the bell, they always let the first ring completely die out before they do the second, which completely dies out before they do the third. But here, in all the groups, they do them very close together. Is that a difference in a tradition, or is it just...?

Diana Clark: [Laughter] For the purpose of everybody hearing, you come from a place where they ring and then they let the first bell all the way die out, whereas here we don't, we just do one, two, three. I've actually never heard that, where one goes and then it always dies out and then goes to the second. I'll just say that I've been in meditation centers where they do one at the beginning, two at the end. As far as I know, there's no magical reason why we do one or the other. I know that often we do three for Buddha, Dharma, Sangha^[4], or something like that, but I don't know of any particular thing about this. But I can imagine that's helpful to do one and then allow it to die out, so that it's another mindfulness object. You can just be with that while it gets fainter and fainter. Yeah, thank you.

Audience: I found—and Nancy, I don't know if this is normal—as your practice deepens, do you find that you actually feel dukkha^[5] more strongly? Is it just a matter of paying closer attention, or does it just feel stronger?

Diana Clark: So the question was, as our practice deepens, is it that dukkha feels stronger? And you were asking if this is normal? Yes, this absolutely arises. Sometimes we just weren't aware so much of some of the difficulties. And not only that, we also maybe don't have as available to us the ways that we used to try to soothe ourselves or numb ourselves, or however we would work with that.

In the beginning, there can certainly be a lot of just noticing more and more dukkha. But hopefully, also, there's a little bit more confidence, like, "Okay, I can be with this. It's not fun, I wish it weren't here, but I know that I've had some difficulties before that I've been able to be with." With meeting difficulty after difficulty, our confidence grows and our capacity grows. Slowly, there is a way in which our moving through the world starts to shift, as we start to feel like, "Oh, I don't have to avoid everything that might potentially be difficult." So our lives start to have some more ease in that way, that we don't have to navigate and negotiate our lives to try to make sure that we avoid things, just because we start to have more confidence that we can handle them.

What I will say is that it doesn't mean that we don't get angry or we don't get sad. But often—and probably you might have noticed this too, Nancy—it's not that the anger or the sadness has gone away completely, but maybe the duration is shorter or maybe the intensity is less. This is exactly how it happens. The duration of the sadness—I'm just making this up, you didn't say it—we still feel sad for events, but maybe it's for a lesser amount of time, and then a lesser amount of time. And then maybe this sadness arises and it's like, "Oh yeah, there's sadness. Yep, okay, well this is familiar." And then you just go do the next thing. Maybe there's a little bit of sadness there, but you know that it's not going to be the end of the world, whereas before it's like, "Oh, I can't believe I'm sad, and I don't want to be sad, and I'm going to be sad for the rest of my life," or whatever it might be. So thank you, Nancy, for saying that too, because sometimes, of course, we wish, "Wow, this mindfulness thing is so great, couldn't it be a little faster?"

Audience: I was under the impression that the goal was to really remove the huge peaks and valleys that you go through, and sort of maintain a much more rolling...

Diana Clark: Yeah, so you were saying that's kind of the practice, is to not have so much of the peaks and the valleys, but to roll with them. I like what you're saying here. It's the idea that it's not that the waves don't come, but we just learn to surf better, right? So we're just surfing on them and they're not thrashing us around in the same way. We could call that equanimity, and equanimity is often where the deepest letting go and the deepest freedoms are found. So yes.

Audience: As she was dying, guess what she said? Pray for my equanimity.

Diana Clark: Beautiful. I'll just say for those who didn't hear that, you said that as your mother was dying, she said, "Pray that I have equanimity." Yeah, this capacity to hold it. Okay, thank you all. Wishing you all a good evening.