Curiosity and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Curiosity and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness ~ Jim Podolske. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Jim Podolske at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 18, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

How is the sound? Is this okay, or maybe a little too loud? Okay.

Good evening, everyone. As you know, we'll be sitting for thirty minutes, and then at 7:45, I'll be giving a Dharma talk. One thing I was told was that our hearing-assisted system is not working right now. So, if you have trouble hearing, I can try turning up the volume a little bit, but I don't think I see anyone with one of those devices. Let me know if you're having an issue.

Curiosity and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness

All right. Excuse me. Good evening, everyone. Welcome.

Last week, Diana asked if I would fill in for her this week as she's away. I thought what I'd talk about tonight, I'd leverage off the talk that she gave last week. For those of you who heard it, she talked about how we can bring the quality of curiosity to our mindfulness practice. Sometimes mindfulness can seem a little bit too rigid in the way that you observe your experience—maybe a little too clinical or a little detached. So curiosity is a supplement to some of our ideas of what mindfulness really is.

During her talk and afterwards, I realized, first of all, I wasn't exactly sure what curiosity is or what the word "curious" means. So, I went, as anyone would do these days, onto the internet to look at some online dictionaries. Several were mostly newer ones, but some actually from Webster's Dictionary from sometime in the 19th century.

Some of the phrases that I came across for "curious" were: "eager to learn or know something," "strange or unusual," and "desire to investigate and learn." Curious: "exciting attention as strange, novel, or unexpected." "Strongly desirous to see what is novel or discover what is not known." "Eager to know, inquisitive, desirous of seeing."

What I got from that—and I was glad I looked it up—is that curiosity, first of all, is associated with a certain energetic quality. It's an energy of eagerness, of desire (I think, wholesome desire), and excitement. A real active engagement with what we're looking at. It is not a detached, clinical, cold way of investigating our experience, but really a way of engaging with it with a certain amount of vitality.

Last week, I received an email from Spirit Rock for a course that's being offered, and there was a quote in there that just seemed very timely to this topic. It was a quote from Marcel Proust^[1] from his book In Search of Lost Time. And the quote is: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

I realized how applicable that was at times for my practice regarding the notion of new landscapes. I want my experience to be different. I want it to be more "wowie-zowie" than it is, maybe bordering on psychedelic, or having visions and out-of-body experiences. I think those things can happen—I've heard it said—but really what's being pointed here is: how do we see what's already happening as though we've never seen it before, with new eyes?

It's so easy to have something arise in our experience, and you go, "Oh, yeah. I know that. I've had that happen before. There's nothing new here." I was just thinking about this years ago when I had a cat. When it was very young, every sound it would hear outside, it would perk up its attention, look outside, and investigate. Then after a while, it got to know certain sounds, like the sound of cars and things like that, and it just wouldn't react when it would hear something. So even a cat would sort of get into this mind state of, "Yeah, I know that, I don't really need to pay attention."

Part of the process, then, is: how can we willingly drop our sense of knowing and go into a sense of—I think someone here last week said—"beginner's mind" or "don't-know mind"?

When I was in my early-to-mid thirties, I felt like I had become a full-fledged scientist. I had gone through undergraduate, I had gone to graduate school, and I had gone through a post-doctoral period. I'd gone through a period as a collaborator with a more senior scientist. And then I reached a point like, "Okay, now I've made it. Now what?"

One of the things that really helped me at that point in my life was discovering this book that was written by a famous physicist, Richard Feynman^[2]. He had worked on the Manhattan Project when he was young, he had taught at Caltech for many years, and he helped formulate quantum chromodynamics (which I'm not exactly sure what that is, but it sounds pretty impressive).

He wrote two autobiographies. His first autobiography was entitled, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character. I really enjoyed reading that because, for me as a scientist, he exemplified a role model, or a sort of virtual mentor. I never met him, but he showed that science wasn't all about being clinical, rational, and logical all the time, but there was an element of curiosity. How do you get interested in the things that you're investigating and bring some energy and vitality to that?

He also brought his curiosity to the Challenger accident in the early 80s. He was on the committee that investigated why that happened. He was really the one that wanted to get beyond just the standard script of, "How do we bury this under a huge report?" So he brought several qualities. One was this curiosity—this way of being eager to discover, to look at things in a way that he hadn't looked at them before.

The other thing about the title of his book, Surely You're Joking, was that he had a great sense of humor. People couldn't always tell when he was joking. I think that is valuable to bring to mindfulness practice. Humor mostly is based on saying the unexpected. It's not telling a story where it's clear where it's going and you get to the end, but there's a punchline where suddenly, wherever you thought it was going, it's gone somewhere else. So humor combined with curiosity can be a helpful element of mindfulness practice.

And the other element that he brought was a certain trickster energy. He knew not in a way to try to deceive or lie to people, but in a way to trick them out of their way of thinking. To trick them out of the sense of knowing what's going on.

I was very fortunate to be able to find his book and read it, and find that it was okay to be curious and investigate things from a place of deep interest, rather than just what's said to be interesting or important. I think all of those qualities we can bring to our mindfulness practice as well.

At the end of Diana's talk last week, where she had her own description of bringing curiosity, somebody asked the question: "Okay, well, curiosity sounds great. What should I be curious about?" Which is a great question. "I'm doing this mindfulness practice. What is it that I should be curious about?" Given that there were only a couple of minutes left in the evening, a very good answer was: "Everything." Everything that arises in your awareness, everything that you experience, is allowable for you to be aware of. There's nothing that's forbidden or outside the realm of what we can be aware of. If it's arising in our awareness, it's fair game.

I think that was a great answer, and the person that asked that question seemed to enjoy it. But it also got me thinking, "Well, that's true, but sometimes it's helpful to have, maybe in your back pocket, some lists of things that you might want to look for."

And of course, the Buddha supplied that. There's a sutta called the Satipatthana Sutta^[3]. This is just one book that's written about the Satipatthana Sutta, and it goes into great detail about a whole variety of experiences and categories of experience that it's beneficial to investigate, beneficial to be mindful of. So tonight I'll just talk about one of the lists. I think it's an important one: the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. If you're going to do mindfulness practice, at some point in time it would be useful to know what the Buddha said are useful things to be mindful of.

The first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. Being mindful of all the sensations, experiences, and characteristics of the body. You may say, "I know the body. I've had this body, it's clicking on fine. Nothing new to see here." You may want to challenge that belief or that tendency, both in formal meditation and also in daily life practice, to pay attention to bodily experience. Decide, "Okay, on this sitting, I'm going to pay attention to what arises in the body."

One of the first bodily experiences that is often pointed to or taught in introductory mindfulness meditation is mindfulness of breathing. Often, you're directed to paying attention to where in the body the breathing sensations are most predominant. How do they change with time? Is the breath short, medium, or long? Can you pay attention to the beginning of the in-breath? The middle of the in-breath, the end of the in-breath, the pause at the end. The beginning of the out-breath, the middle of the out-breath, the end of the out-breath, and the pause. So breaking it down a little further than just a seemingly seamless process to the different phases of it.

Last year, I took a five-week online course from a teacher named Jill Satterfield^[4], who talked about the many ways that you can use the breath for working with anxiety. At the time, anxiety was a big experience for me. Over the years, she had studied with a number of Tibetan teachers, and she described over the course of those five weeks many of the ways in which you can be curious about the breath. How you can actually manipulate it in certain ways to bring attention to different parts of the body. I was astounded. I thought I had been doing breath meditation for twenty or more years, and yet, when I heard her talks, I realized, "Oh, yeah, there's a lot more to the breath than I thought there was." So there's a lot more to be curious about and to investigate just with the breath than I realized.

Another element of mindfulness of the body are particular meditation techniques called body scans, where you bring your awareness all the way from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet in some systematic way. You just tune in to all of the different sensations that you can feel in your scalp, in your face, all the way through the body. The first time I was guided through a body scan meditation, I think we spent 45 minutes just getting from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet. I recognized that there were some parts of the body where I could feel a lot of sensation and some where it seemed like I just couldn't feel anything. But it got me more in touch with my body just by doing that kind of investigation. So one of the categories of experience that you can investigate and be curious about is the body.

The second foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of feeling tone. Every experience, everything that you're experiencing, every sensation, every contact with the sense doors has one of three feeling tones to it. It's either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant (sometimes called neutral). You can also become curious about what is the feeling tone of what's going on for me right now. Is it pleasant? Is it unpleasant? Or is it neutral?

There's a value to this—it's not just idle curiosity. Those experiences that have a pleasant feeling tone, those are the ones that we tend to grasp onto, where there can be a movement towards clinging, towards grasping. By just noting the pleasant feeling tone of an experience, we may be less inclined to grasp it.

Similarly, for unpleasant experiences, there can often be a tendency to want to push it away, to meet it with avoidance or aversion. Again, if we can see the unpleasant nature, we might find that although there may be a tendency to want to push it away, we don't have to. We can stay with it. We can stay curious with it.

For those experiences that are neither pleasant nor unpleasant, the tendency can often be ignorance. We ignore it. It's like, "Okay, well it's not pleasant or unpleasant. It's just a bowl of oatmeal or something." Our reaction is to ignore it or not bring interest to it. So, those experiences that have that feeling tone, we may also want to bring some curiosity to those as well.

The third foundation of mindfulness that the Buddha described in the Satipatthana Sutta was mindfulness of mind states. In modern language, sometimes that's like, "What's the mood of the mind right now?" Is it sharp or is it dull? Is it focused or is it kind of diffuse? Is it contented or is it dissatisfied? Is it calm or is it agitated? Those are some of the classical descriptions of mind states.

You may get curious about the state of your mind: "What's the state of my mind right now?" One of the ones that I'm familiar with is "Grumpy Jim." Every once in a while, I know that there's a kind of grumpiness, a propensity towards it. I have one friend who I've told this to, and she actually told me, "Well, you know, I kind of like Grumpy Jim." It's just kind of okay to admit that that's the state of the mind right now. So mindfulness of mind states is another place to be curious, another thing to investigate.

And then the fourth classical foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of mind objects, or thoughts, or you might call them mental activities. What's going on in the mind right now? Being mindful of thinking can be maybe one of the most challenging of these four foundations. For one thing, because thoughts are very ephemeral. They kind of come and they go, and where do they come from? Where do they go? They can also be very seductive. Who hasn't had a thought like, "Oh, boy, that's a great thought," and right away you're off into some story, spinning some yarn about that thought. It might take you into the past or it might take you into the future. It might take you into some realm of fantasy.

But it's definitely worthwhile at times to explore and bring some curiosity to, "What am I thinking about?" And also to the transition. When your mindfulness is strong and you're alert, and then suddenly you've drifted off into thinking, can you notice that drift? Can you notice the transition going out of active mindfulness? And can you notice the transition coming back to being mindful?

That's something somebody was describing to me recently, and I'm planning to do a retreat on the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya^[5]. He's a Burmese teacher who talks about studying how the mind comes in and out of mindfulness.

So those are the four classical foundations. If you're ever sitting in meditation and you're just lost, and seemingly nothing's happening, these are four categories that you might explore.

There are two more that have come to me more recently that are not directly from the Buddha. One is mindfulness of emotion. I think at the time of the Buddha, they didn't talk so much about emotion. That didn't have a category of its own. But emotions are made up of all four of these foundations, right? An emotion has a bodily component to it. It has a feeling tone to it. It quite often has some mind state associated with it, and there are often many thoughts that come along with an emotion. So being curious about your emotions—that's more of a Western category.

And then the other category that I think is very aligned with these is being mindful and curious about our inner psychology. I think particularly in the West, we become very fascinated by the psychological processes that go on inside, and the way in which we identify with those. We develop an identity around these psychological processes. So they too are worth investigating, bringing some curiosity to.

Last year, I was listening to this Tibetan teacher that I like quite a bit, Anam Thubten^[6], who was in a very light-hearted way encouraging people to get to know your hang-ups. Get to know your emotional baggage. Get to know your neuroses. Get to know your beliefs, your opinions, your stories. All of that is totally legitimate to pay attention to as a way to not, number one, identify with them, and number two, let them obscure some deeper wisdom.

So hopefully this will give you some ideas of what might be useful to be mindful of, to be curious about, to investigate. Particularly when you feel you might be in a place where you think, "Well, yeah, nothing's going on right now." If you think nothing's going on right now, you may want to start investigating the body, investigating feeling tone, investigating mind states, and investigating mental activities. And hopefully, you will be surprised, and find something that you didn't know was there.

So with that, I'll end. Thank you all for your kind attention, and we have some time for questions or comments. Let me just give you a microphone. Thank you.

Q&A

Audience: Thank you for your talk. Would you be so kind as to repeat the four foundations again? The main categories.

Jim Podolske: Okay, let me just get hooked up here. Yeah. So the Four Foundations of Mindfulness are: mindfulness of the body (mindfulness of bodily sensations), mindfulness of feeling tone (the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality of an experience), mindfulness of mind states (what is the mood of the mind at the moment?), and the fourth one is mindfulness of mental activities. What are the thoughts, the stories, and all of the things that are going on in the mind? So thank you for your question.

Audience: The reason why I started re-engaging in mindfulness is basically because I struggle with life. I struggle with depression, anxiety, but just feeling comfortable being me. I've practiced mindfulness or meditation on and off over the years and I'm trying to re-engage to, I guess, in a way, disconnect from the negative thoughts, or according to last week and this week, come to it with a sense of curiosity rather than buying into it every time. Can you sort of speak to how to be curious about it rather than hold onto the feeling of it, or live in the feeling, and be more disconnected from it?

Jim Podolske: Thank you. That's a wonderful question. My first disclaimer is, I'm not a psychologist. So what I'm saying comes from my own experience. One of the things that a psychologist that sometimes teaches here said: anything that you resist persists. So if you say, "I'm not going to be depressed. I'm not going to be depressed. I'm not going to be depressed," that resistance to it may prevent it from changing.

One of the things would be to look at is there some way that I'm identifying with these thoughts? Am I identifying with this experience? So seeing a way in which there may be some way that you're clinging onto the experience, like, "This is my experience," and seeing it instead as, "This is what's happening right now. This is what's happening right now." So I don't have to push it away, but I also don't have to feed it, you know? I don't have to feed it and say, "Yeah." Just the noticing of it—sometimes that can be enough.

Back around 1990, I had the opportunity to hear Ram Dass^[7] give a talk in Berkeley. He was a psychology professor at Harvard along with Timothy Leary^[8], and he both worked as a therapist and went through therapy himself. He said in all of his time in therapy, he doesn't think he cured a single neurosis. But he said what changed was his relationship to them. They went from being big, horrible monsters to these little friendly gelatinous characters called Shmoos from the Li'l Abner^[9] cartoons.

His relationship to them changed, so that it wasn't like they ever went away, but by allowing them, not feeding them, and not getting identified with them, they became much more manageable. I don't know if that's really quite the right word, but they became not so fear-inducing or frightening. They were just like, "Okay, sometimes this is what happens. Sometimes this is what arises." And can I recognize it and notice its changing nature? Notice that it isn't a solid thing, that it has an impermanent quality to it.

So that's what I would offer to you. For some things, mindfulness can be helpful, and it can also be helpful to have an ally, like a trained psychotherapist or somebody that can help with seeing and learning to be with the experience. So hopefully that'll be helpful.

Audience: This is more an observation than a question. But one thing I've noticed in my own practice is that there are two strands. There's kind of the knowledge of mindfulness and the knowledge of the Dharma, the knowledge of Buddhism. And then there's what I'm actually experiencing, the experiential learning. And I find that the knowledge part is sort of easy and the experiential part is very uneven. It just follows its own path. There are times when I have these breakthroughs, and then there are long periods where it may even seem stagnant. But it's just sort of an observation about bringing it back to the Four Foundations, that you can sort of carry around these ideas in your head and be thinking about them and trying to observe them. But then, I went on a retreat in December and it just really moved it back to the experiential.

Jim Podolske: Yeah. One of the phrases that I remember hearing from Gil^[10] is: if you have a choice between the ideal and the actual, go with the actual. The teachings of the Buddha, at some point you might go, "Oh yeah, I get that. Now I get it," but you can't force yourself to believe.

It's often said that there are three levels of learning^[11]. One is hearing and reading about it. Then the next level down is thinking about it, like, "Oh yeah, how does this work in my life?" And then the deepest level of learning is having the direct experience. So all three levels of learning are useful. It's useful to read the books, hear the talks, and talk to other people about it. It's useful to think about it like, "I wonder how that works." And then with practice, like you were saying, being on retreat, you can reach that third level of learning of actually experiencing.

But I don't think that you can just choose which level you're going to be at at any given moment. You just, as Diana likes to say, do as best you can. So, thank you for your question. Is there anyone else that would like to ask a question?

Well, if not, then again, thank you all for coming. I hope this talk sparked some curiosity in you, and some interest in going to places and seeing things that you haven't seen before. Thank you.