Cultivating Mindfulness
What is “mindfulness”? It is a translation of the Pali word “sati” that suggests being attentive while fully conscious. Having sati means you are more fully conscious and alert than normal and are paying attention to the right things in a more skillful way. Mindfulness means the optimal interaction between attention and awareness.
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. While mindfulness is something we all naturally possess, it’s more readily available to us when we practice daily. Being mindful in daily life, during conversations, and while engaged in intellectual activities, is a common challenge. An even greater challenge is to be mindful in emotionally intense and highly charged situations, and when a lot of different things are happening at once. And the latter are the circumstances when mindfulness matters the most.
To grasp mindfulness, we first have to know what attention and awareness normally do. Each has a different function, and they provide two distinct kinds of information. But they also work together, and to respond intelligently to our environment, we need both. The conscious experience takes two different forms, attention, and peripheral awareness. Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our conscious experience. At the same time, however, we can be more generally aware of things in the background. For example, right now your attention is focused on what you’re reading. At the same time, you’re also aware of other sights, sounds, smells, and sensations in the periphery.
The way attention and awareness work together is a lot like the relationship between visual focus and peripheral vision. For instance, you may be listening intently to what a person is saying. At the same time, you’re peripherally aware of the flavor of the tea you’re drinking, traffic noises in the background, and the pleasant feeling of sitting in a cozy chair. Just as with vision, we’re more fully conscious of the object in the focus of our attention, but we remain conscious of the many objects in peripheral awareness as well. When we shift our focus, what had been at the center of attention moves to the periphery. As attention moves from one object to another— from the conversation to the mug of tea— we become more fully conscious of each object in turn, while remaining peripherally aware of the others.
In meditation, we work with both attention and awareness to cultivate concentration and mindfulness, the two main practice skills of meditation. In meditation, where other distractions are minimized, we can learn to use awareness effectively and become skilled at using attention and awareness together. However, skill at using attention and awareness is only one part of mindfulness training. Developing raw mental power is the other part that often gets overlooked. Without this increase in power, you won’t get very far in cultivating mindfulness; and you will still find yourself losing mindfulness when you need it most, especially off the cushion. For example, if your partner had a bad day at work and complains about the food you made, it takes mindfulness to maintain an objective awareness that recognizes the real cause of the complaint. But when strong emotions take hold, all your energy pours into hyperfocused attention as you go into fight-or-flight mode. Your awareness fails, and attention hones in on the criticism as a personal attack.
Sustained mindfulness requires a consciousness that is more powerful than normal. Increasing the power of consciousness isn’t a mysterious process. It’s a lot like weight training. You simply do exercises where you practice sustaining close attention and strong awareness at the same time. This is the only way to make consciousness more powerful. The ‘breath-mindfulness’ (Anapanasati) meditation that we practice precisely focuses on developing the skills of attention and awareness by using the breath as the tool.
Like strengthening muscles, developing powerful mindfulness involves enhancing a natural capacity we all have. Just reflect for a moment on how your alertness and clarity of mind change throughout the day. Sometimes we feel quite sharp, energetic, and lucid. A life-threatening situation is an exceptional example of this. Time slows down. We become finely attuned to every little detail— every color, shape, sound, and sensation is vivid. Sometimes we may have the feeling of being an outside observer just watching the events unfold. Athletes refer to this kind of hyperconscious state as being “in the zone.” This is one extreme. On the other end of the spectrum, there are times during the day when we feel sluggish. A lack of mental energy leads to dullness, and then to drowsiness. In these kinds of states, we miss much of what’s happening around us and often misinterpret what we can perceive. Severe fatigue or alcohol can cause extreme dullness. Deep sleep is the ultimate state of dullness. These varying experiences show the range of the conscious capabilities of our minds. You’ll realize that daily life consists mostly of different degrees of dullness and mindlessness.
As you progress through your meditation practice, you move steadily away from dullness toward enhanced states of consciousness that support increased mindfulness. Having more conscious power means the quality of both attention and awareness improves.
Benefits of Mindfulness
When you have cultivated mindfulness, life becomes richer, more vivid, and more satisfying, and you don’t take everything that happens so personally. Attention plays a more appropriate role within the greater context of a broad and powerful awareness. You are fully present, happier, and at ease because you’re not so easily caught up in the stories and melodramas the mind likes to concoct. Your powers of attention are used more appropriately and effectively to examine the world. You become more objective and clear-headed and develop an enhanced awareness of the whole. When all these factors are ripe, you are ready for profound Insight into the true nature of reality.