Sitting meditation harnesses your attention by using a single focus such as your breath, images (visualizations), sounds (mantra), or an open awareness of what is arising moment by moment which is called mindfulness meditation.
Mindfulness meditation uses the breath as an anchor while attending to the myriad activities occurring non-stop within the body, mind, and environment. For now, let’s focus on just the concept of mindfulness and hold the meditation part for the next post.
Here’s a brief and, hopefully, user-friendly, definition of what mindfulness is: Being right here, right now in each moment with non-judgmental awareness.
For a more technical definition, I think that the one in The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (2007) written by clinical psychologists from University of Oxford (United Kingdom), University of Toronto, and University of Massachusetts Medical School works well. They wrote: “Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to things as they are.”
If I took four words out of the above two definitions as core to defining mindfulness, they would be “present moment” and “non-judgmental awareness.”
“The Present Moment”
Let’s begin with what we mean by the “present moment.” If you think about how you spend your mental energy (what I call mind-time), you realize that most of your thoughts focus on re-living the past or fantasying about the future…but that’s not where you are physically or where life actually happens. Life occurs only in those fleeting present moments that we’re usually oblivious to – once missed, they’re lost to us forever.
We can neither change the past nor control the future, but we do have power over how we respond to and live in each moment that arises. The great Russian author, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) described it this way:
Only when we operate in the present moment do we have the opportunity to choose skillful thoughts, words, and actions that bring us and others happiness…or react like Pavlov’s dog in a conditioned mindlessness. In any given moment, we chose power or powerlessness – in each moment of living mindfully, we consciously chose personal power.
“Non-Judgmental Awareness”
Wednesday night when I was sitting with my meditation group, I decided to observe the experience of “non-judgmental awareness” while meditating. Surprisingly, what I found was that “non-judgment” didn’t describe my experiences because the concept was in the negative of no judging, rather than words in the affirmative. So, using the breath to hold the mind and body focused, I looked to see what words described mindfully watching what arose mentally, physically, and environmentally. (And yes, there are times during some meditations that I do analysis, but it is about meditation, not work or vacation planning.)
Here are the words that described my mindfulness experience:
- Openness,
- Curiosity,
- Equanimity,
- Peace,
- Graceful acknowledgment.
These feelings arose not out of resignation, defeatism, or passive acceptance, but rather an active interest and receptiveness of what I experienced in each moment. And some things felt unpleasant, but those too were just the natural part of the total unfolding, ever changing experience.
Here’s what the authors of The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (2007) say about judgmentalness: “Judgments of any sort (good or bad, right or wrong) imply that we or the things around us have to measure up in some way to an internal or external standard…the habit of judging winds up functioning as an irrational tyrant that can never be satisfied.”
Therefore, when you practice mindfulness, you remain in the present moment, curious about and open to the thoughts, feelings, and surrounding events just as they are…rejecting nothing, and clinging to nothing. You hold a space of equanimity.
