What Is Mindfulness? –or– How to Do Something without Doing Anything

Today for “church at home” Sunday we read from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (aff), with the goal of taking the next step toward a more regular daily mindfulness/meditation practice for all of us.

In doing so, we stumbled upon a road block in understanding the nature and goals of mindfulness. Never to be daunted and ever-curious and exploratory, we trudged through it with our thinking caps on.

Even having read several books on Buddhism myself, I can say that one particular passage from today opened me up to a dimension of mindfulness that I hadn’t yet truly embraced: and I feel closer to understanding what mindfulness is and can be.

The Definition of Mindfulness

In the words of Jon Kabat Zinn, mindfulness is simply “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality.”

photo credit: robertpaulyoung

Typically, meditation or simple “moments of awareness” are intentionally explored as a part of developing mindfulness, whether introduced throughout the day or as a part of a routine once daily. But what is so difficult about the activity of mindfulness is its dual nature: it is an activity that is undertaken deliberately and intentionally, yet the activity itself is by its nature non-intentional. That is, while we are meditating or practicing mindfulness, we are attempting to release all intentions from our mind.

This has always been a challenge for me as the nature of my own mind is to always play out an inner dialog of criticism and goal-setting, a constant “play by play” sports announcer of sorts, like the kind we’ve been enjoying as we watch the Olympics this week:

“Now Hope will attempt to achieve Olympic history in the meditation event. Let’s see if she can get a gold! She’s starting out, now see how her breath begins to shift ever so slightly when she focuses on it? That will be a deduction. Her goal here is to focus on her breath without any alterations. I’ve been watching her in warm-ups and she’s been making that mistake a lot. Here, she’s coming up on another pass. Will she stick this one? Oh!”

Of course I realize that it’s absurd, but I can’t seem to shake my attachment to an outcome. That’s where today’s reading came in and brought me one step closer.

How to Explain Mindfulness: Sorting Out the Non-Dualistic Dualism that is its Non-Doing Do-ism!

Our three readings today from Zinn’s book also happen to express three fundamental keys to beginning a mindfulness practice. They seem to represent a sort of roadside heads-up for the beginner, a “Caution Roadblock Ahead,” and zero in on what’s difficult to approach when we explain mindfulness, not to mention when we learn to practice it. They are:

• Keeping the Breath in Mind. The importance of taking moments to simply experience your breathing without trying to do, change, or accomplish anything.
• You Can’t Stop the Waves but You Can Learn to Surf. Appreciating that mindfulness is not a “miracle cure.” Recognizing a need to accept the inevitable activity of the mind rather than introduce the tension of wanting to control it. Learning to gradually work with the mind to achieve a greater calm, like learning to surf.
• In Praise of Non-Doing. Understanding that “doing nothing” during mindfulness meditation is not truly a negation of activity, but is actually a positive act, an “effortless activity.”

It was the third passage that tripped us all up, partially because it really is next to impossible to express the meaning of this concept in the English language, or probably in any language for that matter.

Especially to our Western minds, the idea of doing something without grasping on to a definite outcome, a “payment” for your valuable time, is quite untenable. But this is exactly what we need to approach when practicing mindfulness. Yet every time you use words like “try to do x” or “don’t do x” it can automatically introduce exactly the kind of effort and tension that mindfulness seeks to step away from.

One of my favorite things about our current “church at home” Sundays practice is the way that we all work together as a family to sort out and disentangle a particularly complex or convoluted passage, in the process sharing our own experiences as we bring personal meaning to our reading. So it was this activity, a rewinding that we did among us as we re-read the passage out loud and took turns interpreting it, that truly brought the meaning home in a way that I might not have grasped had I been reading alone.

First, we encountered these words:

It is very important not to think that this non-doing is synonymous with doing nothing. They couldn’t be more different… On the surface, it seems as if there might be two kinds of non-doing, one involving not doing any outward work, the other involving what we might call effortless activity. Ultimately we come to see that they are the same.

–Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are (aff)

Image via Wikipedia

My first take on the passage? The guy is crazy, I said. He makes no sense. My mom took a stab and proffered that his goal here was to explain that you can actually meditate while doing things like knitting and mowing the lawn. I was unconvinced. Then we read on.

It was Zinn’s eventual offering of a quote by Henry David Thoreau, both beautiful and crystal-clear simply through its poetry, that set everyone to understanding, almost in a felt manner, exactly what this non-doing doing is all about. If offer it here to you in its entirety, in the hopes that it will move you as it did us.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to do any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.

I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing, like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest.

–Thoreau, Walden (aff) [emphasis mine]

Love,

Mama Hope