what is Mindfulness?
I am certified as a Level 2 Coach in the Unified Mindfulness (UM) system of meditation developed by Shinzen Young. Although I have a great interest in other ways of approaching mindfulness/meditation (specifically through the lens of Christian Contemplation and Zen practice), UM is how I typically approach individual coaching and group training sessions with clients. [An alternative framework that I often use can be found here.]
Within the framework of UM, the term “mindfulness” (or, more specifically, “mindful awareness”) is defined as:
A certain way of paying attention to what is going on around you and within you that involved 3 attentional skills working together.
What are these 3 skills of Mindful Awareness? Shinzen describes them as follows:
Concentration power: the ability to pay attention to what you deem relevant at any given moment
Sensory clarity: the ability to track the detail and subtlety of sensory experience in real time
Equanimity: the ability to allow sensory experience to come and go without push and pull
And, what does “sensory experience” refer to?…
In the UM system, all of our experience (and I mean anything that we experience) can be understood as some combination of 3 sense categories:
See: all visual experience (outer sights and inner mental image)
Hear: all auditory experience (outer sounds and inner mental talk)
Feel: all somatic experience (“outer” physical body sensations and “inner” emotional body sensations — taste and smell can be considered as a part of physical body sensations)
The core technique of UM is the SeeHearFeel practice. As the name implies, it is a mindful awareness practice that works with all sensory experience — in other words, it is a meditation practice that uses anything that your attention notices. To practice this technique, you are asked to simply let your attention be drawn to whatever it is drawn to, and, every few seconds, notice which of the 3 sense categories your attention has “landed on” by Noting with or without Labels:
Noting involves acknowledging a moment of sensory experience (wherever your attention is) and focusing in on it for several seconds;
Labeling is the use of a word (See, Hear, or Feel) — either spoken aloud or silently in your mind — to facilitate the Noting process
Practitioners are typically asked to practice a given technique (or combination of techniques) for in 3 ways throughout the day:
Formal practice: 100% of your attention on practicing the technique(s) for a set length of time (at least 10 minutes/day) [this might be what one typically thinks of when using the word “meditation”]
“Micro-practice”: 100% of your attention on practicing the technique(s) for shorter lengths of time (anywhere from 10 seconds to just under 10 minutes) several times throughout the day (maybe ~6 times/day) [this might be what one typically thinks of when using “mindfulness techniques” during daily life]
Background practice: somewhere between 5-20% of your attention practicing technique(s) in daily life situations ranging from the most mundane to the most significant (pleasant or unpleasant) [this might be what one typically thinks of as simply setting the intention to “be mindful”]
Mindful awareness practices are called “practices” for a very good reason… we are engaged in a practice of some sort or another every moment of our waking (and maybe even our dreaming) life. All we do, say, or think increases the conditions for that action, speech, or thought to occur again — we are practicing life every moment of life! That being said, we have the wonderful opportunity to recognize this fact and to guide ourselves toward having a propensity for expressing positive, loving, responsible habits by practicing them as often as possible using our body, voice, and mind. But, you can’t skillfully change something you can’t see — that is where mindful awareness practices come in.
That is [one way to describe] what mindfulness is.
Who is mindfulness for?…
…everyone.
Maybe I’m a little biased…
But, I also think there happens to be a strong case for this claim. Consider the following:
We do not experience anything outside a narrow range of categories — we are always (and only) seeing, hearing, or feeling something that is either pleasant, unpleasant, neither, or somehow both. You could also think of an alternative understanding: we are always (and only) sensing, feeling, or thinking something. There are probably endless ways to name what it is like to be human, but it does seem to be true that, regardless of the names, the components of sensory experience (what we see, hear, and feel) that shape how we see ourselves and the world are finite. By extension, any example of human suffering (torturous pain, empty unsatisfactoriness, chronic uncertainty, debilitating anxiety, dismantling depression, profound discontentment, etc.) could be understood as being made up of some combination of these several components.
Why does this matter?
As we learn new ways of responding or relating to the components of our sensory experience, we can gain a new sense of control over what impacts us and the ways in which we are impacted. There are three general ways we can attempt to do this:
Turn toward the perceived source of our suffering
Turn away from the perceived source of our suffering
Alternate between turning toward and turning away
There is actually a fourth option, however… and this is the options many of us probably use by default: to try and avoid turning toward (“I don’t want to make it worse!”); and/or to try and avoid turning away (“I’m not supposed to suppress it!”).
What distinguishes the first three options from the fourth is the attitude of intentional engagement with our sensory experience — the first three approaches decide to turn toward, turn away, or alternate with purpose in order to develop skills of mindful awareness (concentration, clarity, and equanimity); the fourth is an attitude of powerlessness — a stalemate with our sensory experience (one’s back is against the wall).
This all seems to imply that, regardless of life circumstances, we all are faced with a similar type of challenge: in our suffering (of whatever variety) we are all faced with some combination of seeing, hearing, and feeling (or sensing, feeling, and thinking if you prefer) that appears to imprison us; in the face of which we appear to be helpless; and that “fact” appears to make up who and what we are.
If we are all in fact facing the same type of challenge, it seems reasonable to see the problem of suffering itself as being vulnerable to more empowering ways of relating to it.
If this view is in any way true, it allows us to see the same “taste” of suffering in all things we may suffer with: the “taste of suffering” is something like the automatic and often unconscious ways in which we respond to the components of our sensory experience by clinging to them and/or rejecting them as they arise and pass.
so what?
Miles Davis classic, and an appropriate question…
What this means is that we all have access to the freedom from our own suffering — I have it within me, and you have it within you. That freedom is a liberating potential for altering the stance we each take toward each moment of life. I do not mean to imply that we have the potential to never feel pain or discomfort again… those things are just as much a part of life as are pleasure and joy. In fact, it may even be the case that the complementarity of these two sides of our lived experience actually form the liberating potential to escape into life (even through pain and discomfort). What I am suggesting is that “escaping into life” by paying attention to our experience of it with mindful awareness may in fact be our birth right — and even our responsibility.
This liberation can be learned;
it can be practiced;
it can be lived.
A useful way to think about how to track the benefits of this “escaping into life” is what Unified Mindfulness (UM) describes as the 5 Categories of Human Happiness:
Relief: decrease of suffering with unpleasant experiences
Fulfillment: increase of satisfaction with pleasant experiences
Wisdom: understand of one’s self at deeper and deeper levels
Mastery: speak and act more skillfully
Service: develop a spirit of love and service toward others
Rather than outline many of the countless examples of how our day-to-day lives may be positively impacted by any of these aims of mindful awareness practice, I’d like to encourage you to think of how relief, fulfillment, wisdom, mastery, and service may be noticed in your life if you happened to experience more of any of them…
Again, maybe I’m biased — and, to be clear, I do not live this freedom fully quite yet myself (although, I’m working on it!) — but let’s consider the possibility that (as Richard Rohr sometimes says), “How we see is what we see”. Mindfulness is the systematic training of how to see by approaching all experiences as opportunities of practice.
So, since everyone with an aware mind is subject to suffering;
and “suffering” only arises when we fight with our own sensory experience (by pulling or pushing on it);
and suffering can be lessened to the extent that we bring mindful awareness to each moment of experience…
