Mindfulness - The Whole Formula

There’s a long sutta on the topic of mindfulness called the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. Many people assume that, because it’s so long, it’s a full description of mindfulness practice. The Buddha starts out with a statement of the full formula—what it means to establish mindfulness: You focus on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Then you do the same with feelings in and of themselves, theh mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves.

But then when the Buddha discusses the formula, he doesn’t explain the whole thing. He explains only one part—what it means to be focused on one of those four things in and of themselves. That’s it.

He doesn’t explain what mindfulness means. He doesn’t explain what alertness and ardency mean. He doesn’t discuss putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. So he’s obviously not giving a full description.

Even that partial description is quite long, which may have taxed the memory of his monks. Think about what it was like to give a Dhamma talk back in those days: There were no recordings. You couldn’t go back and listen to them a second time, a third time. For some people, this was their one chance to hear the Dhamma. So the Buddha would give them only what they could digest.

So that night, all that the people could digest was what it means to be focused on something in and of itself. As for the rest of the formula, there are other places in the Canon where the Buddha explains them.

But because the sutta is assumed to be the full explanation of mindfulness practice, it’s given rise to a lot of misunderstandings. In some cases, it sounds like you’re simply aware of what happens, and you make a note: “There’s this kind of feeling, there’s that kind of feeling, there’s this kind of mind state, there’s that kind of mind state.” And you stop there.

But in other places where the Buddha explains what it means to be alert and what it means to be ardent, it’s something quite different.

When you’re ardent, if anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you try to get rid of it. As for skillful things that are not there yet, you try to give rise to them. And when they are there, you try to maintain them in such a way that you don’t allow new unskillful things to arise.

So, there’s a lot of activity involved—a lot more than is usually assumed.

As with the qualities of alertness and ardency: You’re alert to what’s happening. You’re keeping watch over yourself, so that you can then remember what to do. You recognize what’s there—that’s what mindfulness does. Say, for instance, that sensual desire comes up, you recognize that it’s sensual desire. That’s the task of mindfulness. Then it also reminds you what to do with it: Sensual desire is something to be abandoned.

Then with the ardency, you actually do the abandoning. Ardency, here, is basically the same as right effort. Now, how you go about abandoning it is going to depend on lots of things. Sometimes you just look at something and it goes away. Other times, you look at it and it stares right back—it’s not going to go away easily. So you have to think of ways to understand how it got there, why you’re attracted to it, what its drawbacks are, so that you can finally let it go. When you see that the drawbacks outweigh the allure, you don’t have to tell the mind to let go. It lets go on its own. But getting it to see these things requires a certain amount of effort.

There’s a lot to be done, as when you’re sitting here right now: You’re focused on the breath for a couple of breaths, and then something else comes up. You look into it, and it sucks you in. Suddenly you’re not with the breath anymore, you’re someplace else, especially if the breath hasn’t yet become very comfortable. When there’s nothing particularly appealing to it, the mind very easily slips off.

Sometimes it takes quite a while before you realize that you’ve slipped off. Then you might decide, “Well, as long as I’ve slipped off here, I might as well complete the thought.” That takes a while longer. Then you come back. That’s a case where your alertness and your ardency are still weak.

Ideally, as soon as a distracting thought comes up, you want to be aware: “A distracting thought has come.” Then you remember that you’re not going to go there, you’re going to stay with the breath. Then you do your best not to get interested in the thought, and to get more interested in the way you’re breathing.

It’s good to realize that there are these distracting thoughts that are beginning to stir around inside before they take over. Try your best to breathe in a way that’s interesting, a way that feels good. Think of it feeling good in different parts of the body. You’re breathing through the nose, you’re breathing through the eyes, you’re breathing through the ears, you’re breathing through your tailbone. Play with the breath in this way. That’s how you can use your ardency to get past that particular distraction.

Then you have to stay alert, because other distractions are going to come up. Your ardency, as it improves, can get quicker and quicker, realizing what’s happening until you detect, even before the distraction has taken over, that you can begin to see it stirring inside. So you remember what to do: Make the breath more interesting. The important thing is that you’re keeping watch and you’re also remembering that you have tools you can use.

That’s because the purpose of mindfulness is not just to be with whatever comes up. The purpose of mindfulness is to get the mind into concentration, to stay with one topic—say, the breath in and of itself—until you’re thoroughly immersed in it. There’s a sense of pleasure that comes from it, a sense of fullness, and you can allow that pleasure and fullness to spread through the body, so that it seems to run along the nerves and along the blood vessels. It feels really good. You can think of it going out the pores—all the pores of the skin, all around the body. Then you’ve got something you want to protect.

That becomes the duty of mindfulness at that point, to remember how to protect this. Alertness keeps watch. Any little tiny thought that begins to form, even before you can recognize it as a thought—it’s just a little stirring of energy in the boundary between what’s a physical event and a mental event—you realize that if you allow it to become a little knot, a little node, thoughts could gather around it. So you zap it. Think of that good breath energy just going right through and scattering, scattering, scattering the knot.

An image you might want to use is of a spider on its web. It stays in one spot on the web. And if anything hits the web, it immediately goes over, takes care of it, and it goes back to its original spot.

So you’re shooting down potential thoughts. That’s when you can say that you really are mindful, ardent, and alert all at the same time.

Then as you leave meditation, you want to protect what you’ve got. . This is where restraint of the senses comes in. You’ll notice that there are some pleasures outside that you can watch and enjoy, and they don’t have any impact. You can maintain your sense of being centered in the breath and there’s no problem. This is one of the reasons why we like to come to a quiet place like this. There are the beauties of nature, but they’re calm.

Again, the Buddha has nothing against sensual pleasures per se. There’s a tendency for some people, when they translate the description of concentration, to say that you’re secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskillful thoughts. But that’s not what the passage means.

You’re secluded from sensuality, which is your tendency to fantasize about sensual pleasures. If you’re in a city, a place where there are a lot of people, there are a lot of things that could excite sensual fantasies. But here there are very few. Still, there still might be things that knock you off anyhow. You want to notice why. That’s what the restraint is for. It’s not that you’re clamping down and not looking at anything or not listening to anything. Your eyes can see, your ears can hear, and they’re going to want some freedom to see and to hear.

The important thing about restraint is how you process what you see and what you hear. In some cases, it has to do with your choice of what you’re going to look at, what you’re going to make up your mind to listen to. In other words, you’re more actively involved in the process. Well, why do you choose what you do?

There are some things you want to listen to because they’re helpful and useful. Other things you want to listen to because they stir up some kind of emotion. There are times when the mind says, “I’d just like to have some emotion, it doesn’t matter what—greed, aversion, delusion. Something to spice things up.” It’ll look at things and find something to get worked up about. That’s what you’ve got to watch out for.

Remind yourself that you’ve got something good here inside: your ability to be with the body, to be immersed in the breath and the body, and to carry that around with you. That’s a skill you want to develop because it allows the period between meditation sessions to connect the sessions, so that the next time you sit down, you’re right here and you can get deeper into concentration.

So restraint is not putting blinders on, putting earplugs in. It basically means being alert, ardent, and mindful; carrying those three qualities around with you; keeping watch.

This is why the Buddha would often use the image of a mirror because, remember, where is the cause of suffering? It’s inside. Where is the suffering? It’s inside. The problem’s inside, the potential solution is also inside, so you want to pay attention to what you’re doing inside.

As the Buddha said, look at your actions as you would look into a mirror, because that’s where the source of the problem is—in your actions—and that’s where the solution can be found.

These three qualities are what provide you with a proper mirror: You’re mindful, you’re ardent, you’re alert. As for any concerns beyond maintaining your state of mind for the time being, if there are duties you have to do, you do them. Otherwise, you keep your focus inside.

Sometimes you may say, “Well, there’s not much to look at inside. Nothing much is happening.” A lot of things are happening. It’s just that you’re so used to them that you don’t notice them: how you put things together, how you put names on things, how you come up with thoughts, how you focus on feelings. Sometimes you focus on feelings in a way that makes them worse than they have to be. Or you can blot them out entirely. There’s a lot going on inside, so there’s a lot to see. So you want to put your observation station focused inside.

One of the reasons why we focus on the breath is because it’s where the mind and the body meet. When you’re going to learn about your mind and learn about your body from within, this is the place to look. And one of the things you want to be mindful of is the whole formula for what mindfulness is.

You’re focused on the breath in and of itself, ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. When you’re alert, be alert to things in that mode, in that framework. And be ardent to keep that framework in mind—as your guide for what you want to do.

You’re always doing things, even when the mind is very, very still. As you get more sensitive to it, you realize it’s thinking and it’s evaluating and it’s feeling different feelings on a subtle level—and they’re all gathered around one thing. But here again, you want to be alert to what you’re doing, because that’s how you’re going to learn how to do it better—better and better until you don’t have to do it anymore.