Heedful, Attentive, Mindful

There are three words that are often mentioned in the context of the practice, in a way that makes it sound like they’re all the same thing: heedfulness, attention and mindfulness. Now, they are related, but they are different. So it’s good to understand the differences and the relationships, so that you can practice properly.

Heedfulness, appamāda, is a quality of seeing dangers and realizing that the dangers can be avoided if you practice properly. The problem with heedfulness is that it can be misguided many times—like the people who think that the main dangers in the world come from someone on the other side of the world, and the way to defend yourself against those dangers is to bomb them to smithereens. That’s misguided heedfulness because you end up with a lot of bad kamma.

This is where attention comes in.

Attention is not just a matter of paying attention to something, anything, in general. It’s how you phrase your question. The Buddha talks about appropriate and inappropriate attention. Appropriate attention is when you ask the right questions, particularly, “Where is there suffering? What is the suffering? How is it caused? Can it be ended? And what is the path to its ending?” When you ask those questions, then you get a better idea of where your heedfulness should be focused—on ferreting out the causes of suffering and protecting yourself against them by abandoning them.

Here, the causes of suffering, of course, are inside. The three kinds of craving—for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming—are where the dangers are. The dangers multiply out from those three—you get greed, aversion, delusion; passion, aversion, delusion—all the long lists of defilements that the Buddha gives. These are things that cause suffering.

To have appropriate attention, you focus inside—where the main dangers are, although the Buddha does recognize there are dangers from outside. But they’re not the ones you might ordinarily expect.

It’s not that other people can harm you—that is a danger but it’s not the real danger. The real danger is when someone gets you to behave in ways that are unskillful—either they persuade you to see things the wrong way, or they get you to do things that are unskillful. That’s the external danger you’ve got to watch out for because what it all comes down to is that your life, your experience of pleasure and pain, is shaped by your actions—skillful and unskillful. If the causes of suffering take over and influence the way you act, you’re going to act in stupid ways—ways that you would like to cause happiness but end up causing suffering.

So, appropriate attention tells you where to look for the dangers and what might be a good way of putting an end to those dangers.

Then the establishing of mindfulness is what puts that project into action.

Mindfulness is not non-reactive awareness—as we’ve sometimes been taught—or non-judgmental awareness. It’s the ability to keep something in mind. Of course, if there are dangers, you’ve got to keep the dangers in mind. If you’ve learned any ways of avoiding those dangers, you keep those in mind as well. So mindfulness is associated with heedfulness in every way, every form—skillful or unskillful. What makes it skillful is that you apply it to the right things.

Here, you keep in mind what appropriate attention has taught you. At the same time, you try to be alert. This, too, is a quality that goes with heedfulness of any kind—you’re alert to what you’re doing, you’re alert to the results of what you’re doing, to make sure that you’re not causing unnecessary danger.

And you’re ardent. You’re really trying to put this program into action—abandoning whatever’s unskillful, developing what’s skillful. And, here again, any kind of heedfulness requires ardency. It’s just that you want to be informed by appropriate attention.

What that means is that you establish your awareness with the breath, or something in the body right here and now. It could be the thirty-two parts of the body, but the Buddha starts with the breath. When he talks about establishing mindfulness, the most detailed instructions are those with regard to breath meditation.

As you focus on the breath, you start by trying to distinguish between long breathing and short breathing. You realize that there are variations in the breath, and the variations in the breath are going to have an impact on your body. You can add other distinctions as well: heavy or light; deep or shallow. Whatever kind of breathing feels good for you right now, try that.

Then try to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. This establishes a large frame of reference, which you’re going to need. You’re trying to get the mind into a good, centered state of concentration, and concentration is most stable when it encompasses the whole body. This way, if anything unskillful comes into the mind, it doesn’t necessarily have to shake your foundation. If you’re only at one point, the fact that you’ve left the point of your concentration and focused on the disturbance means that your concentration has shifted. But here, when you have that whole-body awareness, things can come in and go out, you’re aware of them, but they don’t shake the foundation.

You’re trying to breathe in a way that calms the body. You breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of pleasure, even rapture—although “refreshment” might be a better translation of the Pali term, pīti. At the same time, you become sensitive to how the feelings you create through the breath have an impact on the mind.

The Buddha talks about four frames of reference for establishing mindfulness: There’s the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves—which makes it sound as if there are four different topics. But when he explains breath meditation, he makes the comment that when you’re focused on the breath, the act of paying attention to the breath does give rise to certain feelings. The state of mind that’s alert to the breath is right here. And then there are the mental qualities, which you need to watch to see whether they’re skillful or unskillful. So when you’ve got the mind focused here on the breath, you want to be aware not only of the breath, but also of the mind and what kind of qualities you’re trying to develop in the mind, which ones you’re trying to abandon. This relates back to appropriate attention.

And that, of course, relates back to the sense of heedfulness, that you want to protect yourself from dangers. Here the dangers are sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, and doubt. The qualities you’re trying to develop are mindfulness, the ability to analyze what’s going on in the mind, persistence, rapture, calm, concentration, and equanimity.

Ajaan Fuang gives the example: He says, “If you want to see the mind, you don’t just follow it around. You give it something that it likes, and then it’ll be there. And then you can watch it, you can observe it. It’s like trying to catch eels: If you jump down into the mud and try to catch the eels, they slip out of your hands. But if you find something they like.”

And the image that Ajaan Fuang gives is not a very pretty image. He said, “You find a dead dog, you put the dead dog in a big clay jar, you put the clay jar down in the mud, and then the eels will come.”

In the same way, you give the mind something it likes—it likes a sense of well-being in the present moment. So you focus on comfortable breathing, think of the breath filling the whole body, saturating it with pleasure, and the mind is going to stay. Then, when it stays, you’re going to watch it. If it’s not trained, it’ll stay for a little while and then want to move on. Well, why? What’s pulling it away? That’s where the dangers are. That’s what you want to watch out for.

This is how heedfulness, attention, and mindfulness are all interrelated. Heedfulness reminds you that there are dangers. Appropriate attention singles out what the real dangers are. And then, mindfulness helps to protect you from those dangers when it’s properly established.

So when you understand the terms, it’s a lot easier to put them into practice—seeing how they’re related, seeing which quality of the mind functions in which way. If you separate these things out and make them totally distinct, then mindfulness starts losing its focus, loses its sense of danger. You’re simply there watching things coming and going. But if you don’t know what things to be mindful of, what dangers to be mindful of, you might end up saying, “I’ll just be with whatever comes up and I’ll be fine.” That’s mindfulness without any sense of heedfulness, without any sense of appropriate attention.

So make sure that all these things work together, and then you’ll get the most out of them.