More than a Sliver of Mindfulness

For a while now, they’ve had a pilot program where they teach mindfulness to kids in New York City schools. Recently, they decided to do a survey of the results. They found that a lot of kids were having a negative reaction, that the mindfulness they were taught got them more in touch with their feelings and what was going on in their minds, yet it didn’t give them any tools to deal with those things. They felt unprotected.

Some people say that was the problem with mindfulness, but actually the problem was with the type of mindfulness they were taught—the type that says to simply be aware of what’s happening without doing anything about it. Sometimes it’s added that you’ll naturally see that things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, and you’ll let go.

But it just wasn’t cutting it. You can see, though, why people believe that mindfulness is just that, being aware of what’s happening as it’s happening. If you look at the big suttas on the topic, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya, and the Mahā Satipaṭṭhāna, the great Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, in the Digha Nikaya, they’re both very long. In fact, in the Thai version of the Canon, they’re identical. And it’s easy to come away with the impression that they must be a complete description of mindfulness practice.

But you have to look more carefully at the suttas. They start with the complete formula for right mindfulness: You keep track of the body, in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

You keep track of feelings, in and of themselves.

You keep track of mind states, in and of themselves.

You keep track of mental qualities, in and of itselves—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

The Buddha lays out the whole formula, but then he answers questions only about one sliver of the formula: What does it mean to keep track of something?

He doesn’t explain ardent, alert, or mindful. He doesn’t explain how to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. This means that you have to look elsewhere in the Canon for what those terms mean. There you can find lots of different suttas to explain them.

Alert means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it, either in terms of what your body is doing or in terms of what your mind is doing, creating feelings and perceptions.

And it’s important to note that fact. You are doing your feelings. As the Buddha points out, there are potentials coming from the past, but you turn those potentials into the actual experience of feelings by what you’re doing right now. You fabricate them in terms of the way you breathe, how you talk to yourself, what perceptions you have around them.

Hold on to that point because it helps you make sense of all the rest of the practice. You’re not just aware of feelings as they come and go on their own. You play a role in fabricating them, and you want to be alert to how you’re doing that.

But you don’t just stop there. You want to do it well. This is what the word ardent means. It’s another word for right effort. If something unskillful comes up, you do your best to put it away. You try to prevent it from coming up again. As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them and then develop them as far as they can go.

This is where discernment comes in, as you understand what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. And you gain experience in directing the mind where it should go.

One area you keep it away from, of course, is thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world. These are the thoughts that the kids in New York were having trouble with. They hadn’t been given the proper tools for dealing with them, but the Buddha gives lots and lots of instructions throughout the Canon on how you deal with thoughts and feelings like this.

So there’s nothing wrong with mindfulness practice as a whole. The problem is when you do only a sliver of it and you suppress the rest of it. Then there’s going to be trouble.

To understand right mindfulness as a whole, you have to see it in its larger context. In the noble eightfold path, it comes after right effort and before right concentration. Based on right effort, which is the same as ardency, you develop mindfulness so as to lead into concentration, where you develop states of well-being, the pleasure and rapture, or the pleasure and refreshment of the first jhana, through to the equanimity of the fourth jhana. That’s where you’re headed.

This point is reinforced by a common list in the Canon of how the stages of the practice go. You start out with restraint of the senses. You build on that to develop right mindfulness.

From right mindfulness, you go to the seven factors for awakening. The seven factors start with mindfulness, but they show how, beginning with mindfulness, you analyze things in terms of skillful and unskillful. You make an effort to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful. That will lead the mind into right concentration.

Seeing the larger context in this way gives you a sense of where the mindfulness should be going. It doesn’t just stay there, watching things coming and going. You use it as part of a training that gets you into right concentration.

Seeing this context, you pay more attention to one of the lists inside the description of right mindfulness. In this, the Buddha talks about the different kinds of feelings. This is relevant to right concentration, because the stages of right concentration center on their feeling tones.

When you read the list of feelings under right mindfulness, it seems as if you’re just aware of feelings that are there and feelings that are not there. The same with mind states. You’re aware of mind states as they come and they go. Remember, though, that’s just keeping track of these things.

But even as you’re just keeping track of them, the Buddha talks about not only feelings—pleasurable, painful, neither pleasurable nor painful—but also feelings of the flesh, feelings not of the flesh.

Feelings of the flesh are your ordinary sensations of pleasure and pain of the senses. Feelings not of the flesh are things you manufacture. They don’t happen unless you consciously do them. As I said, you do your feelings anyhow. But with ordinary pleasures of the senses, you’ve gotten so good at doing them that you’re not really conscious of what you’re doing.

But feelings not of the flesh come only when you’re conscious of doing them. Pain not of the flesh is when you think about how you want to gain awakening: Other people have gained awakening, but you’re not there yet. That pain, the Buddha said, is something that should be developed as motivation for practicing.

There is, of course, the pain that you’re not there yet, but there’s also the possibility of seeing that other people can do this. You think, “They’re human beings. I’m a human being. They can do it. Why can’t I?” That’s a pain with hope.

As for pleasures and neutral feelings not of the flesh, those are the feelings that come with the practice of jhāna. So again, we’re heading into concentration, trying to be mindful in a way, alert in a way, ardent in a way, that gets the mind to settle down with that sense of well-being.

Even the equanimity has a sense of well-being because it comes after the pleasure. It’s not the hungry equanimity of just telling yourself, “I’ll be okay with whatever comes up.” It’s equanimity that’s been well-fed, that’s at peace, what Ajaan Fuang would call large-hearted equanimity, as opposed to the small-hearted equanimity that just grits your teeth and says, “Okay, I’ll bear with it.”

You’re becoming equanimous because the mind’s need for pleasure has been well-fed. So you can view things as they come into the mind with a lot more stability. You feel less threatened by them and you’re more willing to deal with them skillfully, more capable of dealing with them skillfully—willing in the sense of saying, “Yes, I have the energy to deal with these things, to remember what lessons I’ve learned from other people, to listen to those lessons. And if those lessons don’t work for me, I’m willing to put in the energy to figure out what will work.” That’s all part of ardency.

Remember that the Buddha said that concentration is like food for the practice. As we go through the day, go through life, we’re going to need this food, need this support, because negative things will come up, as happened with the kids in New York.

They’re not alone in that. Everybody’s going to have negative things coming up in the meditation. It’s a whole lot easier if you can come at these things with a sense of well-being, a sense of stability, not feeling threatened by them.

Think of the Buddha’s image of the six animals. You go through life and you’re going to be dealing with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. Those things can be pretty strong, especially when they’re negative.

He compares them to six kinds of animals: a snake, a crocodile, a bird, a dog, a hyena, a monkey. It’s as if you have leashes on each of these six animals, but you don’t tie them to a stake. You just tie the ends of the leashes together. The animals will pull and pull, and whichever one is strongest will pull the rest of them where it wants to go.

The monkey will want to go up to a tree. The bird will want to fly into the air. The hyena, apparently, would want to go to a charnel ground and feed on a few corpses. The dog will want to go into a village. The snake will want to go down a hole. The crocodile will want to go down to the river.

Of the six animals, the crocodile is obviously the strongest. And even though the sutta doesn’t say this, I can imagine that the crocodile is basically the mind that pulls everything else along with it, and they all drown in the river. That’s when you don’t have a solid basis.

To give the mind a solid basis—and here, the Buddha says, mindfulness of the body is like a post—you tie the leashes to the post. Then pull as they might, the animals can’t pull away. They end up just lying down right there next to the post.

Mindfulness of the body is not just a matter being aware of the body. When the Buddha describes it, you get the mind into concentration through being mindful of the body in various ways. But the concentration is the important part.

In fact, some of his longest descriptions of the practice of jhāna come in his sutta on mindfulness of the body. And the pleasure, the well-fed pleasure, the well-fed equanimity, that comes with the jhānas: That’s what keeps your various thoughts and ideas and desires for the senses, good or bad, from pulling you away.

So. Think of this. We’re practicing mindfulness for the sake of concentration, concentration for the sake of feeding the mind well. When the mind is well-fed, then it can deal with whatever comes up.

People sometimes ask how I dealt with difficult emotions coming up when I was in Thailand, far away from other Westerners. One of the first things I say is that I learned how to focus on the breath, not just being aware of the breath willy-nilly, but working with the breath to make it comfortable and developing a sense of well-being inside. Once you have that, then the mind is in much better shape for actually wanting to deal with unskillful emotions and having the space to come up with solutions.

What works for one person may not work for another, in the sense of what particular ways of thinking will make a difference. But having this foundation— mindfulness as a whole, not just a sliver of mindfulness, mindfulness leading to right concentration informed by right view, remembering that you’re watching feelings, not just willy-nilly, you’re actually participating in their fabrication: That allows you to look into that process of fabrication and you’ll be right on target. The problem is right there.

As the Buddha said, we suffer because we fabricate things in ignorance, but we can bring knowledge to the process of fabrication. Then it becomes part of the path. And it’s sustained by developing a sense of well-being that you can then learn how to carry through the day.

For example, as you’re doing walking meditation, remember: You’re trying to walk in a way that feels good inside, that feels nourished inside. You don’t just pace back and forth, back and forth. You fill your torso with good breath energy. Then let it float down the arms, down the legs, and keep doing that as you walk. That way, you can actually have this post of mindfulness, well-fed mindfulness, solidly planted inside.