Proactive Mindfulness

When you focus on the breath, you have to be mindful to stay here, remembering what mindfulness means: the ability to keep something in mind.

Sometimes we hear that it means simply being aware of what’s happening, allowing whatever is going to happen to happen without passing judgment, without reacting. But that’s not how the Buddha taught it.

I have a student who’s a therapist, and she’s complained to me that many of her clients have said, when she recommends mindfulness, their response is, “Been there, done that.” Simply being aware of things coming and going in the mind didn’t do much for them. So she had to tell them, “Well, here we’re going to do mindfulness 2.0, where once you know what’s coming and going in the mind, then you figure out what to do with it.”

That’s where actual mindfulness comes in: remembering to recognize unskillful states like sensual desire, ill will, sleepiness, worry, doubt—realizing you can’t let them stay in the mind. You’ve got to get them out.

As for good states—like concentration, discernment, compassion, goodwill—those are things you nurture. You don’t just watch them come and go. If they haven’t come yet, you give rise to them. When they’re there, you try to develop them further. That’s called mindfulness as a governing principle. It’s proactive.

After all, we do have our duties. If you want to put an end to suffering, you have to comprehend suffering; you have to abandon its cause. And to realize the cessation of suffering you have to develop the path. So abandoning and developing, those are the big ones. You’ve got to remember that you don’t just sit here watching things coming and going. You have to be proactive, cleaning out the mind when it needs to be cleaned out, preserving good states of mind when they need to be preserved.

In that way, you really make a difference. And that’s the whole purpose of the meditation: to make a difference. It’s why the Buddha taught. He wanted to make a difference. He saw that people were suffering. He said that people were on fire with the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion. Their eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind were all on fire. He wanted to help them put the fires out. That’s why he taught.

So we don’t just regard his teachings with indifference. If we really take him seriously, we have to look into our minds—and we can’t regard our minds with indifference, either. We have to be very careful about what things we allow ourselves to stay and what things we don’t allow ourselves to stay.

The fact that things come popping into the mind, that’s past karma. You can’t do much about that, but you can choose what you’re going to do with those thoughts. That’s why you want to remember. “Remembering,” here, means recognizing skillful and unskillful qualities, and then remembering what you do with them—what techniques you’ve learned in the past either from other people or from your own observations that worked and which ones don’t work. Remember that.

So when you learn lessons, you don’t forget them. They become part of your treasury of Dhamma. That’s what mindfulness really means: having that treasury inside and putting it to use.