The term mindfulness is used in the three major schools of meditation in the East. It is not necessary to go into their perspectives on practicing mindfulness at this time, but a few examples of mindfulness meditation from these three traditions may give you a sense of how to practice mindfulness in everyday situations.
The Dalai Lama, from Tibet, describes mindfulness as follows: Hence, it is crucial for a spiritual practitioner constantly to examine his or her attitudes and actions. If we examine ourselves every day with mindfulness and mental alertness, checking our thoughts, motivations, and their manifestations in external behavior, a possibility for change and self-improvement can open within us. Although I myself cannot claim with confidence to have made any remarkable progress over the years, my desire and determination to change and improve is always firm. From early morning until I go to bed and in all situations of life, I always try to check my motivation and be mindful and present in the moment. Personally, I find this to be very helpful in my own life.” – The Dalai Lama, The World of Tibetan Buddhism. http://www.dalailama.com/
Thich Nhat Hahn is a meditation teacher (http://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/) from Southeast Asia. One of his mindfulness practices involves observing three raisins. Hold the raisins in your hand and look at them for a few minutes, smell them for a few minutes, taste and feel them in your mouth one at a time. Then, experience the swallowing whole heartedly.
This does not mean that everything we do needs to be slowed down to this level, but we could be a little more mindful of our experiences throughout the day.
I was at a retreat with Katagiri Roshi, a Japanese Zen teacher (http://mnzencenter.org/katagiri/) He described a big event where he was invited to speak on Zen with some other spiritual leaders in Chicago. The audience was ready for a deep explanation on the nature of being. The talk he gave described how to use toilet paper.
Do you catch their drift?
These three meditation teachers are pointing to mindfulness as a path, as a practice, and gradually a way of life. The focus of life is not perfection or piety, but the awareness of our experience in the most mundane aspects, so that we do not fall too far into automatic behavior and attitudes and assume that spiritual practice is some lofty set of practices or ideas.
Breath awareness is a very basic mindfulness exercise. We can take the same attitude of observing the raisins with the breath. Just feeling the subtle changes of the in-breath in the belly and then the shift in sensations with the out-breath, repeating over and over again.
It was interesting when I taught a breathing practice to groups of people who were very sick and had no meditation experience at all. This was at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa, California.
One large group was heart attack survivors and most of the other groups were those with a chronic pain diagnosis. The doctors were telling them there was nothing else to be done except to go to this Mind/Body Medicine class. A greater sense of well being was the result, not to mention, reduced need for prescription drugs and visits to the doctor. The hospital loved that kind of stuff.
As we move toward a more consistent mindfulness with the breath and daily activities, a ground of awareness to experience our vulnerability with deeper reflection manifests, reflections on our “motivations” as the Dalai Lama described above. Feeling our depths is much easier when we are a little calmer and a little more grounded.
