This is the seventh topic in the Buddha’s teaching on “The Noble Eightfold Path”.
The word “Right” here can be offputting. The way I understand that word now is not so much in the moral sense of right vs wrong parallel to good vs bad. “Right” in this context is more like “correct” or even “efficient”. If you want to go to the store, there’s a “right” way to go, which is the fastest way, or the most beautiful way or the way that takes you by your crush’s house. And then there’s the wrong way like going that route will never end you up at the store. So in the Noble Eightfold Path the “Right Mindfulness” topic is the “Correct” or “Efficient” or even the “Best” way to develop mindfulness.
Mindfulness is simply the ability to place your attention on an object and hold it there. This is not a Buddhist thing. It’s not even a human thing. All living beings have some ability to hold their attention on something. Mindfulness is a requirement for survival in the world. If you’ve ever seen a lion stalk a zebra or a rabbit freeze when being chased by a dog, you can tell that their mindfulness is incredibly strong at that moment.
For us, mindfulness is an important skill for our work, for our relationships, even for just enjoying our life. Is there anything sadder than seeing guests at a fancy restaurant on their phones instead of enjoying their meal and each other’s company? Well yes, there are lots of things sadder than that, but you get the point. Developing mindfulness is a deeply important life skill, no matter if you are on a spiritual path or not.
Luckily, we can develop mindfulness. We can train it like we train a muscle or a skill. This teaching, on right mindfulness, is the Buddha’s teaching on how to do so.
There are four big things that we can put our attention on that, if we do so, will increase our mindfulness. Those four are: body, feelings, thoughts, and phenomena.
So let’s do a guided meditation now and touch in on each of those four for a couple minutes each.
Body
We start with the body because that’s where we live. So find a comfortable seat where you can feel the weight of your body on your hips and butt. Your back is upright and unsupported. Your feet are on the ground. Your spine grows naturally curved like a tree out of your base. Your shoulders are relaxed, which opens your heart. Let go of any tension in your throat, jaw, eyes, scalp. Just relax in your body.
You might feel a slight lift from the very top of your head as it stretches a tiny bit towards the sky.
Feel your body breathing. Just place your attention on the natural rising and falling of your chest, your belly, as your breath comes in and out. Do that for a bit.
Thoughts will arise, etc. When you notice that, just gently but firmly return your attention to the feeling of your body breathing.
Again and again.
You can scan through your body or you can rest your attention on it as a whole.
Give yourself permission to inhabit your physical-ness. Just as it is.
Now take a little break, sip some water, whatever. Reset.
Feelings
Resume your meditation posture but this time place your attention on your feelings. Just ask yourself how do you feel right now?
You don’t have to put words to it if you don’t want to.
You are just checking in with your emotional state, however it is at the moment.
Are your emotions obvious? Are they subtle and hard to find?
As with the body, if you find your attention wandering off to other topics, that’s fine. Just gently but firmly refocus on your emotions - whatever that means to you just now.
It actually doesn’t matter all that much what emotions you are feeling. This exercise is about acknowledging your emotional experience, your emotional world and developing your ability to hang with it.
Often when our emotions are raging this is like grabbing a live wire. Paying attention to them is like waking up from a deep sleep on a bucking bronco. The tempatation when that’s going on is to spin out in a story about WHY we are feeling these intense emotions. For the purposes of this exercise, we’re not focused on the storyline. We’re just putting our attention again and again on the feeling of our emotional state.
Again and again.
Sometimes it’s hard to find your emotional state. I experience this a lot. How do I feel right now? Everything is more subtle. My emotions are less clear. That’s ok too. Just place your attention on the subtleness. Guaranteed that will change also.
Can you experience your emotions changing? Can you see an emotion coming into being, blooming in your awareness like a flower, and then fading away?
Now take a quick break. Shake it out a bit. When you feel ready sit down again.
Thoughts
Turn your attention towards your thoughts. There’s this terrible misunderstanding in mindfulness teachings that we are trying to get rid of our thoughts, to not have any thoughts. This teaching, one of the earliest and most foundational teachings from the Buddha, clearly shows that that’s a mistake. “Right Mindfulness of Thoughts” is all about actually being aware of your thoughts - actually placing your attention on the qualities of your mind.
What are you thinking about? What are the contents of your mind?
What are the qualities of your thoughts? Speedy? Slow? Big? Small? Again, like with the body and the feelings, the content of the thoughts is not important. We are paying attention to our mind itself.
Again and again.
Please don’t give yourself a hard time about getting distracted with other thoughts. Actually noticing that your mind has wandered from your mind (or your body or your feelings) IS the practice. You are noticing! That’s amazing! That noticing, and then the dedication to return your mind to the object of your meditation IS the thing that strengthens your mindfulness. It’s kind of magical.
Again, please take a quick break before moving on to the fourth thing to be mindful of.
Phenomena
This word is translated differently. The original word is “Dharma” which has a many meanings in Buddhism. “Dharma” can mean “the teachings of the Buddha”, it can mean “the grains of reality”, “atoms” or if you like “quanta” or simply “phenonoma”, it can mean simply “Truth”.
One way to think about this category of things to be mindful of is “Everything outside myself”. The first three categories - body, feelings and thoughts - are generally thought of as inside me. They are mine. They are part of my identity - who I experience as me.
“Phenomena” is basically everything else. So in your meditation, if your eyes are closed, please open them. Take in the world outside of you. See the sights, hear the sounds. Place your attention on all of it. You could be mindful of one particular thing, or two, or ten. Or you could be mindful of the totality of the whole experience.
You could be mindful of your place in it. Your body, feelings and thoughts, sitting in this incredibly rich, unimaginably complex, deep, horrible, beautiful world. Place your attention on the whole thing and give yourself permission to experience it.
I would like to close with a quote from Carlo Rovelli’s book Helgoland.
“The humanity that knows is not an isolated, transcendent subject; it is not the philosophical “I” of idealism: it is real humanity, immersed in concrete history, part of the natural world. The “sensations” are not “within our mind.” They are natural phenomena in the world: the form in which the world presents itself to the world. They do not come to a self that is separate from the world: they come to the skin, to the brain, to the neurons of the retina, to the receptors in our ears. These are elements of nature.”
Ok as before, please take a break. Drop your contemplations or your meditation techniques and just rest.
Now, as usual, we dedicate the merit of this practice, aspiring that any goodness that came from this time would help not just ourselves but the entire world.
Thank you.