Timeless Truths for Modern Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to a More Focused and Quiet Mind

Introduction

There is a mindfulness craze happening now. It’s everywhere you look—on magazine covers, your local hospital, and in the news. By reading this book, you may have jumped on this bandwagon. While I am happy that you have selected Timeless Truths for Modern Mindfulness , I’d like your experience of mindfulness to be much more than a passing fad. This book presents a practical, portable, and even profound way of integrating the practices and principles of mindfulness into your life. If you read this book, learn the principles, and do the practices, your life will probably change in dramatic ways. It could rework the way you relate to yourself, others, and the world. It could fundamentally alter the way you deal with adversity, pain, and disappointment. In short, mindfulness can transform the way you live. I regard these changes as positive. I also know that these re-shapings can be a radical departure from the status quo. If you want to keep your life as it is—don’t read this book!

If you have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon, I want you to now jump off! Mindfulness is more than just present moment attention. It is more than just being in the now. It’s being here now with love in your heart and peace in your body. Mindfulness is not just about being less stressed and more relaxed. It is not just about being able to concentrate more. Mindfulness is integral to becoming a wise and ethical person. If you perhaps already consider yourself to be both wise and ethical, then mindfulness will help you to become wiser and more ethical. Since you’ve picked up this book, you’ve likely heard of mindfulness already. You may have opinions about it, and may have even given it a try.

My concern with the current enthusiasm for mindfulness is that it is presented as something of a panacea—all things for all people. Mindfulness does embody a suite of generic mind capabilities and does have broad applicability. However, it is not a magic pill. There is no silver bullet, and serious mindfulness practice requires serious commitment. Often, mindfulness is presented without reference to its Buddhist origins. I’d like to re-introduce that context, but do so with Buddha at the center of mindfulness practice rather than the Buddhist religions.

You can use mindfulness to be a better version of yourself. That’s fine, effective, and within reach. You can reduce stress, be more present to your children, and be less reactive. You can even have better sex. It can be much more, too. You can also use mindfulness as part of a radical self-transformation process. By transformation, I mean changing the fundamental way you relate to yourself, others, and the world. By radical I mean an abrupt departure from the business as usual sense of self. Gone will be a materialistic, self-centered existence—not that you actually have to jettison material possessions, success, or wealth. The end-point of this revolutionary process is the capacity to experience happiness in your life regardless of circumstances—internal and external. This is a radical idea, and one that the historical Buddha advocated about twenty-five hundred years ago. It represents freedom from conditions—an unconditional happiness. Beyond advocating for such a transformation, the Buddha also developed technologies, such as mindfulness meditations, to accomplish it. These methods are part intellectual as well as part ethical. Intellectually, it requires having a deep understanding and appreciation for the way things work, including and especially your mind. Ethically, it underscores that the actions we take have consequences. Thus, it makes sense to aim thoughts, emotions, and behaviors toward outcomes that are beneficial, wholesome, and even beautiful for yourself, the people in your life, and the planet. The final piece is meditation—training the mind so that it can work on your behalf to bring happiness, peace, and goodness. The science of psychology also has something to contribute to the realization of the Buddha’s project of liberation. I’ll share insights from my work in psychology from over the past thirty years, along with insights from my personal meditation practice over the same period of time.

There are a lot of books out there that make a lot of promises. You’ve probably read some of these. Here is my promise. What follows in this book is what I like to think of as a no-nonsense, non-gimmicky, yet accessible way to make real change. These changes won’t be instantaneous and won’t last unless you put in the effort. I’ve field tested these ideas with myself, my patients, and the people I have had the privilege to teach. Dip in a little, dip in a lot. To whatever extent you let mindfulness into your life, you will benefit. If you’d like to take it all the way to unconditional happiness, keep reading.

In order to get the most benefit from mindfulness, there are a few issues I want to clarify. First, we need to get beyond the caricature of mindfulness as an ever-serene, gentle countenance of being. Living mindfully can sometimes look like that, but not always. Instead, living mindfully will still be your life—in all its strengths and imperfection—only with less reactivity. The popular perception of mindfulness as a kind of peaceful ideal is not always helpful, because it is just another stumbling block. Living mindfully is challenging enough without putting extra pressure on yourself. Second, we need to reclaim the Buddha from the Buddhist religions that coopted him twenty-five hundred years ago. The Buddha was a revolutionary, and he had a radical vision for himself and the rest of humanity. This was not a religious perspective but a secular, psychological, and existential one. The Buddha wanted to find the best way to live. This was a way that maximized happiness or what philosophers call eudemonia—a state that goes beyond mere momentary happiness to a pervasive sense of well-being. History, however, has painted the Buddha as the embodiment of supreme imperturbability. He evolved into a vision of a luminous deity; a clairvoyant, performing miracles. He became a deathless god, rather than being born again as animal, human, or god. The actual person of Siddhartha Gotama (Gotama is the historical Buddha’s family name; Siddhartha was a designation that came long after he was dead) is more recognizable in you and me. He had aches and pains, frustrations, and an edge to his personality when needed. He was not always the supreme and invariable face of peace, gentleness, and light. Instead, the Buddha was pragmatic and only interested in helping people. He rejected intellectual speculation, ideologies, and metaphysics of all kinds. He focused on mindfulness as the key to his teaching. Third, one of the challenges of integrating mindfulness, or any change process, is the expectations that are brought to that process. It’s easy to get caught up in perfectionistic standards, and mindfulness is not immune to this. This book is designed to help you integrate mindfulness into your life in an authentic way. By authentic I mean something that resonates with you, something that you can actually use to live in the world differently, and something that makes your life more meaningful. This integration doesn’t need to be perfect. In fact, it cannot possibly be. Throughout the book we will address the pitfalls that can prevent this genuine integration from happening.

Timeless Truths for Modern Mindfulness contains everything you need to know about mindfulness and the Buddha’s teachings on living an awakened life to get your practice off the ground. In addition to mindfulness principles and guided practices, I will share with you a set of axioms—practical and likely true propositions—that I have taught over the years. These axioms and practices give you a blueprint for a deep, durable, and sustainable form of happiness. Blueprint isn’t the exact metaphor here, since a blueprint is exact. Think of these, instead, as guideposts that you can make your own as you see fit. The book progresses from basic mindfulness to more advanced topics, with an invitation to go deeper, and then even deeper. You may find it helpful to practice the meditations in each section of the book for a while (let’s say, for weeks or even months) before moving on to the next section. By moving through the book in this way, you’ll be able to integrate the practices and insights in a fruitful way.

SECTION I

Appreciating Mindfulness

It seems that many of the books on mindfulness and Buddhism that I read, disparage our culture with its materialism, self-centeredness, and violence. I’ve even done this myself, and at the urging of one of my editors, was asked to tone it down. There are certainly problems in the world, and there are no doubt problems with the way we conduct our lives, particularly in the West. Yet our minds tend to over-focus on negative things. The news rarely reveals what is going right in the world. One day years ago, I was in a big city marveling at the architecture, and I realized that there was a lot more going right than going wrong. I was recently in New York City and had a similar insight. Millions of people living together in relative harmony. It was not chaos, mayhem, or anarchy.

I think that a balanced approach might be best. Humanity is capable of such beauty and such horror. Both individual and group psychology determine which outcome we create. Increased self-awareness at the individual level can make the world a better place. Meanwhile, we should try not view the world in an overly negative way. Relative to our ancestors, this is a great time to be alive. We no longer die of common infections. Technology has brought ease to our lives in ways that would have been unfathomable even at the turn of the twentieth century. Science continues to make advances. Despite isolated pockets of terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and civil war, the world is less violent today than it has been in its bloody past.

Mindfulness can help us to celebrate life’s wonderment and ameliorate life’s woes. People can and do use these practices to insulate themselves from the pain of the world. But I would like to offer mindfulness as a way to engage with the world, rather than as a shield against its darkness. I want to offer mindfulness as a path to maintaining a sense of peace, balance, and stability. The world needs us to not turn away, but rather to turn toward it with a courageous heart. By reading, understanding, practicing, and experimenting with the principles and exercises in this book, you can develop the bravery needed to be an agent of change in the world. You can start right here and right now with your own self. Your well-being is the foundation for everything else.

Mindlessness is the opposite of mindfulness, but we don’t have a similar conjunction for self. Selfless is opposite of selfish. When we transform the self through mindfulness, it doesn’t become selfless. That isn’t quite right. Instead, the mindful self is full of virtuous qualities such as compassion, friendliness, appreciation, and inimitable peacefulness. We can be selfless for selfish reasons—trumpeting our identity as caring, sacrificing, and ego-less. We can be self-serving in how we identify ourselves. The real goal is to get rid of all identifications, to not own any of the attributes that can be attributed to self. This self is motivated internally by a wish to live with values that are not self-serving; to be self-aware, and to take responsibility for one’s life.

CHAPTER 1

A Brief History of Mindfulness

Mindfulness could just have well been called something else. It is the translation of a Pali language word sati . It wasn’t until the middle of the last century that it become the prevailing English translation. Before then it was translated as remembering or even self-discipline .

There are a number of factors that have contributed to the explosion in the popularity of mindfulness. In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic and started teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Here he taught a secularized version of Buddhist meditation. The success of that program and his popular books on mindfulness—Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are—put mindfulness on the map. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without MBSR, the professional career that I have had as a mindfulness-based psychotherapist, teacher, and author would not have been possible. Other early influences from the 1970s include American teachers, such as Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Larry Rosenberg, who traveled to Asia and brought mindfulness (insight) meditation back to America and founded residential meditation centers, such as the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. Other influences were the prolific writings of the influential Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama who were making Buddhism a household world. Our culture was also responsive to mindfulness, as many people hungered for another way of being that was not based on constant busyness, stress, and pressure. In many ways, the problems we confront today are similar to those of the Buddha’s time—materialism, rapid change, uncertainty—but the Buddha’s followers didn’t have to deal with smart phones, the Internet, and driverless cars. The more inundated with information we get, the more we may long for the quiet that mindfulness can bring.

Mindfulness was also the term that Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer used to describe her research into the opposite of mindlessness. For her, mindfulness is the ability to be flexible with thinking and to avoid jumping to premature conclusions. Her mindfulness does not involve meditation. Researchers have also identified mindfulness as a personality trait, something that we each have more or less of. The Buddha’s mindfulness overlaps with these ideas, yet is also different than these concepts. Just as we all have some mindfulness as a personality trait, we all have the potential to be mindful—Buddha style. We can reach that potential and grow our capacity for mindfulness through intellect, conscientiousness, and meditation practice.

Meditation: Starting Wherever You Are

It’s important to remember that you don’t need any special props to meditate. You don’t need any just right conditions. You can practice wherever and however you are in any moment. This flexibility, portability, and durability is the power of mindfulness practice. The point of mindfulness practice is not to create some special state. Rather, the goal is to appreciate what is happening in your experience now. That’s the starting place. When you start to really appreciate what is going on, you’ll also start to see how you are adding things to your experience, such as expectations. These add-ons actually get in the way of your experience of the moment because they cover reality with imagination. Here are some considerations:

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No props required: no special clothes, cushions, bells, incense, statues. These things won’t do the practice for you! However, there is nothing wrong with having them, you just don’t need them.

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No special conditions necessary: You can practice in an environment that is noisy, too warm or too cold, or that has other distractions. Of course, if you have a protected, quiet, and conducive space that is great,