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meaningless. Without mindfulness, staying in monastic retreat would accumulate few spiritual rewards. All we would have to show for our time would be piles of excrement. All the hours of meditating would lose much of its deeper value unless we were mindful while doing it. Practicing mindful awareness is how we develop insight and self-realization. The same thing is true outside of monastery walls, whether we are meditating or washing our laundry. The more fully engaged in simply doing what we are doing, and the more awareness and insight we bring to bear upon it, the more we get done, spiritually speaking.

MEDITATION IS HOW WE TRAIN

IN MINDFULNESS AND AWARENESS

Only that day dawns to which we are fully awake.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The pioneering Japanese master Dr. D. T. Suzuki was unofficially the first patriarch of American Zen. When Dr. Suzuki, who had taught at Columbia University during the fifties, was approaching ninety years of age, he was present at a meeting of scholars, seated at a long conference table. It seemed to everyone as if he were asleep or in deep meditation. “How to tell the difference?” some of his younger colleagues wondered, perhaps with a little private laugh. Then, one of the lecture papers in front of the speaker seated at the head of the polished mahogany table flew down the table, carried by a gust of wind. It traveled past half the Buddhist scholars and professors seated along the table before the thin hand of the seemingly hibernating elder Zen master snaked out and snatched it without moving the rest of his body or raising his half-closed eyelids. Everyone was awestruck at the realization that the old tiger’s presence of mind and quick reflexes were still sharper than those of anyone else present. After that, no one imagined he might be sleeping … even when he was.

Pure mindfulness is relaxed, open, lucid, moment-to-moment, present awareness. It is like a bright mirror: nonclinging, nongrasping, nonaversive, nonreactive, undistorting. Fortunately, mindfulness is a skill that can be learned like any other. Classical Buddhists in the Vipassana practice lineages always emphasize mindfulness. This is the primary practice of Dharma teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Sylvia Boorstein. Pioneer teacher Joseph Goldstein calls mindfulness the central practice of the Dharma, the first ingredient in Buddha’s recipe for awakening.

Meditation is the method we use to train in mindfulness. Meditation is unique in its ability to wake us up; it opens what is constricted, closed, and fixated in us. Sylvia Boorstein says: “At the beginning of meditation practice you need to remember to be mindful. After a while, you can’t forget.”

Meditation explores, investigates, unveils, and illumines what is hidden within and all around us. This contemplative, introspective experience helps us to awaken from our dreams and illusions about how things are and go beyond our subjective view of the world to the actual reality. Through meditation we can enter directly into more intimate, immediate engagement with our experiences in a way that reflects simplicity and a deeper, more authentic connection to life. This is not just about being more consciously alive. It’s about being itself.

WAKE UP! BUDDHA’S LESSONS

IN MINDFULNESS

Some 2,500 years ago when the Buddha was first giving his disciples instructions on what it means to live with Right Mindfulness, he said, “The disciple acts with clear comprehension in going and coming … acts with clear comprehension in looking forward and backward … acts with clear comprehension in eating, drinking, chewing, and tasting … acts with clear comprehension in walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, awakening … acts with clear comprehension in speaking and keeping silent.”

The Buddha was asking his disciples to be fully conscious, wide awake to all that they do. Let’s never forget that the practice of awareness and mindfulness is directly related to reality. It is clear seeing. The Buddha was telling his followers not to live in the past or the