Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Attitudinal Foundation of Mindfulness Practice

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Standards of Practice (medical model) shares seven attitudes within what is entitled the “Attitudinal Foundation of Mindfulness Practice.”  

“Seven attitudinal factors constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice as we teach it in the stress clinic. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go. These attitudes are to be cultivated consciously when you practice. They are not independent of each other. Each one relies on and influences the degree to which you are able to cultivate the others.”

The Attitudinal Foundation of Mindfulness Practice is as follows:

Non-judging: being an impartial witness [Suspending judgment]
Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to one's own experience. This requires becoming aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences that we are all normally caught up in, and learn to step back from it. 

Patience (hardiness)
Patience, a form of wisdom, demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time. It’s learning to distinguish between chronos and kairos, or measured time and seasonal time.

Beginner’s Mind [second naiveté]
The richness of present-moment experience is the richness of life itself. Too often we let our thinking and our beliefs about what we “know” prevent us from seeing things as they really are. We tend to take the ordinary for granted and fail to grasp the extraordinariness of the ordinary. To see the richness of the present moment, we need to cultivate what can be called “beginner’s mind,” a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki

Trust: become more fully, humanly oneself.
Developing a basic trust in oneself and one’s feelings is an integral part of meditation training. It is far better to trust in your intuition and you own authority, even if you make some “mistakes” along the way, than always to look outside of yourself for guidance.  Our hope is to become more fully and humanly ourselves.

Non-striving: paradoxically relaxing the tension to achieve our goals
Most of what we do we do for a purpose, to get something or somewhere. However in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle; for meditation is different from all other human activities. While it takes work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is non-doing. It has no goal other than for one to be oneself. The irony is that you already are. This paradox may be pointing you toward a new way of seeing yourself, one in which you are trying less and being more.

In the meditative domain, the best way to achieve one’s goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment. With patience and regular practice, movement toward your goals will take place by itself. This movement becomes an unfolding that you are inviting to happen within you.

Acceptance: living each moment more fully
Acceptance is seeing things as they actually are in the present. If you have a headache, accept that you have a headache. If you are overweight, why not accept it as a description of your body at this time? Eventually we have to come to terms with things as they are and accept them, whether it is a diagnosis of cancer or learning of someone’s death. Often acceptance is only reached after we have gone through very emotion-filled periods of denial and then anger. These stages are a natural progression in the process of coming to terms with what is.

In the meditation practice, we cultivate acceptance by taking each moment as it comes and being with it fully, as it is. We try not to impose our ideas about what we should be feeling or thinking or seeing on our experience but just remind ourselves to be receptive and open to whatever we are feeling, thinking, or seeing, and to accept it because it is here right now. If we keep our attention focused on the present, we can be sure of one thing, namely that whatever we are attending to in this moment will change, giving us the opportunity to practice accepting whatever it is that will emerge in the next moment. Clearly there is wisdom in cultivating acceptance.

Letting Go (or be dragged)
They say that in India there is a particularly clever way of catching monkeys. As the story goes,
hunters will cut a hole in a coconut that is just big enough for a monkey to put its hand through. Then they will drill two smaller holes in the other end, pass a wire through, and secure the coconut to the base of a tree. Then they put a banana inside the coconut and hide. The monkey comes down, puts his hand in and takes hold of the banana. The hole is crafted so that the open hand can go in but the fist cannot get out. All the monkey has to do to be free is to let go of the banana. But it seems most monkeys don’t let go. Often our minds get us caught in very much the same way in spite of all our intelligence. Hence the term “monkey mind” which refers to the agitated, easily distracted and incessantly moving behavior of ordinary human consciousness.

In the meditation practice we intentionally put aside the tendency to elevate some aspects of our experience and to reject others. Instead we just let our experience be what it is and practice observing it from moment to moment. Letting go is a way of letting things be, of accepting things as they are.