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,
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.
