One thing, monks, when it is developed and cultivated, leads to extraordinary wisdom. What one thing? Mindfulness of the body.

—Buddha, AN 1:607

Those who have completely understood mindfulness of the body have completely understood the deathless.

 —Buddha, AN 1:626

Develop the meditation of mindfulness of in-&-out breathing. Mindfulness of in-&-out breathing, when developed & pursued, is of great fruit, of great benefit.

—Buddha, MN62

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“Mindfulness” is everywhere these days. Its meaning has been stretched in many different directions, to the point where it’s unclear what the word even means! I’d like to try to shed some light on how mindfulness can be understood and applied, using a Buddhist context.

But first, I want to invite you to move through this article while staying awake, aware. See if you can keep your bodily experience in mind—this breathing, pulsing body. Don’t let yourself get too lost in your thoughts. As you do this, you’re moving toward practicing mindfulness.

Buddhist practice is a tender one. It’s a practice of sensitizing you to your experience. That’s at the core, the root—a tender, open heart and mind that is awake and clear and steady. With that foundation, we can start to erect the “structure” of the Buddha’s teachings.

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Mindfulness (sati in the Pali language) was a core facet of the Buddha’s teachings. It was the first of his “Seven Factors for Awakening” (followed by clear discernment, persistence, joy, calm, concentration, and equanimity). It was also one of his “Five Mental Strengths” (along with conviction, persistence, concentration, and discernment). And “right” (or “wise” or “skillful”) mindfulness was the seventh factor in his “Noble Eight-Fold Path,” which presents the practices necessary for the attainment of freedom from suffering.

All that to say: the cultivation of mindfulness was of utmost importance for the Buddha.

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So, what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of “mindfulness”? Well, at root, mindfulness has to do with remembering, recollecting. We’re holding something in mind. But what is it that we’re remembering? We’re remembering the context of our experience.

We tend to get caught up in the content (the particulars, the foreground) of our experience at the expense of the context (the general field, the background). We get hooked on the particulars (this inner storyline, this urge, this feeling, this sensation), neglecting the “domain” from which these things originate. But it’s through “keeping the context”—through habitually stepping back and seeing the greater perspective—that we are able to transform the mind.

And what is the context of our experience? Well, it starts with the problem of dukkha, which can be translated as “stress and suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness” or “unhappiness.” While we humans certainly have access to states of ease and joy, our existence is also subject to stress and suffering—from the slightest uneasiness to full-on anguish. Why is this? It’s because things are impermanent; they change without our consent.

We get what we don’t want; we want what we don’t have; we lose the things that bring us contentment. The Buddha taught that the ultimate source of our stress and suffering is our craving: despite things being impermanent, we crave and cling to them. The mind “feeds” on things and then those things that bring us satisfaction slip away, and the mind suffers.

You’re undoubtedly already very familiar with this “law of impermanence” (called anicca in Pali). Let’s take a moment to perceive impermanence right now. In this very moment, as you sit here, you can see that things arise, persist, and depart. Every single strand of this vast tapestry of mental formations and physical sensations that we experience is impermanent. That includes, for instance, this mental drowsiness I’m experiencing at the moment; this urge to open my email; this tension in my jaw; this sound from the heater; these ears themselves: none of them will last. Take as much time as you’d like to notice all the impermanence in and around you as you sit there.

Since all phenomena are ultimately unstable and unreliable, they can’t serve as a source of permanent happiness. Furthermore, they cannot be classified as “me” or “mine”—if my experiences truly belonged to me, I would choose to make what I like permanent. But, to a large degree, it’s out of my hands.

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Yet it’s not all doom and gloom! Yes, things fall apart, and yes, we’re subject to stress and suffering, but we’re not just powerless pawns. This is where the law of cause-and-effect (karma) comes in, and where the Buddha empowered his students.

The Buddha boiled down his teaching to this: Do that which is skillful and abandon that which is unskillful. Why? Because actions have effects. What we do comes back to us. He described a complex “chain of causality” that we operate within. The more skillful our mental, verbal, and bodily actions are, the more benefit we will accrue. Ultimately, as we develop our abilities (typically over the course of many lifetimes), our wise actions lead us to a place “beyond” action. This is nirvana (or nibbana)—the cessation of craving, the dimension of permanent happiness. Sounds good, eh?

So then, what are “skillful” actions?

Well, the Buddha starts by defining unskillful actions. He says that unskillful actions emerge from three “roots”:
(1) greed (pulling pleasing things toward us);
(2) hatred (pushing displeasing things away from us); and
(3) distraction (frivolous activity in the midst of neither-pleasing-nor-displeasing things).
Skillful behavior is simply the opposite of these activities: non-greed, non-hatred, and non-distraction.

Our task is to “uproot” our unskillful habits and promote the skillful ones. To do so is to ultimately gain release from craving and clinging and, therefore, liberation from dukkha. (And if we’re free from stress and suffering, it also means we’re not inflicting our stress and suffering upon others and the world around us.)

So, for those wanting to cultivate mindfulness, this is a fundamental context to be mindful of: We’re training the mind so as to free ourselves from the stress and suffering that arises out of greed, hatred, and distraction.

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The Buddha likened the faculty of mindfulness to the gatekeeper of a royal fortress, whose job was “to keep out those he doesn't know and to let in those he does, for the protection of those within and to ward off those without.” He goes on to say: “With mindfulness as his gatekeeper, the disciple of the noble ones abandons what is unskillful [and] develops what is skillful.” We’re building a fence within the mind, giving it a boundary. By remembering what to encourage (the correct context) and what to let go of, we’re protecting ourselves from stress and suffering.

We tend to forget about the “laws” of impermanence (anicca) and cause-and-effect (karma)—that things are inconstant and that we will reap what we sow. We succumb to fantasies, however gross or subtle, that our bodies, our abilities, our loved ones, our possessions will last; and that our actions will not have consequences—that we can do what we want without repercussions.

When we’re practicing mindfulness, however, we’re remembering a context that includes impermanence and cause-and-effect. This helps us to not get so wrapped up in our fantasies. We get less entangled; we become more free. We’re actually protecting ourselves and, by extension, those around us.

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To be mindful of the law of impermanence is to acknowledge our own imminent death—the fact that our lives can be taken away at any moment. And while the Buddha laid out a detailed practice of death contemplation, he recognized that cultivating mindfulness of death can be too overwhelming for many of us. So, he recommended we start by simply practicing mindfulness of this breathing body.

We can take this breathing body as our primary meditative context, our background, our field; we can drop the “anchor” of mindfulness here. Out of this breathing body come all the particulars of our experience—these specific sights and sounds and smells, these tastes and tactile sensations, and all of these mental conditions and formations.

As we sit in meditation, immersed in the experience of this breathing body, we can notice when we lose contact with our context—when we get entranced by a “thought world.” Maybe we become engrossed in rehashing a recent interaction or worrying about our job or simply planning our next meal. When this happens, we can simply relax back open into this whole-body breathing. And we train in maintaining awareness of it. This how we can establish mindfulness.

We can further strengthen the mindfulness faculty in our meditation by remembering what works and what doesn’t work. We keep in mind the useful strategies that we’ve learned along the way. One important strategy the Buddha recommends in cultivating mindfulness-of-this-breathing-body is to make the experience refreshing (which I describe further in this post, but will mention briefly here). Making our inner experience pleasant helps us wean off our addictions to fleeting sensual pleasures. The mind needs to have pleasure, and so we’re providing a wise type of pleasure—one that is stable and always accessible—instead of relying on the titillation of our sense organs, which is an unstable and ultimately unfulfilling strategy.

And so, the Buddha teaches us to breathe in such a way that we’re sensitive to the entire body, and in such a way that we’re calming the body and making it feel good. It’s as if the breath energy is bathing the entire body. And we do the same for the mind: we’re sensitive to what the mind is like right now, and we’re making the appropriate adjustments so that the mind feels both focused and at ease. If we’re feeling “down” (lethargic, depressed), we can energize the body and mind through our breath energy and our mental imagery; if we’re too “up” (agitated, anxious), we use the breath and mental formations to settle and soothe us. The more comfortable we make our inner domain, the more likely it is that we’ll want to hang out there!

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So, the Buddha taught that the path toward freedom from suffering is based on developing the skillful (kusala, that which is good, beneficial) and abandoning the unskillful (akusala, that which is bad, harmful). Developing mindfulness is skillful.

In his Discourse on the Six Animals, the Buddha describes how if one were to catch six different animals and bind them together with a rope, each would pull toward its own home, and ultimately they would all succumb to the will of whichever animal was strongest.

“In the same way, when a monk whose mindfulness immersed in the body is undeveloped & unpursued, the eye pulls toward pleasing forms, while unpleasing forms are repellent; the ear pulls toward pleasing sounds, while unpleasing sounds are repellent; the nose pulls toward pleasing smells, while unpleasing smells are repellent; the tongue pulls toward pleasing tastes, while unpleasing tastes are repellent; the body pulls toward pleasing tactile sensations, while unpleasing tactile sensations are repellent; the intellect pulls toward pleasing ideas, while unpleasing ideas are repellent.”

A person without mindfulness is pulled toward whatever emerging phenomenon is most alluring at a given time. Returning to the animal analogy, the Buddha says that if one were, instead, to tether the animals’ ropes to a strong stake, each animal would initially pull toward its own home, but would exhaust itself and ultimately collapse around the stake. The stake is the Buddha’s symbol of mindfulness—it’s a method of “taming” the unskillful impulses of the mind.

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I invite you to experiment with “keeping the context in mind.” Over the course of today, see if you can remember (a) the context of the truth of dukkha (that there is stress and suffering) and its roots (pulling in what we want; pushing away what we don’t want; and distracting ourselves when we’re bored); (b) the context of the laws of impermanence and cause-and-effect; and (c) the context of this breathing body, out of which comes all of our particular experiences.

No need to force anything! The invitation is just to gently “keep contact with context.” Just try to keep an eye on the the background of your experience, on the larger picture.

Understanding the “dance” between the general and the particulars, between the context and the content—this is skillful. As you develop this skill, the teachings say, you will start to find yourself not getting so consumed by the rising and falling of phenomena. So, now someone is nice to you; and now someone is mean to you. Now you taste something pleasing; now you see something irritating. Things arise and dissolve, and the stake of mindfulness keeps you from chasing toward or running away from them.

The stake of mindfulness keeps you disciplined, restrained, and there’s a power and stability that comes from this. The external and internal events that are arising don’t push you off balance anymore. The mind is becoming unwavering. You are moving in the direction of freedom.