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Lesson for mindfulness – part 1: Living in the Present Moment

Lesson for mindfulness – part 1:

Living in the Present Moment

Battaramulla
Siri Sudassanarama
sadaham senasuna
Ven. Dr. Mirisse Dhammika thero

For the first stage of learning what mindfulness is, one must realize the extent to which people are normally not mindful.

Usually one notices the tendency of the mind of wander only when one is attempting to accomplish some mental task and the wandering interferes. Or perhaps one realizes that one has just finished an anticipated pleasurable activity without noticing it. In fact, body and mind are seldom closely coordinated. In the Buddhist sense, we are not present

Mindfulness is the process of ‘living in the present moment’; it is complete awareness of whatever one occupies or in other words, to experience what one’s mind is doing as it does it, to be present with one’s mind.

When the mind attains the full state of mindfulness (total alertness, vigilance and observation), it may lead to the tranquility of the mind; it is free from subjective judgments. For example, when an ordinary person looks at another person (subjectivity), he will judge the person through pre-conceived beliefs such as race, colour, attractiveness, and social status. But when the mindful practitioner concentrates on the person objectively, he just observes what is.

How can one employ the mind as an instrument for knowing itself? How can one work with the absence of mind? Traditionally, mindfulness is taught by means of formal periods of sitting, or Bhavana. The reason for specific periods is to simplify the situation for complete awareness. The body is maintained in an upright posture and held still. For the development of bare attention, breathing is the simplest and traditionally recommended technique at this very first stage.

Each time the practitioner notices that his/her mind is wandering heedlessly, he/she is to acknowledge non-judgmentally that wandering thought and return his/her attention back to its objective. Venela, Thompson and Rosch

express how, at the early stages, the practitioner can tackle his/her own mind to maintain mindfulness in the present moment:

Breathing one of the most simple, basic, ever-present bodily activities. Yet beginning mediators are generally astonished at how difficult it is to be mindful of even so uncomplex an object. Meditators discover that mind and body are not coordinated.

The body is sitting, but the mind is seized constantly by thoughts, feelings, inner conversations, daydreams, fantasies, sleepiness, opinions, theories, judgments about thoughts and feelings, judgments about judgments – a never-ending torrent of disconnected mental events that the meditators do not even realize are occurring except at those brief instants when they remember what thy are doing. Even when they attempt to return to their object of mindfulness, the breath, they may discover that they are thinking about the breath rather than being mindful of the breath.