Mindfulness – Off the Cushion

We need to understand how to engage with mindful awareness in our daily lives, not just during our sitting practice. In the written instructions for our Innate Compassion Training, Lama John give the following description of Mindful Awareness:

Mindful awareness contributes to all other practices. Cultivating mindful awareness involves placing our attention on an object such as the body, a sense object, a feeling, thought, or attitude, and letting our attention settle into it with increasing fullness and stability.

Modes of mindful practice can involve placing the attention in bodily sensations, with sensations of the breath, in a sound, or in the sensations you feel as you are walking with awareness. Repeatedly returning to the focus of attention strengthens the power and stability of our attention, enabling us to penetrate deeply into the nature of our experience. So, we can become more aware of habitual patterns of reaction in ourselves and in others, more aware of our natural environment, and more fully present to our actions in each moment.

This type of attention is awakened during our guided sitting meditation, but the same type of awareness can be brought into our daily lives, outside of practice sessions; ‘off the cushion’. The way we can engage these practices during the day is to build in a Pause to our daily routine; a break in our regular patterns of the way we engage with others and our environment.

There are many ways we can trigger a pause like this during the day. In Thich Nhat Hahn’s communities, a bell is rung at random times during the day. When you hear the bell, you stop whatever you are doing and allow your awareness to settle into the present moment. Then you can resume your activity with a renewed sense of presence and mindfulness.

Since most of us don’t live in such a community, then we need to find our own “Mindfulness Bell” to trigger a pause in our daily routine. This could be an actual timer we use, or a picture we place where we will notice it regularly, a sticky note on our computer screen, the ringing of the phone, the honk of a horn, or anything you choose that comes regularly into your day. With this Pause practice during the day, we become more aware of the nature of our mental activity and of the connection between our body and our mind, leading to deeper awareness and freedom from the inner causes of suffering.