CULTIVATING MINDFULNESS
Beginning or Deepening a Personal Meditation Practice

Jon Kabat-Zinn

1. The real meditation is how you live your life.

2. In order to live life fully, you have to be present for it.

3. To be present, it helps to purposefully bring awareness to your moments – otherwise you may miss many of them.

4. You do that by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to whatever is arising inwardly and outwardly.

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From the non-dual ‘Innateist’ perspective, if one is cultivating smṛti (Pāli, sati)-mindfulness and manasikāra-attention, then one is cultivating ignorance because one is only strengthening the subject-object structures of awareness—the very structures that are the subtlest manifestation of ignorance itself.

John Dunne, Toward an Understanding of Non-Dual Mindfulness (PDF), in Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, Iss. 1

The key word here is “cultivation”. If you are trying to cultivate qualities as if they don’t already exist within you, you may just be missing the boat all together. There are so many aspects to Dunne’s argument that resonate with me, from the being perhaps overly humble, to the more expansive understanding of mindfulness, to the contextual concerns with MBSR, etc. Love this article.

How is insight dialogue different from other vipassana practices?

Do the other vipassana practices you refer to encompass mindfulness of other people or of one’s own responses while engaged with other people? If not, then this is the primary difference. Insight Dialogue is an interpersonal practice; it takes place in the midst of encounter with other people. This simple difference is at once totally in alignment with the suttas and with the whole of the Buddha’s teaching, and at the same time markedly different from traditional practice forms. I’ll describe the traditional connection, then say just a bit about the differences.

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Rethinking mindfulness

In one of the early teachings of the Buddhist tradition we read:

“One tries to abandon wrong view & to enter into right view: This is one’s right effort. One is mindful to abandon wrong view & to enter & remain in right view: This is one’s right mindfulness.

Implicit in this is that we recognize when a view (loosely speaking, an idea, a viewpoint, or a thought) is valid or not valid, helpful or not helpful, true or untrue, conducing to pain or to freedom from pain.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we beat ourselves up when we recognize that our thinking is distorted.

Mindfulness has a kind of critical edge to it. It’s discriminating. It recognizes the quality of any given experience that we’re having.

Mindfulness recognizes patterns. It can recognize that this particular kind of thinking (angry thinking, “woe is me” thinking) causes suffering, and that that particular mental state (kindness, patience, equanimity) leads to our feeling greater peace and well-being. And so we wisely choose where to put our energy.

Mindfulness is therefore also not entirely about “being in the moment.” Mindfulness is certainly paying attention to what’s going on right now, but it’s also recognizing how “right now” has arisen from “just a moment ago,” and how “right now” is going to affect “just a minute from now.” Mindfulness includes an awareness of process.

—Bodhipaksa, “Mindfulness and wise discrimination”

Source: wildmind.org