I’ve often said that mindfulness is the practice of
- Noticing everything that arises in our field of awareness and
- Noticing this without judgement, attachment or aversion.
I’ve also said that this also means that we notice any judgements, attachments or aversions and resistance, all of which are certain to arise during our practice!
When I teach mindfulness courses, I go deeper into how the practice benefits us on so many levels. As a first entry point benefit, for instance, most of us are likely to feel a little more calm and a little less stressed once we understand how to practice correctly.
At the other end of the spectrum, we shift into the state of Self-realization, where we experience ourselves as Awareness itself and nothing else. This experience may be described (upon reflection) as a timeless boundlessness without a centre, a non-duality or unity consciousness potentiated with infinite possibilities.
Such an experience helps to gradually dissolve the persistent sense of a separate self localized in time and space so that we are less and less bound by its identity, its history, its biography, its wounds and traumas, its expectations and demands, its judgments and all the things that we would typically hold as integral to the construct of the personal ‘I’.
Each time you bring your mind back gently, and even humorously, to its original purpose (1. To notice whatever arises in your field of awareness and 2. To do this without judging, attaching or averting), you are training yourself to be compassionate.
In the meantime however, there is another very important benefit that we acquire through our practice – the consistent experience of compassion. Let me explain how this works.
Because we aim to notice anything that arises within our stream of consciousness or field of awareness and because we aim to do this without judgment, attachment or aversion, we are certain to experience what we would typically describe as ‘failure’.
Why? Well, there are two ways in which we experience this failure:
- We feel we have failed when our habitual mind gets ‘distracted’from its object of focus – breath, sounds, thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations in the body…all the things that arise in our field of awareness.
You see, instead of noticing these things, the mind almost always gets lost in some story or other – our to-do lists, our relationships, the person who irritated us at work, the dread we have about getting together with family, the anxiety we feel around our financial situation…
- We also feel we have failed when our mind judges usfor judging ourselves, our thoughts, our experiences, our reactions and also for judging other people.
But, if we stick to the job at hand, which is to gently bring our mind back again and again and again to noticing, every time we realize that it is lost in story or in judging, attaching, averting or resisting, we will experience the energy of compassion. The key words here are ‘gently’ and ‘again and again and again’.
You see, each time you bring your mind back gently, and even humorously, to its original purpose (1. To notice whatever arises in your field of awareness and 2. To do this without judging, attaching or averting), you are training yourself to be compassionate.
Judgement and criticism come from the Ego which is a bulying mind of perfectionism
I cannot over-stress the value of allowing compassion toward yourself. In fact, I’d say it was the greatest benefit I experienced early in my mindfulness practice. Almost overnight, it dissolved years of self-judging, self-criticism, self-loathing and unworthiness that had caused so much of my suffering. Instead, I became much, much kinder toward myself, much more forgiving and much more encouraging of myself. And I found that, more and more, I was able to do the same for other people.
Almost all of us have grown up with the belief that without judgement and criticism of ourselves and others, we and they will never improve. The opposite is actually true. Judgement and criticism come from the Ego which is a bulying mind of perfectionism. As far as it is concerned, you will never be good enough. In one aspect or another, it will convince you that you are wanting.
Now, judgement and criticism, whether of self or others, can and often does work, but not without a price – painful memories and associations, reactive behaviors of thought, word and action and the resistance towards those associations, all of which get lodged in our bodies.
The mind of Love/God/Infinite Intelligence, on the other hand, has nothing but love to offer, love which is able to notice and discern without judging or punishing. Love that is able to hold all tensions, all apparent paradoxes, conflicts, concerns and awful and unsettling feelings in its limitlessly tender, compassionate and affirming grasp. Indeed, there is nothing that the mind of Love/God/Infinite Intelligence cannot handle if we let it. And it is this ‘letting’ that is the arousal of compassion within us, again and again and again, until it becomes an unstoppable river!
You and I and the world could all do with a lot more compassion and far less judgement, attachment and resistance toward ourselves and toward all other beings. Indeed, we can never be too compassionate.
May we dedicate our Mindfulness practice today and always to generating an unstoppable river of compassion in our hearts and minds!
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