The Way of Effortless Mindfulness, page 4
Deliberate mindfulness is being attentive from our small mind or a mindful witness; it requires us to continuously return to the task—re-remembering and refocusing. The reason we lose focus when we try to be mindful is not lack of willpower. We lose focus because the small mind we’re looking from is always moving and changing. In deliberate mindfulness, we must continuously reapply ourselves to the task at hand by actively remembering not only to focus but to recreate a “focuser” identity in our mind.
In effortless mindfulness, sati (mindfulness) is a different kind of remembering. Effortless mindfulness is a remembering of our true nature—who we have always been. In effortless mindfulness, we don’t have to pay attention from our small mind because we are aware from awake awareness, or source of mind, which is not made of moving thoughts. We can feel in a flow with a wider context but also a feeling of being grounded and not overwhelmed by the things that are happening. A client told me, “I feel grounded, but it’s interesting because the supportive ground is made of awareness. From here, I feel interconnected and effortlessly focused. And that gives me a sense of deep safety and well-being.”
Rather than cleaning up and calming the stormy clouds of our mind first, effortless mindfulness starts with recognizing awake awareness, which is already naturally calm and clear. Then we can return to our stormy problems or challenges with a new perspective and sense of well-being. The benefit of this is that awake awareness is the only thing that can truly bear that which seemed unbearable. When we are mindful from our awake awareness, we have effortless focus, which is not distracted by thoughts, feelings, or sensations. This is often what students first report upon learning effortless mindfulness: “I feel open and connected without anything able to distract my focus.” The conceptual small mind doesn’t become wiser, nor can the calm, focused small mind know awake awareness. With effortless mindfulness, we learn to shift out of small mind into awake awareness, which already has a calm, compassionate clarity.
GLIMPSEAwake Awareness Knows Without Using Thought or Attention
In this glimpse, instead of focusing on what we are aware of, we will have awareness be aware of itself. This may be something that has never crossed your mind. In learning about using awareness instead of attention, we will look back to the source of mind, awake awareness, and then focus from here. Instead of following the flashlight of attention out to the movie screen of experience, we see if we can feel awareness directly. We have learned to experience life as a subject looking at objects, even internal objects like thoughts and emotions. One helpful practice of deliberate mindfulness is called “mental noting.” In mental noting practice, our mindful witness becomes more precise by labeling thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise. In this mindful glimpse, we will let go of labeling and instead learn to trust the intelligence of awake awareness. Now we will have awareness feel what awareness is like when it is both the subject and the object. It will be helpful to have this invisible, contentless awareness know itself as we separate the awareness-based knowing from thought-based knowing.
1.To begin, simply close your eyes while allowing your awareness to remain open. Feel your breath moving within your body. Feel your whole body from within while noticing your breathing happening by itself for three breaths. Be easy and comfortable. Relax while remaining alert.
2.Take a moment to see what is here now. Notice how your body is feeling. Is it uncomfortable, comfortable, agitated, relaxed, tired, or neutral? Just be aware of your body without trying to change it. Just be aware of it as it is.
3.Now simply notice what is aware of these feelings and sensations. Feel the awareness in which these sensations are happening. Rather than being aware of sensations, feel the awareness that is aware. Notice that the awareness is not tired, is not in pain, is not agitated or anxious. Feel how this awareness is with your body.
4.Now notice the activity of your mind and thoughts. Just be aware of whether your thoughts are agitated, calm, tired, emotional, anxious, or neutral. Without changing anything at all, allow your mind and thoughts to be as they are.
5.Now notice the space in which thoughts are moving. Be interested in the awareness instead of the thoughts. Shift to notice not just the content but the context. Feel the awareness that is aware. Notice how awareness allows your mind to be as it is without changing anything.
6.Begin to notice that awake awareness is alert, clear, and nonjudgmental. Feel the awareness that is not tired, anxious, or in pain. Notice that awake awareness is all around and inherent within your body and within your mind. Instead of being identified with the states of your body or mind or trying to accept or change them, simply become interested in what is aware.
7.What is awareness like that is already accepting of things as they are—right here and now? Notice the awareness of the next sound you hear. Does awareness have a location or size? What is it like to be aware of experiences from this pain-free, spacious awareness?
8.Now simply rest as the awareness that is aware of your thoughts and sensations. Hang out as awareness without going up to thought to know or down to sleep to rest. Be the awareness that welcomes your sensations and thoughts. Ask yourself: Am I aware of this spacious awareness? Or What’s it like when I’m aware from this spacious awareness, which is welcoming thoughts, feelings, and sensations? Notice that the awareness is aware from all around and from within—spacious and pervasive.
9.Just let go of focusing on any one thing. Be aware of everything without labeling. Feel that your awareness is no longer knowing from thought. Feel what it is like to be aware from awareness, which includes your thoughts and sensations from head to toe.
10.Simply let be and remain uncontracted and undistracted, welcoming without effort.
Two Levels of Mind
One simple way to distinguish the two types of mindfulness is to say that they are both being mindful but from different levels of mind. This is important because what you can be mindful of depends on what level of mind you’re mindful from. In effortless mindfulness, it is not as important to focus on what thoughts and emotions are arising but rather to ask, “Who or what level of mind are they arising to?” In effortless mindfulness, we shift from focusing on what we are aware of into focusing on awareness itself—moving from a detached observer and into a view from interconnected awake awareness.
In deliberate mindfulness, we are aware, from our mindful witness, of things arising and passing. Effortless mindfulness invites us to be more intimately interconnected with our experience and all that is happening. This begins when we shift out of both our conceptual mind and our mindful witness and into awake awareness. Deliberate mindfulness focuses on the contents of consciousness, while effortless mindfulness turns back to be aware of the context—awareness itself. With deliberate mindfulness, we discover who we are not. With effortless mindfulness, we discover who we essentially are.
Effortless mindfulness does not lead to being detached from emotions but rather to both feeling more vulnerable and to having more capacity to be tender and welcoming of all feelings. The radical reports from my students are that our essential nature is loving, joyous, and free of worry, and we just need to untie the knots of conditioning to reveal these natural qualities.
One student who came to a daylong retreat was a dance and yoga teacher, originally trained in Russia as a ballerina. She said she had never before done a practice like effortless mindfulness. Near the end of the day, after doing a variety of effortless mindfulness glimpses, she said, “I am crying with joy because, for the first time in my life, I am able to intentionally feel fully embodied. This feeling of being aware of my body from within and from everywhere only happens once in a while. Embodiment is not just being in my body, but feeling connected to everything and everybody. It is what I love most about yoga and dance, and I chase it, but I never knew how to access it directly until now.”
Leaving the Witness Protection Program
In deliberate mindfulness, after an initial stage of calming our chattering mind, we establish a mindful witness to observe thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Insight meditation can lead to an important insight that “I am not my thoughts, beliefs, stories, or a thought-based identity.” This is what I call the mindful move. The mindful move helps us get a healthy distance from being identified with emotions and thoughts. For example, we may feel misunderstood by a family member and respond with defensive anger only to realize that we misunderstood what they said. The mindful move can allow just enough space to ask a question that can bring clarity to you and the relationship. We see that there is not a solid mind and not a solid separate self, made of thoughts, by observing thoughts like, “I am thinking this thought.” This helps us take thoughts less personally.
Many people seek mindfulness training because of suffering caused by being too attached. Some people who come to my workshops for the first time say they are too identified with their thoughts and feelings: “I wake up every morning immediately worried about work, then get involved in dramas, which causes more stress.” Or, “I feel like I’m hypersensitive to other people’s moods and take on their feelings.” We make the mindful move to a detached witness with deliberate mindfulness. Establishing this mindful witness brings relief from being overidentified, which is an important step. However, the danger of stopping at this level of a detached witness is that we may end up isolated, as if in a “witness protection program.” One student said, “I was good at being mindful of activities from my birds-eye-view, but I began to feel I lost my flow and became more aloof, mental, and robotic, like Spock from Star Trek.”
Here, there’s still a subtle dualism of “observer” and “observed” that gives us a feeling of freedom from attachment while maintaining a feeling of looking down from a distant tower at our body, mind, and the world. The unique thing about effortless mindfulness is that the first shift is to look back through the meditator to even further disidentification as we open to vast, timeless, nonconceptual awake awareness. The unfolding of effortless mindfulness continues to become aware simultaneously from outside and within, so we feel a natural interconnection and intimacy with everything without being reidentified.
The Effortless Mindfulness Research
Deliberate mindfulness has two main styles of practice: shamatha, translated as “calm abiding,” and vipassana, translated as “insight meditation.” First, there is calming and focusing of the small mind in calm abiding. Next are insight meditation practices, like the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (which I’ll explain in the next chapter), where we establish a mindful monitor to witness the contents of consciousness.
It is now accepted in the field of mindfulness research to refer to calm abiding as focused attention (FA) and the insight meditation practice as open monitoring (OM). Recently, a third type of mindfulness, nondual awareness (NDA), has been included in mindfulness research studies.
The term nondual is one of the best ways to describe effortless mindfulness. The Sanskrit word for nonduality is advaita, which means “not two.” It is pointing to the view that the dualistic way of perceiving—inside versus outside, subject versus object, and other versus self—is not the only level of reality. In Buddhism, nondual is defined as “two truths,” meaning that ultimate reality as formless awake awareness and everyday relative reality are experienced simultaneously. Some people define nonduality as “oneness” or “pure awake awareness” because it is beyond dualistic thought. Here, nonduality means that the dualistic relative reality we experience, of separate energies and things, is made of awake awareness. So awake awareness and appearances are not essentially two different things.
Nonduality begins with a recognition of a transcendent dimension of reality—awake awareness—and then sees this as the foundation of our everyday dimension of reality. So when we shift into nondual awareness, we experience objects both as interconnected and as a unique expression simultaneously. Nondual awareness is another way of describing the view from effortless mindfulness. Here are three descriptions that might be helpful to understand the difference in these three stages of mindfulness. Focused attention (FA) is like looking down from a tower to the river of your breath. Open monitoring (OM) is like looking from an open sky to thoughts, feelings, and sensations as separate objects, like clouds and birds, coming and going. Nondual awareness (NDA) is like being the entire ocean of awareness that is also arising as the unique wave of your body while feeling an interconnected flow with everything. For this reason, I often call effortless mindfulness nondual mindfulness.
In one research study, conducted in 2012 at New York University by Zoran Josipovic, PhD, and his research team, experienced practitioners of effortless mindfulness were asked to shift into nondual awareness while receiving a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.6 I am familiar with these important results because I was one of the subjects in this study. We were asked to do focused attention practices, open monitoring practices, and then nondual awareness practices. The results showed dramatic differences in the brain between the different practices, as I will explain below. The NDA practices I did while in the fMRI machine were the effortless mindfulness practices that I present in this book.
The study looked at our brain’s two primary networks: the externally focused task-positive mode and the internally focused default mode. During goal-oriented activity, the default mode network is deactivated, and the task-positive network is activated. When we are daydreaming, creatively imagining, or thinking about a situation, our internal network is activated, and our external network is deactivated. Our brain continuously and rhythmically alternates between these two networks, which leads to a feeling of distraction. We can notice this when, for instance, we are standing in line and realize our attention goes outward to what’s going on in the room and then shifts to become aware of something we’re thinking about. We are not intentionally doing this; our brain is alternating, and our attention follows.
One insight from Josipovic’s study was that one-pointed focused attention (FA) tends toward “suppression of the activity of the default network.”7 FA and OM each suppress one of the two brain modes. While suppressing one mode gives us relief, we cannot function for long from just one mode. If we are only focused on monitoring our inner world (OM), we cannot complete daily tasks; if we are only mindful of outer tasks (FA), we can become unaware of our inner life and lose the creativity that comes from free association and creative thinking. Josipovic writes that “NDA meditation is different from FA and OM meditations in that it enables an atypical state of mind in which extrinsic and intrinsic experiences are increasingly synergistic rather than competing.” Effortless mindfulness balances the activity of the default-mode network and task-positive network so that we are equally aware of what we’re doing and our internal state. Awake awareness is aware of what happens both inside and outside.
We don’t want to completely shut down the default-mode network because it has positive aspects, including giving us the ability to imagine, free-associate, and think creatively. These advanced creative abilities distinguish us from other creatures as they enable us to imagine future outcomes and plan for them—an evolutionary advantage that we would lose if we were to repress the default-mode network entirely to make ourselves calm.
The study concluded that FA practices, such as one-pointed meditation, create calm by keeping the one mode of the task-positive network on and suppressing the internal, default-mode network. NDA, in contrast, was shown to balance external and internal networks. For me as a subject, NDA (or effortless mindfulness) is the experience of being undistracted without effort, aware of what’s going on inside and outside as a continuous, interconnected, seamless flow.
Awakening Is Restful and Creative
Another important study, done in 2018 by Poppy L. A. Schoenberg, Andrea Ruf, John Churchill, Daniel Brown, and Judson Brewer, looked at the EEG signals of practitioners who were doing similar effortless mindfulness practices.8
The EEG distinguishes five main types of waves, each with its own frequency. The slowest wave is delta, which oscillates between one and four cycles per second and occurs primarily during deep sleep. The next slowest, theta, occurs during a drowsy state before sleep. Alpha waves indicate relaxation and occur when there is little thinking. Beta waves are the next fastest and accompany thinking or concentration. Gamma waves are the fastest brain wave and occur during moments in which separate brain regions are firing in harmony, such as moments of insight, creativity, or “aha!” experiences.
The most significant outcome was that the frequency was in the high gamma range in all twenty-nine subjects doing forms of effortless mindfulness. The study is also striking because “in contrast to using number of hours or years of practice . . . the primary eligibility requirement was that each subject had the ability to shift from everyday mind to awake awareness.”9 This is important in showing that awakening training is possible in the midst of daily life rather than only for full-time yogis or those in monasteries.
Whether we start with deliberate or effortless mindfulness, there is a way to become effortlessly mindful in our daily lives such that we feel connected, creative, and compassionate. In the next chapter, I’ll teach the effortless mindfulness versions of well-known deliberate mindfulness practices.
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