Unified Mindfulness: An Interview With Shinzen Young

By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.

You can listen to this episode here.

***

Thomas: Of all of the teachers I've met along the path, Shinzen, your work has influenced me in such profound ways. We have some space here to hear from you and your very unique take on and formulation of the Dharma. But if I could just make an introduction. Shinzen is unique in that he not only has a deep mastery of the practice side—he's been practicing in different Buddhist traditions and styles for over 50 years now—but has just a staggering grasp of the academic side of Buddhism. So you might hear words from multiple languages in this episode, you might hear some jargony, mathematical speech here. You're really in for a ride on this one. And Shinzen I just want to extend a warm welcome to you. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us on Mindfulness Plus.

Shinzen Young: Sure. My pleasure.

Thomas: Excellent. Well, Shinzen, where do we begin? Do you have anything for us right out of the gate? I've got lots of stuff [laughs].

Shinzen: I guess my main message to the world is that there's something that I call modern mindfulness. I define modern mindfulness as contemplative practice coevolving with science. So to me that is a huge concept, potentially not just a game changer, but a meta-game changer. 

A game changer changes how the game is played, and this meeting of the most powerful disciplines of the human species could—I'm not saying will—but could give rise to something that not only changes how the game is played on this planet, but also changes what the game is. The game has, for millions and millions of years of evolution, been competition for limited resources. And the meta-game changer that may arise from the best of the east cross-fertilizing with the best of the west is that human beings’ ability to appreciate resources will be dramatically increased, resulting in complete democratization across the planet for everyone. So, everyone gets ten times richer because they learn to live life ten times deeper. That's an enormous concept.

Now, throughout the history of science, a well developed branch of science is often seen as having a natural relationship to some other well developed branch of science, and they cross-fertilize and create something new. That's happened over and over again in the history of science and in the history of math. But the notion that takes this to a meta-level is in the late 20th century we discovered that there is a natural meeting between contemplative practice and modern science. And I can specify precisely what I mean by that meeting, what their intersection is, and how each can potentiate the other, creating a synergy. I call it "The Big Idea."

It's just an idea right now, so we don't know for sure if it will deliver all the goodies that I can imagine it delivering, but it's not unreasonable that that might happen. So I guess that's my main message, to deeply understand in a precise way what the contemplative practices of our species have been—east, west, ancient, and modern. There’s a paradigm wherein we can sort of get a unified view of that, I call it "unified mindfulness." 

We have an appreciation for science both as a powerful cultural institution but also as a deep human experience. To understand the nature of science once you get a clear understanding of those two, suddenly you can see this natural way that they can reinforce each other moving forward in time.

Thomas: Beautiful, Shinzen. So this is what I love about Shinzen, everybody. He brings it out fast and hard, and he sets the bar high. So here we are, we're talking about a new world, we're talking about a new potential destiny for the human species, and we're about 3 minutes in. 

Shinzen: For the details they can read the last chapter in my book The Science of Enlightenment.

Thomas: It’s a gorgeous book, along with the audio series from Sounds True, which is beautiful in its own right, also titled The Science of Enlightenment. That audio series, Shinzen, changed my life as much as any single work from any single human being I've ever come across. It's staggeringly brilliant, and heartful, and compassionate. So I highly recommend that to people.

I've got a question for you, Shinzen. So you're talking about science. You're talking about the best of western civilization (science), the best of eastern civilization (this contemplative science we might say). If I could back it up a little bit, let’s get a little bit about your background. 

What originally piqued your interest, your curiosity around this potential marriage (if I can call it that)?

Shinzen: Yeah, I'd call it the marriage of the millennium [laughs]. Well, my background would not have predisposed me either to the practice of meditation or to a competency in science. I was, according to my mother, what mothers call a difficult baby. My earliest memories were of being miserable, impatient, I couldn't handle any kind of physical discomfort. When adults were going through strong emotions I would just freak out, I couldn't handle it. So I was not the kind of person that could really face themselves, I was sort of the opposite of that kind of person. And also, I failed all my math and science courses in school much to the chagrin of my parents. So when I would come home with these bad grades in algebra, geometry, these high school subjects, it was not a pretty scene. So I was very much an underachiever and just sort of wimpy and impatient, and unhappy all the time. 

Thomas: I love when you use this adjective, Shinzen. You describe yourself as a “wimp” and then you get into this new stage in your life where you go into eastern practice living in Asia, and nobody would describe that as wimpy, what you went through. 

Shinzen: Well it was a bit of a shock, what I brought. Which was this non-meditative background. But in any event I did conceive of a passionate fascination with Asian cultures in my early teens and I was in L.A (it was not cool at that time to be interested in such things). I'm almost 73 years old. When I was born, World War 2 was still going on. My father was fighting the Japanese. And being interested in Asian things in general and Japanese in specific was not a cool thing in the 50's in L.A. But for some reason I just got interested in it. And I found out that they had Japanese ethnic school in addition to American public school so I decided I wanted to go to both. I went to Venice high school in Los Angeles but I also went to Sawtelle language school. Actually that started when I was in what's now called middle school but what we call junior high in those days.

So by the time I was out of high school, I had the privilege of growing up bilingual and bicultural with Japanese. But then I realized you could never quite understand—deeply understand—Japan without understanding the Chinese cultural background. So my parents dutifully got me a Mandarin tutor. I'm still in high school. So I could learn the official Chinese language, northern Chinese.

Thomas: I didn't know you started learning Mandarin in high school. That's new to me.

Shinzen: Yeah! And then I realized I'll never really understand China without understanding, at least academically, the Buddhist background. You need to know something about India, so my parents dutifully got me a Sanskrit tutor. I was still in high school, and my parents were terrific in that regard. 

I didn't do well with the math and science but I was really good at languages. Particularly these esoteric languages. So I picked that all up and then that led to an interest in Buddhism—but as a cultural phenomenon—but then the 60's were happening and I try every drug I could get my hands on and that started to change the way I was thinking about things and make meditation seem like something more than just a bunch of “hooey,” which was my original impression. That led to my eventually wanting to get a PHD in Buddhist studies, which lead to becoming a monk in Japan.

Thomas: Can I stop you for a second, Shinzen? That's really interesting that you say that, when you talk about experiencing meditation as a bunch of “hooey” at first. I know a lot of people who have that experience with meditation and I share your work with them. I say “oh you think meditation is a bunch of hocus-pocus and smoke and mirrors?” and I refer them to your work because I haven't met a teacher who brings as much rigor to the path of meditation, as much science to the path of language as you have. So it's really incredible that you've managed to take something eastern and mystical and ground it in the hard science of the west. It's really an incredible accomplishment.

Shinzen: My mission is to take the “mist” out of mysticism [laughs]. Yeah I'm pretty hard-nosed, it's all logic and evidence based. And a lot of traditional things have to be let go of but it turns out that the core transformative practices can stand the test of a rigorous evaluation: logic and evidence. So even after you drop the things that are superstitious or irresponsible claims of this or that, after that is shed there's still enough there to really powerfully transform a human being. And that's why this is so incredible that that is indeed the case. So I like to talk about what science can do for contemplative practice and what contemplative practice can do for science. One of the things that science can do for contemplative practice is validate its effects. And there are literally at this point, I would imagine, tens of thousands of articles, of course representing a spectrum of quality. But among those articles there are some that are very solid science that show that yeah, in the immortal words of my generation, “this works”! So that's one of the things that science can do for us.             

Another thing that science can do is something that I refer to in my own language as “in-formation”. What I mean by that idiosyncratic way of talking is that there's something called the spirit of science. It's what the human experience of science is. It's a combination of intellectual skills and certain kinds of emotional tastes that the best scientists have. And that spirit of science can inform the way that we teach mediation. And that's when you're referring to my work as having some distinct qualities. Those qualities that you're seeing, I describe in my own language as pointing to the fact that the spirit of science has deeply informed the way that I present the contemplative practices.

Anyway to answer your question quickly, I was in Japan, and I had sort of done some hippy stuff—I had lived in the Haight-Ashbury—but I was also an academic. That and certain life experiences that I went through made me get serious about doing meditation. So they made me do it the old-school way, it was very tough. And as I say, I was essentially not very strong. But you know, it's like any other kind of training. It's like lifting weights: you get stronger and stronger as you gain experience. So I proved to myself that even someone who doesn't have the natural endowments to meditate, shall we say, can with persistence get pretty good at it.

I did a number of years of the traditional training in Japan and at one retreat I met a Catholic priest named Father William Johnston. He was a Jesuit. He was another academic and we became friends, and through him I learned that meditation is not just found in Buddhism, it's found everywhere. It’s found in Christianity. It’s even in the tradition that's my family’s tradition of Judaism. I had no idea there was a whole Jewish meditation technology. I learned that from a Catholic priest. The other thing I learned from a catholic priest was that science was beginning to weigh in even in those days (this would be the late 60's and early 70's).

Thomas: Can I pause you on that, Shinzen? Can I ask you a question? It's curious to me that we don't know about Christian meditation, about Jewish style meditation, Islamic. Here we are having a conversation about how to draw from the technology of Buddhist practice, if you will. Could you say a word about why we don’t hear more about other traditions?

Shinzen: Well, if a person wants to look that up, they can. There are numerous online resources on the contemplative practices in those traditions. And people that belong to those traditions do know about these things. What you're saying is true though, Buddhism in terms of this dialogue between east and west, Buddhism in general, and specifically the mindfulness type practices from southeast Asia. They're the thousand-pound gorilla. They sort of dominate the dialogue. However, I would say that that is actually justified and that there's a reason for it.                   

Because the Buddhist traditions of all the other ones compared to the other traditions of the world, are the ones that although they are not scientific by modern standards, they are rather science-like in a number of ways. So there's already basis for dialogue.

Furthermore, meditation is the center piece in Buddhism and in the other traditions it may be viewed as important or marginal, depending, but it's not the name of the game the way it is in Buddhism. Christianity in the middle ages was quite meditative. But it also believed in rituals and doctrines and those were very important for salvation. Where as in Buddhism, your salvation is the result of your practice. So I would say that contemplative practice is central in Buddhism and it is also the case that just about every approach to contemplative practice that has been used anywhere in the world has an example somewhere in the Buddhist tradition.                 

There's a wide range of technologies that are in Buddhism. Buddhism does, in a sense, contain all the basic ways to meditate—or most of them anyway—and then couple that with the fact that Buddhism has certain science like qualities. It's not for nothing that it dominates the dialogue.

Anyway, just to complete your thing that you asked me originally. Father Johnston knew Japanese researchers who were doing brainwave research on meditators, and he clued me into the fact that this was happening. So it occurred to me that I'm going to be leaving Japan in a little while, I'm going back to “the west”. Maybe I should go back to my bête noire, the thing that I had done so poorly with, which was the math and science, because I can bring a new power to it because now I've got a number of years of meditation under my belt. I have concentration power, I have the ability to deconstruct my limiting beliefs. So I used my meditation skills to revisit math and science, and sure enough like I say: “this works.” 

And not just for spiritual or liberation things, it works for performance skills. Academic performance skills. It raised my IQ significantly and gave me the ability to actually excel in math and science. So I did it on the spec that someday in the future—once again we're talking early 70's here—maybe there would be this marriage of contemplative practice and modern science. Well, sure enough, the Dalai Lama started to talk to the Nobel laureates, the Mind and Life Institute, and it started to gain momentum and now it's everywhere. Most academic institutions around the world have some sort of research going on with mindfulness or meditation type things and it's like “oh my, it actually happened.” And fortunately I had prepared myself to have a place in this brave new world [laughs]. 

Thomas: Wow. Amazing, Shinzen. Yeah, I'm curious, you know I have a lot of different memories of you and stories you've told in the past going through my head. For the moment I just want to open up this question to you: for all of these listeners here at Mindfulness Plus, what would you say to them about what this new union is yielding in terms of science and contemplative practice coming together? What do we know now about meditation that we didn't know—that we couldn't know—two-thousand years ago as the Buddhist tradition was evolving, being formulated. Yeah, if you could just let us into that research.

Shinzen: Yes. Well, remember the old 'Sopranos' series? That T.V series?

Thomas: I remember it. Not familiar with it [laughs].

Shinzen: That was one of my favorite TV shows and there's in the first episode the main character, Tony Soprano, who says something to the effect of “it's good to be in on the ground floor”. He was comparing the Mafia in the 50's to the current Mafia, ok? He wasn't in on the ground floor. His father and their fathers, the previous generation were the ground floor. He's coming too late to the game so there's this line “it's good to be in on the ground floor”. 

Thomas: [laughs]

Shinzen: Now that has a lot of meaning to me because my buddies and I were in on the ground floor, which is both an agony and an ecstasy. The ecstasy is we know we're onto something. The agony is we're really not there yet. A lot of claims are maid and I mean, there's a lot of good research in certain areas of practice, but the holy grail in my way of thinking is an actual science of enlightenment. And we could see that that could happen in this century, but don't let anyone fool you with pictures of peoples brains and colored blobs to make you think that we really understand these things well yet. So what I compare us to is the Age of Galileo.

There's this great painting, famous painting of Galileo showing the Doge of Venice his invention, the telescope. And it's a crude device, right, his original telescope. So they're looking through this crude device but they know they're onto something because it's an awareness extending tool that doesn't distort, and when you look at the moon, the moon is not perfectly spherical the way Aristotle says it has to be. It's not that way at all! And in fact, the earth is not stable, ok? The earth turns etc, etc. So they knew they were onto something but they weren't there yet. Kepler hadn't lived yet, Newton hadn't lived yet, Einstein, Maxwell hadn't lived yet. So they knew they were onto something but the details and the bulletproof evidence wasn't there yet. So that was the ground floor. It's exciting because you're pretty sure that you're onto something, but it's also sort of frustrating because we're not there yet. So I would say we're on the ground floor and there is a potential that may manifest in this century for what I would refer to as a true science of enlightenment.

Thomas: Can I stop you there? Let me just say this for people who aren't familiar with your work. What I've noticed about you—I came across your work in 2005, I've been following you very closely for the last 12 years—I've noticed that you, more than most teachers, don't shy away from this term enlightenment. And that's unique about you and you take it a step further and suggest that there's a potential science of enlightenment where enlightenment could be common currency in the human experience at some point in the future. So if you'd say a word about the science of enlightenment, what does that look like?

Shinzen: Well, to appreciate that you have to appreciate two things: science and enlightenment. So I'm not sure I can say a word that will lead to the appreciation of both of those. First of all, I'm not the only teacher that isn't afraid of the “e” word. In fact, in the Zen tradition it's routinely talked about—particularly in Rinzai zen. And my very first meditation teacher was a Japanese Rinzai zen practitioner, Okamura Keishin Sensei. So he would talk about Satori or Kenshō—these are the Japanese words that roughly, roughly, correspond to what in Theravada Buddhism is called Sotapatti. So he would talk about this as a feasible goal and something that I should work towards. So there are teachers, even whole traditions that talk about this. However, it is also true that many teachers do not talk about it and there is a long list of good reasons not to talk about it. And of course I know those reasons and I respect those reasons, but I have elected to ignore those reasons [laughs]. But it's not for nothing that most teachers don't explicitly talk about this.

For one thing it's an ambiguous term—what one teacher might confirm as an enlightenment experience, another teacher might say that's not. That it’s the beginning of a beginning. So it's a little bit of a moveable feast. as to how it's going to be defined, that's a problem and a reason not to talk about it. It's not necessarily something that happens suddenly (even though the books often describe it that way). In my experience, most of the students that I've worked with that I would say have some degree of enlightenment, it did not happen suddenly. Every now and again you do get those sort of huge epiphany things that you've read about in the books; that certainly does happen sometimes. But it's usually not sudden, it sort of sneaks up on people. And it's not an attainment. But you can't talk about it in any other term. You talk about it and it sounds like it's this thing you’ve got. But it's not an attainment, it's not something you can take credit for or adorn yourself with, it's paradoxical. It's simultaneously the most empowering and the most devastating thing that can happen to a person [both laugh]. So there's no informed consent! Ok so you can see there's a lot of reasons not to talk about this, to say nothing of the fact that very quickly you're saying a lot of weird stuff like I just said, because it's quite paradoxical [laughs].

Thomas: So here we are at Mindfulness Plus speaking to the Buddhist crime boss of the western world, Shinzen Young, straight talk on enlightenment. Shinzen, if we could, I think we're going to wrap it up here for the day. If I could ask you to lead us in a bit of a pointing out instruction, just give the listeners a bit of a flavor of how you guide and we'll drop an episode next week with the concluding half of this conversation that you've led us in.

Shinzen: Very good. So you’d like me to give a little guided meditation? 

Thomas: I’d love that if you would. 

Shinzen: Sure.

*start practice*

Take a moment to stretch up and settle in. And if you wish you can close your eyes or have them open. Whatever appeals to you. Now bring your attention to your body experience. Let your awareness move within your body however it wants. Maybe it will go to one place, maybe it will circulate around, maybe you'll be drawn to the whole body at once. Any pattern is fine. Focus on body and let your thoughts come and go as they wish in the background. You'll hear mental conversations, you may see mental images, that's fine. Totally give permission for thoughts to arise or not, but your intention is to place attention in somatic experience. Every few seconds say to yourself the mental label "feel" to remind you that you are feeling. It could be physical, it could be emotional. It could be pleasant, unpleasant, both, neither, subtle, intense. It could be stable, it could be flowing. Just feel.

Now continue to focus on your body experience and we're going to raise the challenge level just a bit because I'd like you to slightly open your eyes. the outer world of color and form arises. That's fine but let that be in the background, sort of soft focus, defocus. See if you can keep attention in the body even though your eyes are open a bit, and then gradually open wider and wider until your eyes are completely open but your awareness is back. Back in the body, the physicality, the perhaps emotionality. And in a moment when this program ends and you make your transition to life, make it smoothly. See if you can retain some embodiment, perhaps coming back to this with a little micro-hit here and then during the day. Just feel.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Everything You Need Is Right Here: A Meditation for the Exhausted

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

***

Sometimes it may seem like no matter where you go in this modern world, people are exhausted.

Perhaps you’ve felt it. Maybe you've gone back to school to get a better job. Maybe you aren’t feeling fulfilled in a relationship and want to trade your partner out for another to see how you fair in the lottery. Maybe your mind is wandering from the present moment, fixating on an even better moment that might, you imagine, lie just around the corner.

Whatever the specifics, chances are that you’re exhausted in part because you’re reaching for that which you don’t have.

Of course, I'm not suggesting for a moment that it’s a bad thing to get further education and a better job. Or that it's inherently bad to leave a relationship that's not working anymore. Or even that it's bad to let your mind wander. These experiences are all just part of human life. They're what it means to be human.

But what I want to point out is that when we're stuck in this mode, when all we can do is seek better things that don’t yet exist, we tend to feel exhausted. If we're constantly in a posture of reaching, we can't let go, relax, and be with exactly what is right now.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Instead, you can practice taking up the attitude that everything you need is right here.

Take a moment and see what it does to your body when you internalize these words: "everything I need is right here."

In one sense, the practice of mindfulness is the practice of giving that thought more time each day.

Of course, that thought can itself be pitfall. You might pick up mindfulness because you hear it will help you relax more, and all of a sudden mindfulness becomes a new task — a new form of seeking. In that instance, mindfulness itself puts you back at square one, where you're in a posture of reaching.

So I want to invite you to really sit with the thought that wherever you are and whatever you're doing right now, absolutely nothing is missing.

When I teach this concept, people often ask, "If nothing is missing, why would I get out of bed in the morning? Why would I do anything at all if everything is right here?”

It’s a good question, and it’s important to note that the point isn’t to learn mindfulness and then become so passive that there's no need to ever leave our meditation cave for the rest of our lives. Rather, mindfulness is a practice that helps us replenish. It's a practice that helps us rejuvenate so that we become deeply present and then paradoxically become more vibrant in our actions.

Let’s see what this feels like in practice.

Whatever you're doing right now, come to stillness.

Starting with the experience of the physical body. Just notice in this moment how you feel. You can notice any pleasant sensations as well as any challenging sensations — any physical discomfort.

It's deeply instinctual to want to move away from discomfort, but what you can do here is just invite all of your experience to be present right now. Notice the comfort and discomfort in the body. And then notice that there's a part of you that’s even deeper than the body, a part of you that can just allow comfort and discomfort to exist as they are. Be present to this full experience.

And you can notice what emotions are present. Maybe pleasant emotions, maybe neutral emotions. Maybe you’re not feeling much of anything — an emotional idling. Or maybe you’re aware of challenging emotions, or negative emotions. Whatever the case, notice that you're able to just stay present to all of it.

If you're feeling really good, you don't need to grasp on to that good feeling. If you feel negative emotions at the moment, you don't have to drive those emotions away and go looking for a better experience. You can just rest in this moment exactly as it is.

And now notice what thoughts might be going through your mind. Maybe thoughts about things that have happened in the past. Maybe thoughts anticipating what needs to happen today or what you hope will happen in the future.

Rather than struggling with the thinking mind, rather than trying to stop thought, you can just allow thought to flow without diving into the stream yourself, without pursuing thought or elaborating on it.

You can just allow thoughts to flow as naturally as blood flows through the veins.

Notice that whatever the state of the physical body and whatever the state of the thinking mind, there's a part of you deeper than the physical body and deeper than the thinking mind. And this part of you is just aware.

For this moment, you don't have to struggle. You don't have to strive. You can simply rest in this moment that is full. Rest in this moment where absolutely nothing is missing. Everything you need is right here.

***

So, why would we want to experience this?

Again, because we live in a world where we are constantly driven to exhaustion.

We are constantly reaching for what comes next, to the point we forget that there's a moment right here. We forget there's a moment right now where we're already complete. And when we rest deeply in this sense of completion. When we really take on this posture and attitude of nothing is missing and everything you need is right here, something really amazing happens: we start to move in life.

Improvement itself is not the problem. Striving for all the things we care about most in our lives is not the problem itself. The problem is the forgetting.

When we remember we are complete, we paradoxically start to reach the things we care about most. Not from a place of lack. Not from a place where we feel like something’s missing and we just need to work harder and won't be ok until we have it.

Rather than moving from a place of scarcity, trying to get more and trying to bring more in, we start with a quality of deep fulfillment.

You could say we start from a place of abundance and from that place where everything is complete and everything we need is here, we move to the next moment where everything we need is already here again.

And in that way we let go of exhaustion.

***

Transcribed by Seth McConkie, edited by Jon Ogden

Subscribe to Mindfulness+.

Mindfulness Is the Awareness that You Are: An Introduction to the Basics

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

***

Mindfulness is the buzz of the world right now. Business leaders, educators, scientists — everyone’s talking about mindfulness. People are even saying mindfulness will create revolution in human health.

So, what is all this hype about?

I want to address that question, but first I want to share how I came into the practice.

It started when I was 18 years old. I was an insomniac. I'd just moved out of my parent’s home to start my freshman year of college. I got to my apartment, unpacked my bags, sat on the floor, and realized that my life was a total mess.

I felt emotional turbulence. I wasn't able to sleep through the night. It was a really stressful time for me. I didn't know how to be on my own.

One day I somehow absorbed this word out of the ether: mindfulness.

I started asking people about it. I'd never known a meditator, and I'd never sat with any group formally to practice meditation, but something in me was yearning to learn mindfulness. I just had an intuition that it could help me.

So I learned the basics: how to hold the posture, how to follow my breath, how to observe my thoughts, etc. It was challenging, but I kept doing it because I had a sense that the practice was really going to help.

Then, around the six month mark, I felt my whole life change. It changed in a very subtle but profound way. I had gone from being an anxious, destabilized teenager to feeling like I was really rooted in my self. I had a certain centered awareness that I'd never felt before, that I didn't even know was possible, and I knew that it was the result of practicing mindfulness for a few months. In a very concrete way I could feel that my breathing had changed. It had gone from this kind of nervous, anxious, chest breathing, to dropping down deep in to my belly — every breath calming me more than the last.

Mindfulness changed the course of my life. I've been doing it daily for nearly twenty years, and it’s a joy of mine to share the basics with people so that they can start their own journey with it.

If you stick with the practice, your transformation will look very different from mine, but I can promise you that it will be incredibly rewarding. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it, which brings me to the next point.

When we talk about mindfulness, it can sometimes sound like a really exotic technique that gurus know how to do and you don't. Perhaps you’re already hearing those gurus saying, “We're on the in and you're on the out!”

I want to debunk that notion immediately because what I love about mindfulness is that mindfulness is who you are. What I mean is that when you pay attention, like I invite you to do right now, what you'll notice is that you're aware. You're just simply aware. You're not trying to be aware. In fact, you can't try to be aware. You're just aware. And there’s something really profound that happens when we just notice the fact that we're aware. Everything shifts.

I'll give you an example. If you watch a newborn infant, you realize there’s something wondrous about the simple act of looking around. It's an amazing experience.

That’s the way it is with all our senses. It doesn't matter if you're hearing a dump truck or if you're hearing Niagara Falls. Human hearing is an incredible experience.

Infants know this intuitively. You could say that they're enraptured by the sensorial experience of being a human. Unfortunately, what happens over time is that as we become used to the many sensory experiences available to us, they lose their charm.

You could say that a mindfulness practice is the practice of remembering. It's remembering just how amazing it is to be awake, to be in a human body, to be in this very moment.

That's the essence of it. There are techniques we can learn. We can rev up our mindfulness and raise our baseline of mindful awareness, but at the very heart of the practice, at the very heart of the experience, you're already mindful. You’re already aware. You’re already perfectly present. In this sense, to practice mindfulness is to celebrate what's already here.

Let’s go ahead and try it. As you read the following words, see if you can treat the experience as mindfulness practice.

Start by bringing awareness to the physical body.

Notice that if I prompt you to notice the physical body, your awareness just goes right there. It's not effortful. You're just suddenly aware of the physical body.

And you can just notice the flow of sensation in this moment. If you're sitting down, you can notice what it feels like to be sitting. If you're standing, you can notice the sensation of standing.

What I want you to notice, especially here, is that it doesn't take any special effort or special training to simply notice that you're already aware. In this case, you can just notice that you're aware of body sensation and let that body sensation flow and enjoy.

In this moment, notice hearing. Notice any sound in the environment. If there’s not sound, you can simply attend to the silence, the absence of sound. Again, just notice how effortlessly you're aware of sound, aware of hearing. You don't need any special training to do this. You simply turn your attention one degree, and suddenly you notice all the sound in the world.

At this point, I invite you to notice seeing. Take a moment away from this text and notice your surrounding. Notice the different shapes, the different colors in your visual field, the volume of space, and so on. Maybe you're sitting in a small room. Maybe you're outdoors beneath the wide open sky. Whatever the case, you can just notice the experience of seeing all of this. Notice that it doesn't take any special training. Just bring awareness to seeing and you're aware of seeing. Seeing is happening.

Now give yourself a nice full breath, letting go and softening even more. Notice that all of these different qualities of awareness are happening all at once: feeling, hearing, seeing, all just different experiences within the experience of awareness, of being aware.

At the heart of experience you're always already aware.

***

There are many mindfulness teachers in the world right now — many extremely talented and knowledgeable mindfulness teachers. They have their own definitions on what mindfulness is, but I want to offer you my own very simple definition, which hopefully you just had a chance to experience:

Mindfulness is the awareness that you are.

In this sense mindfulness is the practice of just remembering that we're already aware. It's being aware that we're aware. When we get buried in daily tasks, when we're stressed about where we need to get to next, we forget this joyous and simple feeling of being that comes through our own awareness. By contrast, when we take a moment or pause, when we shift attention one degree, when we pay attention to how we're paying attention, these are all mindful moves.

As we make these mindful moves more and more they become habit, and this habit changes our experience. It changes the course of our lives.

Remember this incredible thing that you already are. You might have simply forgotten.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Subscribe to Mindfulness+.

Guided Meditation: A Tour of Body, Mind, and Spirit

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Listen to this episode here.

***

Take a moment to settle in, letting the intelligence of the body organize itself into a posture that allows you to be awake, alert, but also soft and relaxed.

And you can just breathe, letting the breath soften you, especially on the out-breath. You can just notice the way the body tends to relax and let go. The muscles tend to soften.

I'd invite you in this practice to not try and feel a certain way as you practice, not try and get somewhere with this meditation so much as just open up to what’s already here — what's actually so. Just notice the body. Notice the shape, the posture, of the physical body. Notice sensation, the feel of the floor or the pressure of the seat against your bottom or maybe your back. Notice where you make contact with the ground.

Also notice where sensation is the brightest, the most felt — maybe through the organs, the belly, the heart, the throat, or the face. Just notice. And you can notice where sensation is quieter, more dim, or difficult to detect. However the body is feeling in this moment — blissful, relaxed, happy, or maybe tense, challenged, uncomfortable, or all the above and more — notice that the body is just happening. Sensation is just flowing like a mighty river. Or a quiet river, as the case may be. And just as you can never step into the same river twice, the body never repeats the same sensation. It's a continuous flow — always new, always renewing.

Notice thoughts in the mind, thoughts floating through awareness. What does it feel like to have a thought? What images come up? What internal sound and chatter occur? Notice the shape, the contour, and the movement of the thinking mind in this moment. And again you can just allow thought to flow. Just like you wouldn't hold the breath indefinitely, you don't need to try and not think. Rather you can just allow thoughts to flow through awareness as naturally as blood flows through the veins.

If you get pulled into a thought, you can just notice that awareness collapses into a thought and allow awareness to open back up into spaciousness, into the vast field of awareness that is, that you are. And just notice awareness in this moment. Not awareness of something — awareness of the body, awareness of the mind — but awareness that you're aware. You're having an experience and if you weren't aware, there would be no experience at all. Forget what you're experiencing and notice that you're experiencing.

And as you rest as awareness, as you're aware of awareness, it makes no difference what you're experiencing. There's no longer such thing as a good meditation and a bad meditation, even a good day and a bad day, because you are awareness. You are the open and free field through which experience comes and goes, comes and goes. But you — awareness — don't come and go. You, this wakefulness, this intelligence — you have always been and always are. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to understand it. You can be it. Just aware.

And in this moment the body rises in awareness. Thoughts arise in awareness. The entire world arises in awareness, and you are all these things, all at once, simultaneously. Body, mind, spirit, integrated. Breathe in through all of you. Breathe in through all of your bodies, feel the stretch in awareness, feel your own vastness. And know that this is always available.

Freedom in Chains: A Practice of Open Awareness

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

***

In his book Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl reflects on what enabled him to not just survive, but to thrive during the Holocaust. 

There’s a quote from the book that for me incapsulates something beautiful about what we're working with in a mindfulness practice and in a human life. Frankl writes, "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

Here's a person writing from the extreme of the extremes — a witness to some of the most atrocious acts ever committed in the history of human civilization. And yet he talks about his ultimate power to not respond to outward situations, which we don't often have ultimate control of, and instead move to a kind of inner freedom where we choose our response. 

If we pay close attention, we notice that our days are full of moments where we feel oppressed or we don't feel free. Or perhaps we feel extremely limited, burdened, and oppressed in really significant ways. From a conventional standpoint, what we tend to do in those situations is get really moody and mad at everything and everyone around us. We want things to change. And sometimes we get our way, and sometimes we don’t. Often we don't. In extreme situations, we might come upon incredible hardships that last for days, weeks, months, years, even decades.

So it's not the conditions of our lives where we find actual freedom. And I think that this is where a mindfulness practice is so relevant to all of us. 

I'm talking about the movement at the deepest level of our being that desires to be free. Can you feel that? Can you feel that stirring in you, that deep desire to be free? And yet the paradox is that we're always born into conditions. Having a human body is a condition that limits us in many ways. Depending on the culture we grew up in — the political, economic, and social environment we grew up in — we were denied certain freedoms and gifted with other freedoms. So certain conditions work in our favor, they're positive, they’re supportive. Other conditions, such as Viktor Frankl’s, are at the extreme opposite end of oppression and limitation. And yet there's something in us, there's an awareness, there's a suchness and a beingness beyond all conditions, that knows freedom right now. 

At the deepest level we're already free.

Of course, I'm absolutely not asking you to take anything I say just based on my words. The invitation is for you to investigate this directly and see if you're able to access this quality of freedom that goes beyond all conditions. 

It's an amazing paradox and a poignant contradiction that Viktor Frankl, chained and tortured during the Holocaust, learned to access his deepest freedom in the very conditions that we would suppose are the antithesis of freedom. 

Let’s take a look at this experience at a personal level

*start practice* 

Take a moment to settle in. Find a comfortable posture. Feel the shape of the body, the posture of the body. Notice the impact that has on your experience in this moment, on your awareness. And just breathe. Let the breath move through you like a wave. Notice all of the rich sensation associated with breathing.

Take another moment to just soften, to let go of whatever you've been carrying with you from the days work, from the night full of dreams, to just empty out. To soften. To unwind. 

Feel the spaciousness of your awareness. Notice that it's no effort to be aware. You're aware of sensations in the body, emotions, thoughts in the mind. You're aware of sounds, activity in the world, and it's no effort to you; you are this awareness, this intelligence. Notice any conditions in this moment that feel limiting, that feel troubling in any way. Perhaps pain in the body, challenging sensations, emotions. Maybe the mind is busy and you'd like it to calm down. Or if in this moment, the body, the mind, are relatively at peace, relatively blissful, you might open up your awareness to relationships that are challenging, work life. Just the demand to earn money to provide for yourself and maybe others. And if everything is amazing on this front and effortless, you can open up your awareness to the challenges of the world.

The huddled masses of immigrants who are driven from war-torn, famine-stricken countries. Climate change disturbing environments, ecosystems, communities. Political strife, division, the threat of war. All of these conditions, they're in the air, and if we look closely we feel it in our bodies. These conditions that challenge us, that would seem to limit our joy, limit our freedom. Whatever conditions are particularly challenging to you in the moment, you can pick the one that, if you could wave a magic wand and make it disappear, you would. But rather than making it disappear you actually open up your awareness even more, become even more present and just feel the presence of this condition in your life. The way it colors you, the way it pushes on you, the way it impinges. And rather than pushing back, rather than resisting, rather than trying to change it, perhaps you can allow awareness to simply more fully receive it. Not that you're giving up action, not that you don't allow conditions to inform you and evoke the appropriate response, but to just fully be present to this condition, this limitation, this challenge. 

And recognize that when you don't tell a story about it, when you don't jump to a meaning about it, when you just dwell in the immediacy of your experience in this moment — the immediate experience of having a body, being in sensation, being aware, being alive, being intelligent — notice what this does. Allow this condition to fully inform you to become completely present, so present that you become one with it. This condition is your life, it is you. It's part of what makes you you. 

And when you let this condition be fully present you're actually free not to react. Not to react in a desperate way that tries to make this go away as quickly as possible, but act in a way that's intelligent, that's responsive, that's appropriate, skillful, whatever that is. Whatever that is to you. But first you can taste the freedom in open awareness.

*bell to conclude*

I'll invite you to stay with this practice. You'll notice when you pay attention, countless times throughout the day where we notice this vague sense of dissatisfaction, of oppression, horns blaring in traffic, a long, slow moving line at the grocery story, a vaguely boring or uncomfortable interaction with a friend, a colleague, a neighbor. In these moments when you're most inclined to react and change circumstances immediately, see if you can first escape into circumstance. Finding your freedom in the chains of conditions. Going beyond conditions all together, into freedom beyond any condition.