Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness

In the practice of meditation, we learn to continually bring our thoughts back to the present moment whenever we find them wandering. We learn to use our many senses to engage our minds in the moment. We tell ourselves, ‘Be Here Now.’

It is challenging to go against life-long habits of the mind where the past and the future have commanded central roles in our thinking process. The effort we exert to become aware of our habits and to bring our mind back to the moment may feel a bit strained, and the results are often fleeting. This can lead to frustration, but we remind ourselves that developing any new skill is challenging. We continue to meditate and to bring awareness into our daily lives because we find that we and those around us benefit from our increasing spaciousness of mind, even though we may only be able to bring our minds to the present moment a small percentage of the time.

Having learned about Right Effort in the post before last, we might now question whether we need to try quite so hard to be mindful. If practicing mindfulness is a task or a chore we add to our daily to do list, then it is neither Right Effort nor Right Mindfulness.

Thinking again about the challenge of developing a new skill, consider playing the piano for example: At first it is all about the position of our fingers on the keys. We do endless drills to let our fingers learn where they should rest and how far they should reach to play the notes. But if we stay with it long enough for our fingers to feel at home on the keys, keeping our focus on the mechanical aspects can get in our way. As we become more adept at fingering, we can relax and allow ourselves to sense into and open to the music itself.

And this is exactly how it is with being present. At first, yes, the practice may seem a bit mechanical, our reminders to ourselves a bit nagging. This is normal. But at a certain point -- and when this happens is totally individual -- there is a shift where we realize that we don’t need to tell ourselves to be in the moment, that the moment itself claims us. We are naturally interested in the moment, perhaps awed by it, as if each moment were a new painting or poem to really see or hear. This is not a chore! This is a delight! This is life unfolding, fresh in every moment!

(Perhaps this sounds like being high, but those who have ever done drugs see how paltry drugs are in comparison to this grounded sustainable sense of being fully present with life as it is. This is a high that supports our physical and mental well being, while drugs threaten both.)

So how do we know when this transition comes? Well, the same way we knew when we no longer needed training wheels on our first bicycle. Perhaps we just had a sense that the training wheels were getting in our way, inhibiting our natural ability to ride. The extra trappings started to feel clunky. The same can be true here. The trappings of extra efforting begin to feel clunky, unnecessary – extra baggage no longer needed.

But if we take them off too soon, we will fall back into the habit of dwelling in the past or future. So we need to be mindful of our needs and not strive to be rid of that which supports us in our practice.

Some clues to being ready are noticing that we are: Becoming more aware of sensations in the body and taking heed of the body’s messages about our emotional or mental states; discovering that certain situations cause us to be less mindful and finding ways to craft our lives more skillfully; giving up multi-tasking so that we can stay present with our experience; arranging our schedule so that we create quiet spaces between events for our own rest and renewal; finding skillful means to stay present in difficult situations and to not add fuel to the fire by falling into fear.

All of these incremental steps allow us to be more mindful more of the time. And so perhaps we can transition from so much efforting to be mindful to opening to the naturally arising mindfulness within us out of our growing love and gratitude for life. Perhaps instead of reminding ourselves to come back to the moment, we can ask ourselves, “Where is the beauty in this moment?” and really give ourselves over to experiencing our surroundings with fresh eyes and ears, inviting ourselves into the spacious joy, the celebration of this precious gift of life.

This is Right Mindfulness. When life itself is so very interesting, even in the most ordinary moments, that we find ourselves fully present for our lives, enjoying discovering the depths and multi-layered dimensions of being absolutely where we are, our attention needs no effort.

But we are human. We will, by our very nature, get tripped up by the past or the future, and by old habits rising up at times of turmoil. That’s when we can turn to the guideposts of the Eightfold Path. If we have wandered into suffering, we can look at the guideposts of the Path and question what is going on. The light cast by the guidepost of Right Mindfulness is often bright enough to guide us back, because so much of our suffering is caused by not being mindful. We dwell in the past, regretting, reminiscing, revising history, laying blame; and we dwell in the future, worrying, planning or fantasizing. In this state we are bound to be unskillful. We can’t end our suffering if we aren’t present for the only moment in which we have the power to do so: This one.

As we spend more and more time fully in the moment, we fall in love with each moment, welcoming it and bidding it adieu as we greet the next. We no longer hold out for the moments we used to think were the ‘good’ ones, where life is ‘perfect.’ No matter what our situation, even if we are in incredible pain, we can sense in to the richness of life.

When I presented this dharma talk a question came up that a lot of other people probably share:

“If we are always in the present how do we plan?”
Being in the present does not preclude planning. We set aside a block of time in which we are going to plan something and that is our focus. But that is very different from the persistent thread of planning and daydreaming that runs through our minds all day, distracting us from being fully present with our current experience. When planning is the experience we want to be present for, then that’s Right Mindfulness.

An Introduction to the Noble Eightfold Path

Now we begin on the Fourth Noble Truth. To review the first three:The First Noble Truth is that there is suffering, the Second that it is our tendency to grasp and cling that causes this suffering, and the Third is that the end of suffering is possible. (For more in depth discussion, refer to prior posts in the archive at right.)

The Fourth Noble Truth is that The Noble Eightfold Path is the means to end suffering by developing Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.

On our first encounter with the idea of there being ‘right’ views, speech, etc., we may bristle. We don’t want to be forced into a particular way of speaking or thinking. We want to speak authentically and think for ourselves.

For me the single most powerful sentence the Buddha spoke, the one that drew me to Buddhist study in the first place, was “Be a lamp unto yourself.” (Before I ever undertook to study Buddhism, I had that quote on the back of my book, Tapping the Wisdom Within, A Guide to Joyous Living.) For me, this list of do’s and don’ts just didn’t jive with that statement.

Since becoming a Buddhist practitioner it has been easy to just ignore the subject. There are so many rich veins of Buddhism to explore that even over the course of many years The Eightfold Path rarely came up in any dharma talks in weekly classes or retreats I attended.

But then when the upper retreat hall and residences were built at Spirit Rock, they installed a beautiful hand-painted prayer wheel in the pedestrian entry gate. It is adorned with illustrations of the Eightfold Path. As you walk through, you take a handle -- perhaps the one named ‘Right Effort’ -- and spin the wheel. Then that focus of Right Effort (or whichever handle you took) stays with you as an intention.

In my comings and goings, I always enjoy spinning the prayer wheel. I remember one day I was walking through, and I had a bit of an aha moment about the Eightfold Path. I recognized that I had resistance to being told what to do, but that in fact, these were not dictates that I must subscribe to or rules of behavior I have to live by, lest I fail to be a good Buddhist. Instead I could see them as useful guideposts, so that when I am suffering I can see them in the fog of my misery shining a helpful light to help me see the cause of my suffering.

For example, say I am feeling oddly discomforted and don’t know why. I can mentally review the Eightfold Path to see if there is anything there to guide me. Say that on this occasion when I come upon Right Speech, and then I remember that the night before I had been talking about someone, telling a story that wasn’t mine to tell, and now I have this residual sense of ickiness, as if I truly have wandered into a sticky and stinky bog in my mind. But now I can see that by not adhering to Right Speech, I had wandered off the Eightfold Path.

That guidepost sheds the light of awareness on my behavior and brings me back on the path. Each time I find my way back, I have learned something valuable. And though I will probably wander off the path many times in many ways, these guideposts help me return more quickly, so that my suffering is shortened as I develop the habit of looking to the guideposts for cues to my current discomfort.

If a path sounds constricting, like a ‘straight and narrow’ path, the truth is that this path is incredibly spacious. For by staying on the path, we free ourselves to be fully present in every moment in an unencumbered way. And that is deep authentic connection indeed.

Over the coming weeks we will explore the aspects of the Eightfold Path. Each is a facet of the same jewel of wisdom, and they are so deeply inter-related that insight in one aspect brings understanding in another. Together they have the capacity to enrich our lives, sweeten our relationships and deepen our practice.

Yes, the Buddha told us to be lamps unto ourselves. But he also offered these guideposts to shed light on our path in order that we may brighten and strengthen our own inner light.