AWAKENING WITH MINDFULNESS
by Peter Carlson I
’ve been practicing Buddhist mindfulness meditation since 1982, participating in intensive meditation retreats once or twice a year. After my fi rst 3-month retreat in 1990, I decided to provide mindfulness training for others in Central Florida. Ross Payne and I founded the Orlando Insight Meditation Group (OIMG), a non-profi t corporation around 1993, with the intention to bring the benefi ts of the varieties of Buddhist trainings to Central Florida. Check
Orlandoinsightmeditation.org for more information.
Since then, OIMG has provided introductory courses, intensive study groups, opportunities to meditate with others and talk about mindfulness and loving-kindness on a weekly basis. For about 15 years, we’ve produced one day retreats, along with weekend and one week residential retreats. I’ve been teaching how to practice mindfulness of breathing meditation for over 25 years, and when I encounter students years later, they still fi nd checking in with breath sensations, both during formal meditation practice and informally during the day, to be very benefi cial.
Until about 10 years ago, the term “mindfulness” was not well known. What is mindfulness? The Miriam- Webster website says:
1: the quality or state of being mindful.
2: the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis; also: such a state of awareness.
Now let’s consider the word “awakening.”
Centuries ago, the term “Buddha” was translated as “Enlightened One.” That is inaccurate. A be er term is “Awakened One.” The Buddha encountered another wandering spiritual seeker who was struck by his presence and asked “Are you a god?” He replied “No… Just as a red, blue, or white lotus — born in the water, grown in the water, rising up above the water — is unstained by the water, I — born in the world, grown in the world, having overcome the world — live unstained by the world. Remember me, brahman, as ‘awakened’.” What was he awakened from? Buddhism describes “hindrances”: desire for pleasant experience, desire to avoid unpleasant experience, dullness, restlessness, worry and skeptical doubt and indecision. Awakening involves understanding how these hindrances arise, what negative consequences come from them and how to reject them. Turning attention away from the hindrances with mindfulness and compassion is the path of awakening. Every moment of mindfulness without hindrances is a moment of awakening! Buddhism is changing as it enters into contemporary culture. Now we are drenched in stimulation—pleasant, unpleasant, worrisome and producing doubts about how to be in the world. Practicing mindfulness-of-breathing is a powerful tool for recognizing and unburdening the mind and heart from these stressful experiences. Why is something as simple and
straightforward as breath-awareness benefi cial? Whenever attention is drawn to a focus, it is typically infl uenced by
30 Central Florida natural awakenings
a feeling of impulsive urgency that can be either subtle and unimportant, or strongly controlling of attention, and it can be pleasant or unpleasant. This urgent feeling quickly “researches” for similar memories to make sense of what caught our attention. This process of meaning- making is what mindfulness addresses. Buddhism identifi es “craving and clinging” as the cause of distress and confusion. Craving is the urgent feeling and clinging is the tendency to take what emerges from memory as essentially and factually true, when meaning-making is only a supposition about the truth that may or may not be useful. This creates what I call “the selfi ng
story,” an internal narrative and commentary we all experience. When practicing mindfulness-of-breathing, the meaning-making process is quite simple: you mindfully notice the sensation of breathing in and breathing out, typically in the area around the nostrils. When aware of a distraction, attention is returned back to the breath sensations. This process doesn’t require anything other than simple awareness. I mentioned the pleasant or unpleasant feeling previously, and that feeling generates a fl ow of energy in the mind and body. An example is adrenaline. Every “energized” feeling (along with the story that comes with it), squirts a little adrenaline into the bloodstream, and goes throughout the body, increasing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and emotional excitement—whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant. The adrenaline takes some time to be used up,
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