In the Sutras, Buddha taught four types of Mindfulness Meditation:

1. Body Mindfulness
2. Feeling Mindfulness
3. Consciousness Mindfulness
4. Phenomena Mindfulness

1. Body Mindfulness Meditation, Kayanupassana
To practice body mindfulness meditation, one uses the breath as the way to connect and go into the body. With each breath, you notice what physical sensations there are. Each breath conditions the body, bringing oxygen to every cell in the body. Notice the way the breath feeds each and every part of you. There is an amazing connection between Mindfulness and breath. The breath is a powerful instrument for bringing about Mindfulness to the body in a powerful way. It takes you to a place where you can make contact with your body without preference or hesitation.

Breath is not will but technique. Will is one’s initial motive for cultivating spiritual goals and discipline. There is nothing wrong with having a desire for enlightenment. At same time, it’s not sufficient to have that unless we practice meditative techniques. Just having will might turn one into divine frustration, since there won’t be any transformative progress. It’s like you have fantasies about going to Tibet or some exotic country, but do nothing about it, which one could do by saving money and buying a ticket.

Breath allows you to connect with yourself in a deeper way. The moment you focus on the breath, you’ll begin to feel every aspect of your body, even at a cellular level.

Our body is multi dimensional, it’s more then flesh and bone. It’s a galaxy in its own way. Our body has all these cellular levels, each of them have a complete organism. Modern science describes that every cell in our body has some kind of intelligence and function. First of all, it’s common understanding that without body, there is no way one can survive. The more we connect with our body, the more we are alive.

Our usual tendency is to identify with thought and emotion. When we do that, we get stuck with them the way a car gets stuck in a ditch. That is the place where we repeat the same habitual patterns over and over again. In someway, we are not completely alive in each moment as long as we’re not free from our habit. Our internal habits prevent us from connecting with our body. The state where we got stuck. It’s not a place where we correspond to moment by moment reality.

Without being fully alive, there is no way we can go any further on the spiritual path. If we truly desire enlightenment, we have to learn how to be alive completely. When you’re fully alive, you’re free from all internal conflicts, because you’re in contact with reality.

Our body is a doorway to connect with every momentary reality. Our body is not a separate entity from us. Being in the body means that you embrace yourself. When we get stuck with our thoughts, fantasy and memory, we’re in mental realms where everything is distorted. Meditation is not about leaving this body and playing with one’s mind. When we’re too much in a mental realm, we become so disconnected from everything and we don’t experience anymore the wonder of every moment, the freshness of every moment.

Breathing is again a very powerful meditative tool. Along side that physical movement can be very helpful.

Here are some instructions for body mindfulness meditation:
1. After doing physical movement, sit in the lotus position. Straighten your body and relax.

2. First breathe gently for quite a while, while you breath, observe the breath as usual. Now and then breath fast and actively.

3. Make sure that when you breathe, breath all the way to belly, this is quite important. You’ll experience the centeredness and the vitality of life. In Tibetan, it’s called “bumtho” meaning vase belly.

4. All the way through, let yourself observe the body. Deepen your awareness. Be aware of every bodily sensation. See that the body is changing in every moment. See it as quite different than how we see it most of the time. See the body as no longer this separated entity, so called, “body”. You can experience there is no boundary between you and your body. Even the concepts of body will disappear. There will be only an experience of the body.

5. Remember, do not ignore any sensation of body. Even the subtle ones.

In the meditative state, you do not have the clinging towards your body as “my body” or even “the body” or notion of body as a separate object. Rather you simply experience every change and all sensations of the body. In that state, all belief systems and concepts about one’s body will be transcended.

Remember, do not attach to any sensations of your body, whether they’re pleasant or not. Open yourself to the entirety of sensations, even when breeze touches your ears.

For most practitioners, Mindfulness is the “same old, same old meditation”. Of course, it came directly from Buddha two thousand years ago. In actuality what Buddha taught was a system or way of developing Mindfulness, but Mindfulness is not anyone’s creation, not even the Buddha’s. It is inherent in each and every one of us, whether or not one has done meditation. Sometimes it requires that we use meditative techniques and structures just for the purpose of igniting the amazing ability, which lies latent in each of us.

In my own life I have met individuals who don’t call themselves “Meditator,” yet they are amazingly mindful in their actions. They have the ability to be in the moment and have the insight to act in accordance with each situation. Because Mindfulness is natural to all of us, sometimes it requires very easy steps to develop it.

The paradox about Mindfulness is that when you become very ambitious about cultivating it, this becomes an obstacle. It pushes Meditation away instead of bringing it about. In some ways, it has nothing to do with how much you know about it and how many disciplines you have practiced. Its natural cultivation has to do with whether or not you get the idea.

When we enter into a meditative state, we’re entering into the realm of pure consciousness in which all our concepts are gone. There is only one Meditation, it’s a way of being in the moment and aware of everything around us. When we’re fully in our body, we’re already in the meditative state. It’s much easier to practice those pseudo meditations than just being in the body.

While practicing Body Mindfulness, first one focuses on the belly where vitality is. Breathe all the way there. Awareness of that space will occur. Slowly, one can expand one’s awareness throughout the body. Do not apply any other complicated method unless one doesn’t know how to get the awareness. Breath is the sufficient and proper method. You may begin having a sense of bliss or rapture. Learn not to attach to them; let them pass by. This is a form of primal meditation in which we use our vitality for becoming aware of everything.

2. Feeling Mindfulness Meditation, Vedananupassana
If one became enlightened without connecting with feelings, he or she would be less educated about human life, therefore the potential for experiencing internal disaster would lie dormant and sooner or later arise unexpectedly, stimulated by outer conditions.

So, what is the benefit of being enlightened?

One can hide from facing the reality now and then, but eventually no matter how strong your avoidance tactics are, you have to face the inevitability of your life situation. We don’t know what’s going to occur tomorrow. We could win the lottery or we could die by tomorrow. There is no way we can predict our future even in the next moment. When we face those realities, we might not be ready for them. That’s when we could completely fall apart.

If we cannot find another easy way to escape as we have in the past, we might have to experience our emotions like a volcanic eruption. It is very easy to be lost in that emotional eruption. It is like being a child fighting amongst tigers.

The very reason we avoid our feelings and emotions is because we experience them as painful and sorrowful due to our attachment to them. We attach to our emotions by perceiving them as pleasant or unpleasant. Why do we do that? Because we have such dualistic perception toward conditions as being either good or bad. This perception is so infantile and ignorant. We humans tend to conceptualize things based on our hopes and fears. With this perception toward reality, we will never be able to free ourselves from resistance and craving. To free ourselves, we must go beyond this fundamental perception of good and bad, life and death.

Connecting with one’s emotions is a direct way of facing reality. We have suppressed and over-accumulated a great many past emotions because feeling them seems so painful, although they have nothing to do with reality. It is only a belief system. This moment is the time to explore them. Remember the saying, “now or never”.

You might feel grief about your lost friend that you hadn’t fully processed, you might have a wound that goes back sometime ago, but didn’t have the tolerance to face. If we keep giving power to our internal issues, we’re going to have more and more issues to purify and we become less capable of being conscious of our tendencies (Bakchak), the tendencies, which view them as reality, which conditions our life.

When you truly allow yourself to reveal your old and long-held emotions, there will be awakening, an opening experience, that’s when you are undertaking an inner journey in the moment in which you’re going to find liberation, the liberation of inner conflicts. Just learn not to hold back when the journey begins. Go into the experience of feelings and emotions the way you dive into water. Remember not to apply those classical, religious judgments toward emotions as being instinctual, sinful or dirty. Experience whatever arises without judgment, pleasure or pain, lust or depression, love or anger.

Here are some methods that will allow you to connect with your feelings:
1. After you have done some stretching exercise, like Yoga, shake your body from head to foot. While you’re shaking, breathe fast and deep for a while and also make sounds such as “Ha”.

2. Sitting in the lotus position, focus on the breath. When you inhale, imagine that you’re entering into you emotions and feelings.

3. If you have a hard time connecting with your emotions and feelings, don’t try to pray for that, it’s not going to work. Imagine a powerful event in your life, which ignited the emotions. Let the feeling develop fully, get into it.

3. Consciousness Mindfulness Meditation, Cittanupassana
Mind is like a wild monkey. It jumps from one place to another place. It repeats the same stuff and now and then it imagines new things too. Mind or consciousness is enigmatic phenomena.

We do have power over it and we don’t. We could try to direct our thoughts and eventually the thoughts would win. We don’t remember how and when we lost concentration.

Thoughts can be both comforting and intrusive. When a thought is comforting, we have more positive thoughts, like fantasies or positive thoughts about ourselves. Sometimes we have negative imagination and dreadful thoughts. Our mind is like traffic. It is congested with familiar and unfamiliar thoughts.

There was a famous Tibetan lama who used to meditate and count his thoughts the whole day. When he had a positive thought, he would pick up a white stone. When he had a negative thought, he would pick up a black stone. First he got only black stones, and gradually all he got were white ones. The black stones represented judgment of the arising thought as being negative. The white stones represented states of non-judgment towards arising thoughts. Remember this story is not about getting rid of bad thoughts, nor keeping good thoughts, rather about becoming aware of the thought process and more and more free of judgment, of liking or disliking thoughts. Eventually one will develop a state when one neither thinks of thoughts as being positive or negative but simply dwells in the pure awareness of thoughts.

What is Consciousness Mindfulness? It is becoming aware of every process of thought, yet not judging nor attempting to capture particular ones or push other ones away. That’s a form of resistance. Thoughts are just thoughts. They’re not good or bad. It is a liberating experience to simply let the thoughts arise without controlling them or preferring one over another. Be a witness of the thought process. Be fascinated by the process of your own thoughts just the way you’re fascinated by the beauty of the setting sun.

Many meditators try to push away negative thoughts. When one tries to stop thoughts, thoughts become intrusive, and neurotic. It is the same as telling someone not to imagine a monkey, but what happens is that one ends up thinking about the monkey.

Don’t fight your mind with your mind, because it’s not a separate entity from you.

Here are a few steps for consciousness mindfulness meditation:
1. After sitting in a comfortable posture, focus on the breath.

2. Keep your mind clear and vigilant, do not let one self feel sleepy or too relaxed which happens during meditation.

3. Let all thoughts arise spontaneously, even if they are sometimes disturbing.

4. Don’t attach or be disturbed by any of them. If you have a thought of saving the whole world or of stealing your neighbours’ cute puppy, don’t judge them.

5. Just laugh when you see all these contradictions of the mind. Then you’ll be liberated from your own thoughts.

4. Phenomena Mindfulness Meditation
If you want to be free from suffering, you must realize reality, the way that things are. There is no way to find salvation or liberation outside. There is no supernatural being or holy man who can grab your hand and take away all your problems right in the moment.

Even Buddha says, “I can only show the path to liberation, but liberation itself depends on you.” Human suffering is a form of nightmare. It does not really exist, as we perceive it. If you inquire about the nature of suffering, where is it? What is it? You will not find its existence outside of yourself. Suffering, pain and sorrow, all of them exist in your own mind. If you are not free from your own mind, you will never find happiness anywhere by escaping from one circumstance and changing to another. Buddha says, “Mind is the creator of everything”. The very cause of happiness and suffering is in one’s own mind. You cannot go beyond anything unless you can cut through the cause in your mind. The cause is known as Ignorance, the lack of understanding of reality. The duality of happiness and suffering, good and bad is created by our own minds. The duality does not exist outside of one’s mind.

Why do we constantly attempt to alter the conditions of life instead of altering our perspective of life? Dharma, in Tibetan Language is called “choo”. Choo means modification. Dharma is a way of modifying one’s mind. When we modify our perspective towards everything, there is no need to fix any situation outside of oneself. We try to make our life perfect and super by desiring a more perfect life-style, career, and relationship. Hope and fear are our main sufferings that dominate our everyday life. Until we go beyond hope and fear, we will relentlessly experience turmoil. Desire to control life is the factor of hope. Fear is the fear of not being able to control it.

First, we need to come to the realization of everything as our mental projection. Then, we have to learn how to be conscious of ourselves, especially the way we react to situations based on our own hope and fear.

The idea of Phenomena Mindfulness is to see the way that things are without distortion, the distortions of our own projections and perceptions. To do that, we have to understand that we are bound by our own delusions and that we react from that point of view. With this awareness we have the perfect means with which to eliminate our conflict and suffering. The moment we are consciously aware of our own delusion, the delusion begins to fade. Under the circumstances we need not try to eradicate our delusion by exerting effort or, so called, “spiritual discipline”. The very reason we do all sorts of spiritual practice, such as meditation, yoga and different forms of exercise, is to become conscious of our own delusions and neurosis.

Once we become a conscious person, we’re becoming more, an enlightened one, a Buddha. Buddha means awakened one or conscious being, but doesn’t mean one who is completely immaculate and who doesn’t have to go through any process of purification.

When we are able to be mindful of everything around us, we’re able to see clearly the way things are. We see everything as impermanent and transient. We begin to know that there is no reason to be attached to anything in this world, since everything is disappearing in every moment.

We no longer are attached to our thoughts, emotions, life style and relationships. Nothing exists longer than a moment anyway. Attachment comes into being by obsessing with our memory about the past.

Non-attachment is not about being insensitive. It’s a state where we can experience love and joy by not being attached to our internal obscurations.

Here are stages for the Meditation:
1. Hold the intention to let go of all of your attachment to your thoughts and emotions whenever you are ready to practice the meditation.

2. When you have the thought to meditate, just meditate right at that moment, no matter wherever you are or whatever you’re doing, even if you’re fighting with someone on the phone or jumping in the air.

3. Focus on the breath and imagine that the belly is the place where you breathe.

4. Every time you attach to your thoughts or emotions, breathe deeply and focus on that.

5. The moment you get the sense of mindfulness, carry that throughout your entire day with worldly and spiritual activities. 

Tag: Mindfulness Meditation