(guitar music)
- And so I tend to offer this quite
like simple definition of mindfulness
of this nonjudgmental moment-to-moment awareness.
Sometimes you'll see these like long paragraph descriptions
of mindfulness as a definition
or the eight points or nine points of mindfulness,
which can be very helpful,
but to help people digest it in the beginning,
I think it's helpful to kind of boil it down
into its essence of this nonjudgmental
moment-to-moment awareness.
And some teachers will call it loving awareness.
Um.
You'll hear different interpretations of this,
but I tend to say it's nonjudgmental
moment-to-moment awareness.
And the nonjudgmental piece
trips a lot of people up
because it's kind of easy to concentrate
on what's exactly happening in your experience
but can you do it without judgment?
Can you do it without labeling it to be right or wrong,
good or bad, whether it should be different?
And so this non-judgment piece is the heart of mindfulness
because when we refrain from judgment,
we do that with the heart.
Judgements tend to disconnect us
from the experience and actually take us
out of the unfolding experience as it's happening.
Now, when I say non-judgment,
I don't mean non-discerning
or analytical.
What I mean is this sort of harsh criticism,
this, um,
disconnecting quality where,
oh that's wrong or that's bad, or
um, it should be different.
So that's kinda what I'm pointing to
with this non-judgemental word.
And we can cultivate non-judgment
by practicing
practices like loving-kindness,
compassion,
and self-compassion,
joy,
equanimity,
gratitude,
generosity,
and forgiveness.
Qualities of the heart,
and I'm sure this conference has had plenty of sessions
based around some of those practices that I just mentioned,
around the heart, heart cultivation.
So those practices are not peripheral to mindfulness.
They're actually baked into mindfulness
by helping us to cultivate the sense of
connection and non-judgment.
The moment-to-moment piece of mindfulness,
this ability to stay present moment to moment
to moment to moment to moment
is born out of our ability to concentrate and to focus,
to stay with what's happening,
even if it's unpleasant
or boring.
Can we stay present,
stay open, and continually notice what's happening?
So concentration practices
include
mantras,
um,
visual concentration objects, where, or meditations,
where we're concentrating on one visual object
at the exclusion of everything else,
and just staying with that one thing.
There's auditory meditation practices
where we're just listening to one thing
or maybe a repetition of something over and over
and just staying with those sounds.
Counting breaths
is a
concentration practice.
So these concentration practices
um, are not exactly mindfulness practices,
but they can fuel our ability to stay mindful,
in daily life or in a mindfulness meditation.
And so with mindfulness,
we are staying present for whatever's in our experience,
moment to moment to moment without judging it.
So we're just continually, continually noticing
what's in our actual experience.