Go Deeper With Your Mindfulness

 

10.2.2020 GO DEEPER WITH YOUR MINDFULNESS The November 2020 issue of Lion’s Roar magazine features helpful dives into teachings from the Buddha, the world’s first mindfulness instructor. Inside, you’ll find the Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness interpreted by the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, as well as scholar Sarah Shaw explaining how mindfulness, along with ethics and compassion, makes for a complete path—and a good life. Additionally, Melvin McLeod touches on how Buddhism uses mindfulness to develop the wisdom that frees us from suffering. You can access these articles right now if you subscribe to Lion’s Roar magazine and include digital access.   Below, you’ll find three pieces from the Lion’s Roar archive that all speak to the power of mindfulness.  —Ross Nervig, audience engagement editor, LionsRoar.com

The Alchemy of Mindfulness Tara Bennett-Goleman describes how the transforming power of mindfulness can be applied to our painful emotional patterns. ‘‘Each thing has to transform itself into something better,  and acquire a new destiny,” Paulo Coelho writes in his novel The Alchemist. Coelho describes the world as only the visible aspect of God, with invisible spiritual forces at play that remain largely unknown to us. Alchemy occurs when the spiritual plane comes into contact with the material plane. I was given Coelho’s book by a client, who told me, “This reminds me of our work together.” Indeed, alchemy offers an apt metaphor for the process of working with emotions I will describe.

Taking Mindfulness to the Mat Applying the Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness to hatha yoga asanas, says Frank Jude Boccio, can enrich practitioners’ experiences and cultivate awareness of the unity of body and mind. For many practitioners and nonpractitioners alike, yoga has been reduced to, and synonymous with, the postures and movements of hatha yoga. Yet for most of its history, meditation has been the essential aspect of authentic yoga practice. The word “yoga” comes from the root yuj, meaning to “yoke or to harness,” signifying both spiritual endeavor and the state of integration. Buddhism, a bona fide child of the yoga tradition, offers a model of yogic theory and practice, and, like all authentic yoga, is moksha-shastra, a liberation teaching designed to free us from suffering.

A Quick Mindfulness Quiz A buzzword, a hashtag, or something much, much more? Rod Meade Sperry explores the real meaning of mindfulness. “Mindfulness” is such a buzzword now that we might not even quite know what we mean when we say it. Ask yourself: Is it, A) a mind-state; B) a practice, C) a way of life, or — and the difference here is perhaps important — D) a lifestyle? Or might it be E), all of the above? Such questions abound, in part, thanks to all the ways mindfulness has been packaged and presented as it’s gone mainstream in recent years — arguably, some of those ways may not be so good. Some, though, are inarguably good. What’s key, I reckon, is that the motivation behind one’s adoption of mindfulness goes way beyond what it might do for us individually. Ideally, mindfulness helps us to be more at one with everyone, to retain what makes each of us unique while helping us to see through false separation. It helps us mitigate suffering, but not just for ourselves.

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