Mindfulness has become a popular concept in recent years, but what does it really mean? To understand mindfulness, it is important to understand the four components that make up the practice. The first component of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. This involves recognizing the body as a collection of parts, rather than a solid, unified thing. Practicing mindfulness of the body can be done through various exercises such as yoga, tai chi, and meditation.
The second component is contemplation of feelings. This refers to the affective tone of an experience, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral. In the early stages of contemplation, one simply observes the different qualities of feelings. As practice progresses, a distinction is made between worldly feelings that tend to lead to attachment and spiritual feelings that tend to lead to detachment.
Over time, the focus shifts from the tone of feelings to the process of feeling in oneself. This helps to understand impermanence and nullify greed for pleasant feelings, aversion for painful feelings, and illusion for neutral feelings. The third component is contemplation of the mind, which refers to observing mental states. Mental states can only be distinguished through their associated factors that give them their distinctive color.
The fourth component is attention, which is one of the three main components of mindfulness (including intention and attitude). Attention helps to put experience in context and observe suffering, its cause, its end, and the path to its end. It also helps to deconstruct an emotion into five aggregated components (form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness). The American Mindfulness Research Association defines mindfulness as “the state, process, and practice of remembering in order to observe the moment-to-moment experience frankly and without automatic patterns of previously conditioned thoughts, emotions or behaviors”.
Mindfulness can be cultivated through mind-body practices such as focused attention and open-monitoring meditation.
