Mindfulness has become a popular word these days and everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means, separation of thoughts.
Mindfulness
of the body is the first base of mindfulness. It's about recognizing the body as a body, something that is experienced as a collection of parts, not as a solid, unified thing. Some ways to experience mindfulness of the body include:.Of the four applications of mindfulness, contemplation of the body refers to the material side of existence, the two of the middle to the mental side, and the last to the exploration of experience in a way that reflects the objective of teaching. The four unfold in a defined sequence, starting with the body as the crudest and culminating in the last one, which is the most subtle. Contemplation of the body (kayanupassana) is said to comprise fourteen exercises, but since the last nine are simple variations of a single principle, in practice they number six. The next basis of mindfulness is the contemplation of feeling (vedananupassana).
The word “feeling” here does not refer to emotion but to the naked affective tone of the experience, whether pleasant, painful or neutral. In the early stages of contemplating feelings, one simply observes the different qualities of feelings as pleasant, painful, or neutral. One sees feeling as a naked mental event, devoid of all subjective references, everything points to a “me” experiencing the feeling. As the practice progresses, a distinction is made between whether the feeling is worldly, which tends to attachment, or spiritual, which tends to detachment.
Over time, the focus shifts from the tone of feelings to the process of feeling in oneself, which is revealed as an incessant flow of feelings that arise and dissolve, one after the other, without pause. This marks the beginning of the understanding of impermanence, which, as it evolves, nullifies the greed for pleasant feelings, the aversion for painful feelings, and the illusion for neutral feelings. The third foundation of mindfulness is the contemplation of the mind (cittanupassana), which actually means the observation of mental states. Since the mind itself is only the naked consciousness of an object, mental states can only be distinguished through their associated factors, which give them their distinctive color. 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, and says: “Mindfulness can be cultivated through mind-body practices (such as focused attention and open-monitoring meditation, as well as other intrapsychic and sensory practices) that are based on a demanding mode of awareness that recognizes healthy and unhealthy states of being.
I can put my experience in the context of the Four Noble Truths, observing the emergence of suffering (dukkha), its cause, its end and the path to its end; I can see an emotion simply as one of the five obstacles (desire, aversion, drowsiness, restlessness and doubt); I can deconstruct an emotion into five aggregated components ( form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness). Attention, one of the three main components of mindfulness (including intention and attitude) identified by Dr. The five aggregates expose the constituent factors of experience, with greater attention to mental components.
