Mindfulness is both a basic power of mind and an intentional practice. It is the universal capacity of mind to be aware, focus, and use its natural intelligence. It is present not just in us but in all beings.
Mindfulness is also a specific meditation practice that cultivates and develops our innate mindfulness. We train our mind by intentionally practicing nonjudgmental awareness of whatever is happening, moment by moment, inside and outside of us. This stabilizes and focuses our mind, increasing its power and clarity.
This simple but profound practice brings us more calm, understanding, happiness, and well-being. Today, millions of people are enjoying the benefits of a regular mindfulness practice. They find it reduces their stress, improves their health, increases their resilience, and helps them enjoy life more.
These are real and important benefits, and for many mindfulness practitioners they are enough. But many of us long for more and want to take the next step on our mindfulness journey.
The good news is that mindfulness can be the complete path we are looking for. As a complete path, mindfulness gives us practical and powerful tools to work with our mind to become more aware, insightful, ethical, loving, and connected. It can transform every important aspect of our lives and help make the world a better place.
Having played a historic role in introducing millions of people to basic mindfulness practice, now is the time for the mindfulness movement to take the next step. While many mindfulness teachers already talk about things like ethics and compassion, it is time to explicitly expand and deepen how the mindfulness path is defined, practiced, and lived. Offering mindfulness as a complete path will make it more impactful and potentially attract many more people who are looking for practical, positive ways to live that are available to anyone.
To me, there are five important parts of the path of complete mindfulness. Practiced together, they are the way to a happy, meaningful life and a better world.
What Is The Complete Path of Mindfulness?
1. Mindfulness Meditation: Train Your Mind to Change Your Life
The foundation is our mindfulness meditation practice. The rest of the path flows naturally from the stable, awake, and discerning mind we develop.
2. Insight: The Power of Seeing Reality Clearly
By applying the strong, focused mind we have cultivated, we see the true nature of ourselves and our world. We develop wisdom and ease the suffering and stresses caused by misunderstanding the reality of our own nature and what we experience.
3. Ethics: Living Our Values
We discern what is good and what is harmful so we can live a life that benefits ourselves, others, and society. With ethics as our guide, we live our values in our daily life, in our livelihood, and in our roles as citizens, consumers, and activists.
4. Love and Compassion
Mindfulness opens the heart as well as the mind. It deepens and expands our natural kindness and compassion, the secret to a joyful, beneficial life and a more caring world.
5. Community: The Healing Power of Connection
It is our connection to others that gives our lives happiness, growth, intimacy, and support. From those closest to us to all beings, our connections and communities make life—and the path—complete.
As a path, these five work together organically to help mindfulness meditators deepen their practice and extend its benefits to all parts of their life. I use the word “path” here, but that could be misleading. This is not a path in the sense of a spiritual path (although it could be that if we want). It’s a path in the sense that life itself is a path or journey. The path of mindfulness is simply a path of life, one that anyone can follow and benefit from, no matter what their belief system.
It is also not a path that we follow step by step in a certain sequence. Yes, it starts with mindfulness meditation and the insight it naturally develops, but these five are practiced—lived, really—simultaneously. At different times we may focus more on one or another, but they’re always working together and supporting each other to help us lead a happy and meaningful life.
The interesting thing is that none of these five is inherently religious or spiritual, even mindfulness. Of course, many people do approach them from a spiritual point of view. In my case, my approach to them is informed by my long practice as a Buddhist. But they are not inherently Buddhist, or Christian, or even spiritual, for that matter. Awareness, wisdom, ethics, compassion, community—these are practical, universal aspects of a happy, meaningful life and a good human society.
There is something important about mindfulness that makes it different from most other paths. Mindfulness is about who we really are, who we already are. Mindfulness is not about trying to improve ourselves, or change ourselves, or building a new and better self. It’s about cultivating the human nature we already have. It’s about training the mind we already have.
This makes mindfulness different from philosophies, whether religious or secular, that see people as fundamentally flawed and seek to make us better or more complete, that see unhappiness as our inescapable lot. Instead, the path of mindfulness is based on a hopeful, positive view of ourselves and our lives. Yes, the world is filled with suffering we cause ourselves and others. This is undeniable. But we can lead lives that are happy, meaningful, and beneficial. We can make the world a more caring and peaceful place. We have all the resources we need. We have methods that work.
Trusting in that, we embark on the five-part path of complete mindfulness.
Mindfulness Meditation
Anything can be a mindfulness practice because we can be mindful of anything. But there is a basic practice that most people think of when they talk about mindfulness.
Sitting in a good posture, upright but relaxed, we gently focus on our breath going in and out. When we become distracted, we simply return to awareness of the breath, without judging or criticizing ourselves. It’s that simple, yet it’s the start of a path that changes our lives.
We can think of this foundational practice as exercise for our mindfulness muscle, as a way to cultivate and strengthen our innate awareness. It trains our mind in two important ways.
First, by returning again and again to the breath when we get lost in thoughts of the past or future, we train the mind to be in the present, where real life is. It’s only here, in the present, that we can see reality clearly, experience the joy and goodness of ourselves and our world, and heal and grow as human beings.
Second, by not criticizing or judging ourselves when we stray from the present, we start to develop the power of clear, nonjudgmental awareness. After some practice, we can experience anything that arises—inside and outside of us, positive and negative—with this accurate, unbiased, clear mind. This is the most important power we develop in mindfulness practice, and it is key to the entire path.
With the basic practice as the foundation, our mindfulness can go wider and deeper. Popular ways to practice mindfulness include mindful walking and mindful eating. But really, everything can be done mindfully, from work to art to sex. Experiencing what we experience, not judging it as good or bad, we can make anything we choose into a mindfulness practice.
We can also go deeper into the practice. In this issue, mindfulness and self-compassion expert Shauna Shapiro offers us a science-based, multidimensional view of mindfulness practice. She identifies three key components—intention, attention, and attitude—that make our practice work. At a deep level, mindfulness engages all parts of our being.
Insight
The idea of insight into the true nature of reality can sound pretty abstract, but it is incredibly helpful in our lives. To see how, let’s look at Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which is considered the birth of the secular mindfulness movement.
To help people dealing with chronic pain, stress, and other suffering, MBSR suggests they look closely at what they are experiencing and see what they discover about its true nature.
When they do that, patients see that the stress and pain they are suffering is always changing. It is not fixed or solid, and neither is the self that is experiencing them. These insights help people find relief, calm, and resilience. They know that what they are suffering is not as strong or permanent as they thought. They get some distance from their pain and don’t identify with it as much.
This is a concrete example of how insight helps free us from the stress, struggle, and suffering caused by misunderstanding the reality of who we are and what we experience. The problem is that our normal, untrained mind has a hard time seeing reality clearly. Unstable and distracted, it can’t sustain its focus on anything long enough to penetrate its true nature. Its perceptions are clouded by its own judgments, biases, and preconceptions.
The great power of the trained mind we develop in mindfulness practice is that it can look deeply and accurately into the reality of things. Because our mind is stable, awake, and unbiased, we can examine and understand the true nature of what arises within us and what we experience outside of us.
What might we discover when we look clearly at the world around us?
First of all, we see that everything is always changing. Some things change quickly, others very slowly, but they’re all changing all the time. Of course, we know that at an intellectual level, but we habitually experience the world around us as solid and fixed. Our insight into the reality of change cuts through that misperception.
When we look at our world with a focused, aware mind, we also see that things are impermanent. They have no permanent, solid core, identity, or essence. We see that they are not separate from each other—that all things are interdependent in a great web of causation. Everything is caused by other things, and in turn is the cause of other things. Nothing exists independently or creates itself.
Then when we look inside ourselves—at our thoughts, feelings, opinions, sense of self—we find the same realities. We see that these mental events are transient, interdependent, and like the self that experiences them, without a solid core or essence. We may even glimpse a more open, fundamental level of mind, one whose awareness and basic well-being are untouched by passing troublesome thoughts and other challenges of life.
As Gullu Singh says in this below, one of the most important insights we gain is into the root causes of happiness and unhappiness. We see that we suffer and struggle when we think of ourselves—falsely—as unchanging, solid, and isolated. But when we experience ourselves as fluid, open, and intimately connected with all things, there is joy, peace, and lightness in our lives. Because we are not separate, there is harmony between ourselves and the universe.
The surprising news is that this insight arises naturally from our mindfulness practice, even if we don’t intend it to. Of course, it’s more effective to make the development of insight a conscious practice, but once our mind stabilizes and focuses through mindfulness, we naturally look at ourselves and the world through that lens. We can’t help but develop insight, and from that flow ethics, compassion, and the rest of the path. The fact is that once we take that first mindful breath, we step onto the complete path.
Ethics
We all want to do good—I believe that is the essence of who we are as human beings. The challenge is discerning what is good and what is not.
Too often we mistakenly think something is good when actually it is harmful to ourselves and others. On the other side of the coin, we may think something is negative when in reality it is good. It’s particularly a problem when our judgment is based on our perceived self-interest. So often, “what is good” really means “what is good for me.”
That’s why discerning what is really in our self-interest, what truly leads to a happy and meaningful life, is so important. Misunderstanding what actually brings us happiness—and what doesn’t—is at the root of so much conflict and suffering. We may mistakenly define our self-interest in superficial, us-against-them ways like success, prestige, and wealth that ultimately don’t make us happy. But when we have insight into what really makes our life happy and meaningful—things like compassion, connection, love, and peacefulness—we see there is no conflict between what benefits us and what benefits others. What truly makes me happy makes you happy, and vice versa. What is good is good for everybody.
That’s why it is so crucial to discern the ways to live in this world that benefit everyone—ourselves and others. Then, based on insight into the real causes of happiness and suffering, we can develop effective ethics to guide our lives.
Ethics make our deep longing to do good a practical reality. They help us live our values in our daily life, in our work, and in our roles as consumers, citizens, and activists as we strive for a more just, caring, and sustainable society.
Ethics are less a collection of rules than the natural expression of our inherent good hearts and our insight into what is beneficial in any situation. Ethics are not only negative—not just a bunch of thou-shalt-nots. They are as much about right ways to live as wrong ways. Moment by moment, they help us live our deepest values and to notice when we’re not. They are our daily guide to a life that is good for ourselves and others.
Love and Compassion
Mindfulness is about more than the mind. It is about the heart, too. It is about opening to our natural love and compassion.
This starts with mindfulness practice itself. Mindfulness is based on looking at ourselves without judging or criticizing. In that sense we are neutral in our observation, but that doesn’t mean being cold or indifferent. Mindfulness only works if we have a friendly and compassionate attitude toward ourselves. How else can we accept ourselves and what we are going through in life? How else can we face ourselves honestly?
When someone we care about is suffering, even from problems of their own making, we accept them with friendliness and compassion. How else can we help them? In mindfulness, we give ourselves the same warmth and acceptance. How else can we help ourselves?
So there is heart and compassion in mindfulness practice right from the beginning. Then we expand our self-compassion into compassion for others. We extend our kindness and compassion to those closest to us, and eventually to all beings. That love changes our lives and helps change the world. Here too, the complete path of mindfulness, with all its benefits, is present from the very beginning of the practice.
Community
The path—like life itself—becomes complete in our connection to others, in our communities. This is where mindfulness, insight, ethics, and compassion come together to create places where people can love, learn, and grow together, supporting each other on life’s journey.
As Robert Waldinger points out in his essay in this issue, connection to others is the number one factor in our happiness. Waldinger is director of the famed Harvard Study of Adult Development, which studies people over the course of their whole lives to see what makes them happy. The evidence is clear that the people who have the most connection to others are the happiest.
In each of our lives there are many communities and infinite connections. Our family is a community. So is our workplace. So is our town or city. There are cultural communities, artistic communities, spiritual communities, political communities.
It is in these communities that our own journey and the journey of others come together. Supporting and inspiring each other, communities are where we grow together and do the real work of creating a better society.
The mindfulness movement has been a great success. Now it needs to become such a community. While millions of people practice mindfulness on their own, there are few if any places they can meet, practice together, and inspire each other. Maybe it could start with mindfulness centers in a couple of major cities, places where mindfulness meditators of all orientations could meet and practice together, and grow from there. It is in community that the mindfulness movement will become complete.
In the article that follows, five experts in the mindfulness field explore the different parts of this complete path in depth. They show us how we as individual meditators, and the mindfulness movement as a whole, can take the next step toward a more complete understanding of mindfulness and its comprehensive benefits. We are fortunate to have such wise guides as we take the amazing journey that begins with a single breath.
