Comment 27 on Mindfulness

Hi Changent, good to have you here on Ned and thanks for your comments.

You've prompted me to take part! I don't think I've participated in this thread of Linda's previously, except for giving the odd point, but I feel I must respond to your comments.

Firstly, I would agree that mindfulness is about being not merely conscious of what is going on in the mind but "fully aware".

However, I doubt that this is the full purpose of mindfulness. I take mindfulness as something fairly active and social that we need to work at - certainly not something as passive and intrinsically unrelated to others as you seem to imply when you say:

Isn't mindfulness more about simply allowing the awareness of whatever thinking and feeling might be going on?

I see it as having something to do with treating people not simply with due respect, but with the fullest respect. Because if we are sufficiently mindful, we will see that everyone requires and receives (though not necessarily deserves) our fullest attention. We need to aim to treat everyone as a VIP - a very important person.

When I think I'm am being most mindful, I like to think that the VIP stands for Vigilance, Industry and Patience - these being the three key active ingredients that I think we add to a basic all-encompassing goodness that I believe is built into all of us, if only we can be passive enough to accept the implications that this must inevitably have for our lives.

Mindfulness, as I see it, therefore is about

being vigilant to past experiences (and learning from it); being vigilant to all our perceptions of the present moment (being alive to every nuance of our moment-by-moment experience); and being vigilant to future events (by anticipating and shaping them)
being industrious at all times to ensure that we maximise opportunities for being vigilant, to act on the messages our being vigilant evokes and not to be easily deterred from this task
being patient - but not in the passive sense of procrastinating or 'putting off being active until later on'. The active meaning of Patience (coming directly from the Latin root meaning suffering or allowing) is about consciously and purposefully sticking to our mindful intentions no matter what difficulties this may create for us. Not blindly or obstinately sticking to them because we are unwilling to admit in the face of experience that we must wrong, but because we mindfully believe them still to be right.

That's my take anyway.