Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Extending the Benefits of Mindfulness beyond Sitting

Mindfulness, I declare, is useful everywhere.

—Buddha

Mindfulness may be one of the most important things you can ever learn in your life. But don’t take it from me. Here’s what William James, the father of modern psychology, had to say:

And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.¹(emphasis by original author)

There you have it. Mindfulness is the skill that gives you the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, and as William James said, it is “the education par excellence,” the best thing you can learn. I hope that makes you feel better about spending money on this book.

In the previous chapter, we learned that mindfulness meditation is a key tool in developing emotional intelligence. In this chapter we will learn ways to extend mindfulness into every aspect of our daily lives. The mind of calmness and clarity you experience while sitting in mindfulness meditation is very nice, but it only becomes life changing when you can bring up that mind on demand, in day-to-day life. This chapter shows you how. I hope that makes you feel really good about spending money on this book.

“May I be excused from class? I’ve lost my mind.”

In General, Generalize Mindfulness

One of the most important things a mindfulness meditator needs to do is extend the benefits of mindfulness beyond sitting into every part of life. During sitting meditation, you may experience some degree of calmness, clarity, and happiness, and the challenge is to generalize that mind into life situations outside formal sitting meditation.

The good news is the benefits of mindfulness training are already naturally generalizable or, put another way, easily incorporated into all areas of our lives. For example, your attention naturally gravitates toward things that are either very pleasant or very unpleasant, so if you can train yourself to keep your attention on something as neutral as your breath, then you can keep your attention on anything else. Your breath is like New York City for your attention—if your attention can make it here, it can make it anywhere. Hence, if you become very good at settling attention on breathing, you may find yourself able to pay much better attention in class or at meetings. Renowned meditation teacher Shaila Catherine told me that after she learned to meditate intensely during college, she never received any grade below an A.

That is the good news. The better news is there are things you can do to make your mindfulness training even more applicable to other areas of life.

There are two areas in which you can naturally and immediately start to integrate mindfulness. The first is to extend from mindfulness at rest to mindfulness during activity. The second is to extend from self-directed mindfulness to other-directed mindfulness. If you like, you can think of it as extending, or generalizing, mindfulness along two dimensions: one from rest to activity and the other from self to others. In the following few sections, I will suggest exercises for each.

Mindfulness in Activity

The best place to practice mindfulness is in daily life. Once you are able to bring mindfulness into every moment of daily life, your quality of life may change dramatically. Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates this beautifully with his description of the simple experience of walking:

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.²

When in mindfulness, even the simple experience of walking on earth can be a beautiful miracle.

In my own experience, mindfulness can increase my happiness without changing anything else. We take for granted many of the neutral things in life, such as not being in pain, having three meals a day, and being able to walk from point A to point B. In mindfulness, these become causes of joy because we no longer take them for granted. In addition, pleasant experiences become even more pleasant because our attention is there to fully experience them. For example, a delicious meal when consumed in mindfulness becomes more enjoyable simply because you put your full attention into enjoying the meal. When living in mindfulness, neutral experiences tend to become pleasant, and pleasant experiences become more pleasant. There is no cost or downside (nor down payment). What a great deal.

Once, when I was quite young, my father took the family to an expensive Chinese restaurant and ordered some of the signature dishes. During the meal, I caught myself giving the experience my full attention, partly because the meal was indeed very tasty, partly because it was so expensive, and partly because I considered it a fairly rare experience. It wasn’t every day that we splurged on food. Because of all that, I found myself deep in mindfulness during the meal. And then it occurred to me, why did I have to be this mindful only during expensive meals? What if I pretended that every meal was rare and expensive, and gave it as much attention as I could? I call it the Expensive Food Meditation. I have been practicing it at most meals ever since, which is kind of ironic since I eat most of my meals at Google and food at Google is free.

If you have no other practice but sitting, the mindfulness will eventually grow into daily life and give you a no-cost, zero-down-payment happiness boost. However, you can accelerate this generalization process by purposefully bringing mindfulness to activity. The simplest way to do it is to bring full moment-to-moment attention to every task with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back. It is just like sitting meditation, except the object of meditation is the task at hand rather than the breath. That is all.

For those who prefer a more formal practice, the best such practice I know of is walking meditation. The nice thing about formal walking meditation is that it has the dignity, focus, and rigor of sitting meditation, but it is done in motion and necessarily with eyes opened (otherwise, it will become bumping-into-people-and-things meditation), so it is highly conducive to bringing the mental calmness of sitting meditation into activity. In fact, this is such a useful practice that in many formal meditation trainings, students are asked to alternate between sitting and walking meditation.

Walking meditation is really as simple as it sounds. When walking, bring full moment-to-moment attention to every movement and sensation in the body, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back.

WALKING MEDITATION

Start by standing still. Bring attention to this body. Become aware of the pressure on the feet as they touch the ground. Take a moment to experience this body standing on the ground.

Now, take a step forward. Lift one foot mindfully, move it forward mindfully, plant it down in front of you mindfully, and shift your weight to this foot mindfully. Take a short pause, and do it with the other foot.

If you like, when lifting your foot, you may repeat silently to yourself, “Lifting, lifting, lifting,” and when moving and planting your foot forward, you may repeat silently to yourself, “Moving, moving, moving.”

After taking a number of steps, you may wish to stop and turn around. When you decide to stop, just take a few seconds to become mindful of your body in a standing position. If you like, you may repeat silently to yourself, “Standing, standing, standing.” As you turn around, do it mindfully, and if you like, you may repeat silently to yourself, “Turning, turning, turning.”

If you wish, you may synchronize your movement with your breathing. When lifting your foot, breathe in, and when moving and planting your foot, breathe out. Doing this may help inject calmness into the experience.

You do not have to walk slowly when doing walking meditation; it can be done at any speed. This means you can do walking meditation every time you walk.

For myself, I do it every time I walk from my office to the restroom and back. I found mindful walking to be restful for the mind, and a relaxed mind is conducive to creative thinking. Hence, I find this very useful for my work, which often requires some creative problem solving, so every time I take a restroom break, my mind gets the opportunity to rest into a creative state. Problems often get solved in my mind during my restroom breaks. (Yes, I seem most productive during breaks, so maybe my employer should pay me to take breaks. Boss, I hope you are reading this.)

It is advantageous for us that pacing is accepted in our culture. It means you can do walking meditation any time of the day, and people will think you are just pacing. You do not even have to wait for restroom breaks to do walking meditation.

Dog-Walking Meditation

Other-Directed Mindfulness

A beautiful way to practice mindfulness, which is almost guaranteed to improve your social life, is to apply mindfulness toward others for the benefit of others. The idea is very simple—give your full moment-to-moment attention to another person with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time your attention wanders away, just gently bring it back. It is just like the meditation we have been practicing, except the object of meditation is the other person.

You can practice mindful listening either formally or informally. The formal practice involves creating an artificial environment for one person to speak while another listens mindfully. The informal practice is to listen mindfully to another person and generously give him or her the space to speak during any ordinary conversation.

FORMAL PRACTICE OF MINDFUL LISTENING

In this exercise, we will practice listening in a way that is different from how we usually listen.

We will do this in pairs, with a family member or a friend, each person taking turns to be the speaker and the listener.

Instructions for the speaker: This will be a monologue. You get to speak uninterrupted for 3 minutes. If you run out of things to say, that is fine; you can just sit in silence and whenever you have something to say, you may continue speaking again. The entire 3 minutes belong to you, you can use the time in whatever ways you want, and know that whenever you are ready to speak, there is a person ready to listen to you.

Instructions for the listener: Your job is to listen. When you listen, give your full attention to the speaker. You may not ask questions during these 3 minutes. You may acknowledge with facial expressions, by nodding your head, or by saying, “I see,” or “I understand.” You may not speak except to acknowledge. Try not to over-acknowledge, or you might end up leading the speaker. And if the speaker runs out of things to say, give her the space for silence, and then be available to listen when she speaks again.

Let us have one person speak and one listen for 3 minutes and then switch over for another 3 minutes. After that, have a 3-minute meta-conversation, in which both of you talk about what this experience was like for you.

Suggested topics for the monologue:

• What are you feeling right now?

• What is something that happened today that you want to talk about?

• Anything else you want to talk about.

INFORMAL PRACTICE OF MINDFUL LISTENING

When a friend or loved one is speaking to you, adopt a generous attitude by giving this person the gift of your full attention and the gift of airtime. Remind yourself that because this person is so valuable to you, he or she is entitled to all your attention and all the space and time needed to express himself or herself.

As you listen, give your full attention to the speaker. If you find your attention wandering away, just very gently bring it back to the speaker, as if he or she is a sacred object of meditation. As much as possible, try to refrain from speaking, asking questions, or leading the speaker. Remember, you are giving him or her the valuable gift of airtime. You may acknowledge with facial expressions, or by nodding your head, or by saying, “I see,” or “I understand,” but try not to over-acknowledge so as to not lead the speaker. If the speaker runs out of things to say, give him or her space for silence, and then be available to listen when he or she speaks again.

When we do formal practice in class, the most common feedback is people really appreciate being listened to. We often do the formal exercise at the beginning of our seven-week Search Inside Yourself course, in which most participants start out not knowing each other. We frequently hear people telling us right after this exercise, “I got to know this person for six minutes, and we are already friends. Yet there are people who have been sitting in the next cubicle for months, and I don’t even know them.” This is the power of attention. Just giving each other the gift of total attention for six minutes is enough to create a friendship. My friend and fellow Search Inside Yourself teacher, the Zen master Norman Fischer said, “Listening is magic: it turns a person from an object outside, opaque or dimly threatening, into an intimate experience, and therefore into a friend. In this way, listening softens and transforms the listener.”³

Our attention is the most valuable gift we can give to others. When we give our full attention to somebody, for that moment, the only thing in the world that we care about is that person, nothing else matters because nothing else is strong within our field of consciousness. What can possibly be a more valuable gift than that? As usual, Thich Nhat Hanh put it most poetically: “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”⁴

If there are people in your life you care about, be sure to give them a few minutes of your full attention every day. They will bloom like flowers.

“I’m getting his full attention all right, but I don’t think I’m blooming.”

Mindful Conversation

We can extend mindful listening into the extremely useful practice of mindful conversation. This practice came to us from our friends in the legal community and is especially useful in mediation. Specifically, master mediator Gary Friedman taught it to Zen master Norman Fischer, who in turn taught it to us at Google.

There are three key components to mindful conversation. The first and most obvious one is mindful listening, which we have already practiced. The second is something Gary called “looping,” short for “closing the loop of communication.” Looping is simple. Let’s say there are two people involved in this conversation—Allen and Becky—and it is Allen’s turn to speak. Allen speaks for a while, and after he is done speaking, Becky (the listener) loops back by saying what she thought she heard Allen say. After that, Allen gives feedback on what he thought was missing or misrepresented in Becky’s characterization of his original monologue. And they go back and forth until Allen (the original speaker) feels satisfied that he is correctly understood by Becky (the original listener). Looping is a collaborative project in which both people work together to help Becky (the listener) fully understand Allen (the speaker).

The third key component to mindful conversation is something Gary called “dipping,” or checking in with ourselves. The main reason we do not listen to others is that we get distracted by our own feelings and internal chatter, often in reaction to what the other person said. The best way to respond to these internal distractions is to notice and acknowledge them. Know that they are there, try not to judge them, and let them go if they are willing to go. If feelings or other internal distracters decide to stay around, let them be and just be aware of how they may affect your listening. You can think of dipping as self-directed mindfulness during listening.

Dipping is also useful for the speaker. As the speaker speaks, it is useful for her to dip and see what feelings arise as she is speaking. If she likes, she may talk about them, or if she prefers, simply acknowledge them, try not to judge them, and let them go if they are willing to go.

Our class participants often ask how we can give our full attention to somebody speaking and dip at the same time. The analogy we give is peripheral vision. When we are looking at something, we have central vision and peripheral vision. We can see the chosen object clearly (with central vision), and at the same time, we have a visual sense of what is around it (using peripheral vision). Similarly, we can think of our attention as having a central component and a peripheral component, so we can give our central attention to the other person for listening and still maintain a peripheral attention to ourselves for dipping.

You can practice mindful conversation either formally or informally. The formal practice involves creating an artificial environment for each person to practice the three techniques of listening, looping, and dipping. The informal practice is simply to use those techniques in everyday conversation.

FORMAL PRACTICE OF MINDFUL CONVERSATION

The three parts to this skill are listening, looping, and dipping. Listening means giving the gift of attention to the speaker. Looping means closing the loop of communication by demonstrating that you have really heard what the person is saying. Do not try to remember everything: if you really listen, you will hear. Dipping means checking in with yourself, knowing how you are feeling about what you are hearing. Part of the practice is becoming able to give full attention to the speaker, with full awareness of your own feelings.

Instructions

Part I: Monologue

Person A speaks in monologue for 4 minutes. When you are speaking, maintain some mindfulness on your body (this is the dipping part). The entire 4 minutes belong to you, so if you run out of things to say, you can both sit in silence, and when you have something else to say later, you may just say it.

Person B listens. Your job is to give your full attention to the speaker as a gift, while at the same time maintaining some mindfulness on your body (this is again the dipping part). You are giving him the gift of your attention, without losing awareness of your body. You may acknowledge, but do not over-acknowledge. You may not speak except to acknowledge. Part II: Resolution

After that, B repeats back to A what she thinks she heard. B may start by saying, “What I heard you say was…” Immediately after, A gives feedback by telling B what he feels B got right or wrong (for example, what she missed, what she misrepresented, etc). Go back and forth until A is satisfied that he is completely understood by B. Do this for as long as it takes, or until 6 minutes are up. (This is the looping part).

Then we switch places, so B gets to be the speaker and A the listener.

After the exercise, spend 4 minutes in meta-conversation discussing the experience.

Some suggested topics for conversation:

• Your self-assessment. Your impressions of yourself, what you like, what you want to change, etc.

• A difficult situation that happened recently or a long time ago that you want to talk about.

• Any other topic that is meaningful to you.

You can think of the informal practice of mindful conversation as the stealthy version of the formal practice. You do not have to tell your friend, “Hey, I want to try out this practice I read from a really nice book, so I’m going to loop you and dip myself.” That may be awkward. Instead, you can just say, “What you say sounds important. To make sure I understand you correctly, I would like to repeat to you what I think I heard. Let me know if my understanding is correct. Is that okay for you?” Most likely, your friend will really appreciate that because you are taking the time and trouble to listen and to understand him or her correctly. In making this request, you are implicitly demonstrating that you value and respect your friend.

This is very beneficial for relationships.

INFORMAL PRACTICE OF MINDFUL CONVERSATION

You can practice mindful conversation during any conversation, but it is most useful when communication is at an impasse, for example, in a conflict situation.

The three parts to this skill are listening, looping, and dipping. Listening means giving the gift of attention to the speaker. Looping means closing the loop of communication by demonstrating that you have really heard what the person is saying. Dipping means checking in with yourself, knowing how you are feeling about what you are hearing.

Begin with mindful listening (see Informal Practice of Mindful Listening). Give the speaker the gift of your attention without losing awareness of your body. If any strong emotion arises, acknowledge it and, if possible, let it go. After the speaker is done expressing her views, make sure you fully understood by asking for permission to repeat back what you heard. You may say something like, “What you say sounds important. To make sure I understand you correctly, I would like to repeat to you what I think I heard. Let me know if my understanding is correct. Is that okay for you?” If the speaker says yes, repeat back what you heard and then invite the speaker to let you know what you understood correctly or incorrectly. After the speaker offers her input, repeat her corrections in your own words to make sure you understood those correctly. Repeat this process until the speaker is fully satisfied that she is understood.

After demonstrating that you understood the speaker, it is your turn to speak. If you are comfortable doing so, you may explain the looping process and respectfully invite the other person to participate if she wants to. You may say something like, “I want to make sure I do not miscommunicate anything, so if it is okay with you, after I speak, I’d like to invite you to let me know what you heard. Shall we do that?” If the other person accepts the invitation, you may apply the looping process.

Sustaining Your Practice

We have discussed mindfulness practices for developing a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time, and practices for extending that mindfulness into everyday situations. The keyword is practice. Mindfulness is like exercise—it is not sufficient to just understand the topic; you can only benefit from it with practice.

As an instructor, I found it fairly easy to get people started on mindfulness practice. I usually just need to show them the brain science, explain the benefits, introduce a short two-minute sitting, and voilà, people get it. That is the good news.

The bad news is after the first few days, many people find it hard to sustain the practice. Many of us start the first few days with great enthusiasm, committing ourselves to ten or twenty minutes a day of this wonderful practice, but after that initial enthusiasm, it starts to feel like a chore. You sit there bored and restless, wondering why time goes by so slowly, and then after a while, you decide you have more important and/or interesting things to do, such as getting stuff done or watching cats flush toilets on YouTube. And before you know it, you have lost your daily practice. One person who has a funny way of describing this state is the Tibetan meditation master His Eminence the Very Venerable Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (but hey, call him Mingyur, he insists). Talking about himself as a very young beginner, he said, “Although I liked the idea of meditation, I didn’t like the practice of meditation.”

How can we sustain a mindfulness practice?

Happily, the difficulty of sustaining a mindfulness practice often lasts only a few months. It is like starting an exercise regime. The first few months are usually really hard—you probably have to discipline yourself into exercising regularly, but after a few months, you find your quality of life changing dramatically. You have more energy, you suffer fewer sick days, you can get more stuff done, and you look better in the mirror. You feel great about yourself. Once you reach that point, you just cannot not do it anymore. The upgrade in quality of life is just too compelling. From that point on, your exercise regime becomes self-sustaining. Yes, you probably still have to cajole yourself into the gym every now and then, but it becomes fairly easy.

It is the same with sustaining a mindfulness practice. You probably need some discipline in the beginning, but after a few months, you may notice dramatic changes in quality of life. You become happier, calmer, more emotionally resilient, more energetic, and people like you more because your positivity emanates onto them. You feel great about yourself. And again, once you reach that point, it is so compelling, you just cannot not practice anymore. Yes, even a seasoned meditator needs to cajole herself onto the cushion every now and then, but it becomes fairly easy and habitual.

So how do you sustain your practice up to the point it becomes so compelling that it is self-sustaining? We have three suggestions:

1. Have a buddy: We learned this from Norman Fischer, whom we jokingly call the Zen abbot of Google. Once again, we use the gym analogy. Going to the gym alone is hard, but if you have a gym buddy with whom you commit to going, you are much more likely to go regularly. This is partly because you have company and partly because this arrangement helps you encourage each other and hold each other accountable (what I jokingly call mutual harassment).

We suggest finding a mindfulness buddy and committing to a fifteen-minute conversation every week, covering at least these two topics:

• How am I doing with my commitment to my practice?

• What has arisen in my life that relates to my practice?

We also suggest ending the conversation with the question, how did this conversation go? We instituted this in Search Inside Yourself and found it very effective.

2. Do less than you can: This lesson came from Mingyur Rinpoche. The idea is to do less formal practice than you are capable of. For example, if you can sit in mindfulness for five minutes before it feels like a chore, then do not sit for five minutes—just do three or four minutes, perhaps a few times a day. The reason is to keep the practice from becoming a burden. If mindfulness practice feels like a chore, it’s not sustainable. Yvonne Ginsberg likes to say, “Meditation is an indulgence.” I think her insight beautifully captures the core of Mingyur’s idea.

Do not sit for so long that it becomes burdensome. Sit often, for short periods, and your mindfulness practice may soon feel like an indulgence.

3. Take one breath a day: I may be the laziest mindfulness instructor in the world because I tell my students all they need to commit to is one mindful breath a day. Just one. Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled; everything else is a bonus.

There are two reasons why one breath is important. The first is momentum. If you commit to one breath a day, you can easily fulfill this commitment and can then preserve the momentum of your practice. Later, when you feel ready for more, you can pick it back up easily. The second reason is creating the intention to meditate is itself a meditation.

This practice encourages you to generate an intention to do something kind and beneficial to yourself daily, and over time, that self-directed kindness becomes a valuable mental habit. When self-directed kindness is strong, mindfulness becomes easier.

Remember, one breath a day for the rest of your life. That is all I ask.

Lightness and Joy in Meditation

When I was new to meditation, I struggled with the simplest and silliest of all problems: I could not breathe. I mean, I could take in air and all during the normal course of the day, but when I tried consciously bringing my attention to my breath, I could not breathe properly. I was trying too hard.

One day, I decided I was going to stop trying hard. I was just going to sit, smile, and take note of my body while I sat, that was all. After just a few minutes of doing that, I fell into the state where I became alert and relaxed at the same time. And then I caught myself breathing normally. That was the first time I was able to pay attention to my breath and breathe properly at the same time. Only by not trying did I finally succeed. If I were a TV character, I would have looked up at the sky at that moment and sarcastically said, “Very funny.”

In a humorous way, meditation is like trying to fall asleep. The more relaxed you are, the less you are fixated on the goal, the easier it becomes, and the better the outcome. The reason for this is that meditation and falling asleep have one important feature in common: they both rely on letting go.

The better you are at letting go, the better you are at both meditating and falling asleep. That is why many meditation teachers tell their students to have no expectations about their practice, because being fixated on outcomes interferes with the letting-go mind. I think this approach is correct, but it creates a vexing problem: if people have no expectation of benefits, why would they want to practice at all?

The best solution I know was suggested by Alan Wallace: “Have expectations before meditation, but have no expectation during meditation.”⁵ Solved. Simple, elegant solutions like this one warm the hearts of little old engineers like me.

Having a relaxed mind is very useful in meditation. Relaxation is the foundation of deep concentration. When the mind is relaxed, it becomes more calm and stable. These qualities in turn strengthen relaxation, thus forming a virtuous cycle. Paradoxically, deep concentration is built upon relaxation.

A similar mechanism works in the practice of mindfulness. I found lightness to be highly conducive to mindfulness. Lightness gives rise to ease of mind. When the mind is at ease, it becomes more open, perceptive, and nonjudgmental. These qualities deepen mindfulness, which in turn strengthens lightness and ease, thus forming a virtuous cycle of deepening mindfulness.

This insight suggests that a really good way to practice mindfulness is using joy as an object of meditation, especially the type of joy with a gentle quality that doesn’t overwhelm the senses. For example, taking a nice walk, holding hands with a loved one, enjoying a good meal, carrying a sleeping baby, or sitting with your child while she is reading a good book are great opportunities to practice mindfulness by bringing full moment-to-moment attention to the joyful experience, to the mind, and to the body. I call it Joyful Mindfulness.

The first effect of bringing mindfulness to joyful experiences is they become even more enjoyable, simply because you are more present to enjoy them—extra enjoyment at no additional cost. More importantly, I found this mindfulness gain to be generalizable. That means if you practice and strengthen mindfulness during joyful experiences, that gain in mindfulness infuses other experiences as well, so you end up with stronger mindfulness in neutral and unpleasant experiences too. (Having fun as a meditation, what a great deal!)

Having said that, it is important to note that Joyful Mindfulness is best practiced as a complement to, not a replacement for, formal sitting practice. Formal practice requires you to bring mindfulness to neutral experiences like your breath, and because attention naturally gravitates away from neutral experiences, that mindfulness gain is a lot more generalizable. So comparing formal sitting to Joyful Mindfulness, you find that the former gives you better mindfulness gain, but unfortunately, requires discipline, and discipline is a scarce resource. In contrast, Joyful Mindfulness gives you less mindfulness gain but is far more sustainable. Plus, it is fun, and nobody can argue with fun—I know I can’t. Hence, you can think of Joyful Mindfulness as the first gear of a car: it can easily move the car, but if you only use the first gear, you cannot go fast. In contrast, think of formal sitting as the higher gears: it is harder to get a stationary car to move using those gears, but they are the ones that get you good speed and mileage.

These two practices turn out to complement each other very well. Doing both practices every day is like making use of the full set of gears in your car: you can start the car moving smoothly and get a good speed.

More importantly, after a while, your formal meditation may be infused with a powerful quality known in Sanskrit as sukha. The most common translations for sukha are “bliss,” “ease,” and “happiness.” In my opinion, the best translation of sukha is its most technical translation: “non-energetic joy.” Sukha is a quality of joy not requiring energy. It is almost like white noise in the background, something that is always there but seldom noticed. There are two important implications of sukha’s non-energetic quality. The first is that it is highly sustainable because it does not require exertion of energy. The second is that because it does not require energy, it is so subtle that it takes a very quiet mind to access, like a soft background hum that is audible only when nobody in the room is talking loudly. What that means is you need to learn to quiet your mind to access sukha, but once you become skillful at doing that, you have a highly sustainable source of happiness that does not require sensual input. Talk about life changing.

Almost all seasoned meditators I know arrive at sukha at some point in their meditative careers. However, my own experience suggests that Joyful Mindfulness accelerates sukha in formal sitting. I theorize that practicing Joyful Mindfulness got my mind accustomed to ease, humor, and lightness, thus allowing it to connect with sukha more readily during formal practice. That sukha then quietly infuses my daily life and makes daily experiences a bit more joyful, thereby increasing the frequency and intensity of joyful experiences that I can use for Joyful Mindfulness practice. And thus, another happy, virtuous cycle is formed. Joyful Mindfulness works great by itself, but it becomes very powerful in combination with formal mindfulness practice.

Mastering Both Focused and Open Attention

There are two complementary qualities of physical fitness: strength and stamina. To be a well-rounded athlete, it is good to have both. Similarly, there are two complementary qualities of attention: focused attention and open attention. To be an accomplished meditator, it is good to be strong in both.

Focused attention is an intense focus on a chosen object. It is stable, strong, and unwavering. It is like sunlight focused with a lens shining intensely on a single point. It is like a solid piece of rock, majestically unmoved by the distraction of the wind. It is a mind like a closely guarded royal palace where only the most honored guests are allowed to enter and all others are courteously but firmly turned away.

Open attention is a quality of attention willing to meet any object that arrives at the mind or the senses. It is open, flexible, and inviting. It is like ambient sunlight, lending itself to anything and everything. It is like grass, always swaying gently in the wind. It is like water, willing to take on any shape at any time. It is a mind like an open house with a friendly host, where anybody who walks in is welcomed as an honored guest.

The good news is when you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are training both focused attention and open attention at the same time. (Two for the price of one!) That is because mindfulness meditation includes both components. There is the element of moment-to-moment attention that you keep bringing back, which trains focused attention. There is also the element of non-judging and letting go, which trains open attention. Hence, if you only do mindfulness meditation, you will be just fine.

Having said that, however, we found it very useful for our participants to experience the difference between them and to acquire the tools to emphasize training of one or the other if they so choose. The exercise we created is similar to circuit training that some athletes use. Circuit training is a combination of high-intensity cardio and resistance training in the same session. One common way to do it is for trainees to run around a track (cardio) and then stop to do push-ups (resistance), and then run around the track again, and then stop to do sit-ups (resistance), and so on. Trainees alternate between cardio and resistance training, hence developing both strength and stamina at the same time.

In the same way, our circuit training starts with a focused attention exercise for three minutes, and then we go to an open attention exercise for three minutes, and so on. We usually do this for twelve minutes, plus two minutes each of resting the mind on the breath at the beginning and at the end. Here are the instructions we use.

MEDITATION CIRCUIT TRAINING

Let us begin by sitting comfortably in a position that enables you to be both relaxed and alert at the same time, whatever that means to you.

Let us rest the mind. If you like, you can visualize the breath to be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it.

(Short pause)

Let us shift into focused attention. Bring your attention to your breath, or any other object of meditation you choose. Let this attention be stable like a rock, undisturbed by any distraction. If the mind is distracted, gently but firmly bring the mind back. Let’s continue this exercise for the remainder of 3 minutes.

(Long pause)

Now we shift into open attention. Bring your attention to whatever you experience and whatever comes to mind. Let this attention be flexible like grass moving in the wind. In this mind, there is no such thing as a distraction. Every object you experience is an object of meditation. Everything is fair game. Let us continue this exercise for the remainder of 3 minutes.

(Long pause)

(Shift to focused attention for 3 minutes. Then shift to open attention for 3 minutes.)

Let us end this sitting by resting the mind. If you like, you can again visualize the breath to be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it.

(Long pause)

Thank you for your attention.

There are a few important features common to both focused and open attention. These features are also common with the original mindfulness meditation we practiced earlier.

The first feature is strong meta-attention (attention of attention). This is because in either meditation, you maintain clear awareness of the movement (or non-movement) of your attention. Hence with enough practice, meta-attention can be strong whether in moving mind (open attention) or still mind (focused attention). The second feature, closely related to the first one, is clarity and vividness of attention. In either meditation, attention can be maintained at high clarity. The analogy is a good torchlight, which can be equally bright whether you shine it at one spot or move it around the room.

The third feature is both meditations require a balance of effort and relaxation. In either case, too much effort makes it tiring and unsustainable, while too little effort causes you to lose your grip on your attention. The classical analogy for this balance is having just the right tension on the strings of a sitar. If the strings are too tight, they break easily, but if they are too loose, they cannot produce beautiful notes. So the strings need to be in the “Goldilocks zone” of being not too tight and not too loose.

I suggest one fun way of maintaining this balance is to play it like a video game. When playing a game on the Xbox, it is most fun when the difficulty setting makes the game just difficult enough to be challenging but not so difficult that you will lose every time. So I like to start a game at a beginner setting and increase the difficulty as I get better at it. We can play the same way in meditation, especially because we get to control the difficulty setting. Initially, we can make the game easy. For example, we can tell ourselves, “If I can sit for just five minutes, and I can maintain a solid attention on my breath for ten continuous breaths anytime during these five minutes, I win!” If you can beat the game at this difficulty setting, say, 90 percent of the time, you can increase the difficulty setting for more fun. Once again, the key is to create just enough difficulty to be challenging, but not enough to discourage you. One funny thing I discovered about playing this game is after I became quite good at it, the lowest difficulty setting became really fun. That setting for me is, “Just rest my mind for ten minutes, in an alert sort of way.” That’s it, just rest. I like it so much that I still play at this setting a lot in between days when I play the more challenging games. It is a game in which the easiest setting never gets boring.

“I got you this book on mindfulness meditation instead of an Xbox. It’s just as fun!”

The final feature, closely related to the third feature, is that in either meditation it is possible to get into a very good state of ease and flow. When you are engaged in an activity you are very good at, such as skiing, dancing, or writing code, and if you are in a state where your full attention is on the activity and it is fun, easy, and sufficiently challenging at the same time, then you may get into a state of flow in which you are performing at your best yet your mind is at ease. Similarly, with enough practice, it is possible to become skillful at playing with attention and getting into a state of flow when it feels fun and easy at the same time, just by sitting. Very cool.

Zen and a Walking Baby

One of the best analogies I have ever come across for meditation practice is a baby learning to walk.

I remember my daughter taking her first step when she was about nine months old. One beautiful step. One step was all she could manage before she would fall, in the über-cute way that only babies can fall. (Everybody say, “Awwwww.”) Eventually, she graduated from one step to two steps. And then she plateaued for a while. For a couple of months, she could walk no more than one or two steps before she would fall. (Awwwww.) Then a few days after her first birthday, I noticed her walking four steps. That same day, she doubled that achievement and maxed out at eight steps. (Yes, I measured—I’m an engineer.) The next day, she seemed to plateau at eight steps, but in the late afternoon, she managed sixteen steps before she fell. In the evening, she exceeded thirty steps. Once she broke that barrier, she could walk. On that day, she mastered walking. (Awwwww.)

I found an important similarity between that experience and my own meditation practice. There seem to be two stages in one’s meditation progress. I call the two stages “initial access” and “consolidation.” The initial access stage is when you find yourself able to access a certain state of mind, but you cannot maintain that mind for very long. For example, you may serendipitously find yourself in a state of mind where you are very calm and alert, and feel a deep sense of joy permeating your mind, but after just a few minutes, you lose it. This stage is like a baby taking her very first step. The baby is finally able to access the experience of walking. She finally knows what it feels like, but it only lasts a single step, maybe two, and then it is over.

The consolidation stage is the long process of going from walking one step to being able to walk around the house. For a meditator, it is becoming able to bring up a state of mind on demand, at a desired intensity and duration. Progress in this stage seems to be an exponential function that looks like a hockey stick on a graph, which means that you go for a frustratingly long time seemingly without any meaningful progress, and then suddenly—boom—within a very short period, you make huge progress and arrive at full consolidation. It’s like my daughter plateauing at two steps for months and then suddenly, in the space of two days, becoming able to walk. To the casual observer, it may look like she learned to walk in just two days, but in reality, she did it over three months. It is her constant practice over three months that enabled the last two days of sudden progress and mastery.

I think the lesson to be learned is to avoid feeling discouraged when your meditation does not seem to be progressing. If you understand the process, you may understand that when change does come, it will come suddenly, and every moment of effort brings you a little closer to that point. The classical analogy is ice breaking up on a frozen lake. To a casual observer, the breakup seems like a sudden phenomenon, but it is actually due to a long period of gradual melting of the underlying ice structure. In Zen, we call it gradual effort and sudden enlightenment.

So the next time you see a baby learn to walk, pay some attention. That baby is really a Zen master teaching you a thing or two about progress in your meditation. (Everybody say, “Awwwww.”)

“She’s very advanced.”