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decisions in the preceding hours (decision fatigue). All of
these will weaken self-control and make us more likely to act
thoughtlessly.
At certain times we simply don’t have the cognitive capac-
ity to think straight, any more than we can drive safely when
we’re drunk. We can try hard to perform well, but no amount
of effort or worry or need or coffee will bring us up to scratch.
When we become mindful that we are a liability to ourselves,
we need to restrict our activity to tasks that are simple and
routine, or just go to bed. This retreat from activity would not
be a failure of will—it would be a decision to act wisely instead
of foolishly.
MINDFULNESS HAS MULTIPLE PURPOSES
Mindfulness is not a free-floating state of mind, a pure aware-
ness, or mirrorlike consciousness. “To pay attention” is a tran-
sitive verb: it always has an object and it interacts with it. We
have to focus our attention on something, and the consequent
interaction is for a purpose. The flavors of mindfulness differ
immensely according to what we focus on and what our pur-
pose is. Let’s now look at how different objects and purposes
shape our understanding of mindfulness.
The “Man in the Street”
To an ordinary person in everyday life, being mindful means
paying attention to what one is doing. The object is invariably
an action and the purpose is to avoid mistakes and improve
performance. It is also mindfulness directed outwardly rather
than inwardly.
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The Monk
The Buddha said that we should pay attention to the body,
emotions, states of mind, and thoughts, but he omits action
from this list except when it is unavoidable. A monk is trying
to bring all thought and action to a halt, not improve them.
This is mindfulness directed inwardly for the purpose of physical stillness and emotional detachment.
The Professional Athlete
In the West, attentional training has been most fully devel-
oped in sports, the performing arts, and the military. A soccer
player, for example, has to focus both inwardly, monitoring
arousal, muscle tone, and energy, and focus outwardly as well.
He learns to flexibly switch attention from inner to outer, and
from single-point focus to wide-angle focus as the moment
requires. This is high-quality, high-energy attention for the
purpose of winning. A person can make a lot of money out of
well-trained mindfulness.
The Mother
Any good mother learns to focus well on her child’s physical
and emotional behavior, and on her own response to that.
She’s not interested in serene detachment (like the monk) or
in winning (like the football player). Her goal is closer to that
of the ordinary man in the street: good daily functioning.
The Soldier
Learning to self-monitor and pay attention has been integral
to military training for centuries. In the Far East we see it in the
close links between the samurai and Zen. A sniper needs very
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low arousal and muscle activation while also remaining vigilant.
His goal is to kill without getting killed. Conversely a soldier
in the field needs the ability to pace himself under pressure.
Soldiers can pay the supreme price if they are distracted when
it matters. Being mindful is not just a baby-boomer indulgence.
The High-Stakes Specialist
Many people such as doctors, pilots, or operators of machinery
have to develop sustained, self-monitoring attention as part of
their professions, or catastrophes can occur in an instant. This
is another high-stakes form of mindfulness.
The Psychologist
A psychologist will see mindfulness primarily as a therapeu-
tic tool. Her goal will usually be to help another person lower
arousal, enhance self-control, and better manage thoughts and
moods.
The Student
Long before the psychological bandwagon took off, mind-
fulness was promoted as an essential metacognitive skill for
students. Attention is critical for any kind of learning, from
babyhood onward. We have to be able to “hold something in
mind” for long enough to store it in memory.
The Connoisseur
People who deeply enjoy music, art, movies, travel, nature,
or other pleasures will have given a lot of high-quality atten-
tion to them over the years. The object of their mindfulness is
beauty. Their purpose is delight.
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The Contented Person
Sustained, uninterrupted attention is essential for states of
deep pleasure and “flow.” Social scientists now speculate that
frequent flow states in one’s life are good indicators of subjective
well-being, while the absence of flow correlates with depression.
Conversely, it is almost impossible to feel good if one’s mind is
constantly scattered, distracted, restless, or confused.
MINDFULNESS IS DOMAIN-SPECIFIC
These kinds of mindfulness all involve attention, but this is
not readily transferable from one activity to another. You don’t
want your surgeon to be in a state of serene monastic detach-
ment. Empathy and affection are ideal for a mother, but not
for a soldier. The intense point focus of a sniper will not nec-
essarily help you raise a toddler. Nor can a mindful mother
instantly switch to being a mindful soldier or a mindful nun.
Skills are invariably domain specific. Each skill comes
embedded with different physiological markers, emotional
tones, learned behaviors, and values. A surgeon needs
strong sustained point focus. A mother needs wide-angle
trouble-shooting attention. A meditator wants a low-arousal,
low-muscle-tone state with minimal awareness of the envi-
ronment. An athlete needs high arousal, constantly
modulated muscle tone, and strong environmental awareness.
Learning any skill is time-consuming, so we naturally
select what seems most profitable to us personally. A mind-
ful person such as a meditator is likely to have specialized in
focusing on one kind of object (the body) for one kind of pur-
pose (mental calm). She may not even be aware of other pos-
sibilities. Even after reading this book, I am sure that many
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readers will continue to think of mindfulness as referring to meditation alone. So which of these is “real” mindfulness?
I hope this survey shows you that the uses of mindfulness
can be much more diverse than you may have expected. The
concept of mindful action doesn’t have to be squeezed all
into one
box.
MINDFULNESS FOR ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
Mindfulness keeps us out of trouble, but it is also essential if
we want to improve what we do. Mindfulness is often incor-
porated into sports and military training. Top athletes con-
sciously develop a wide range of attentional skills. A team
player needs to be able to switch from a tunnel-visioned, spot-
light focus (for instance, when making a shot) to a wide-angle
fluid attention (when sensing what is happening on the whole
field). We also have to switch our attention from narrow to
wide when we leave the computer or a book, and attend to our
children or our friends.
An athlete needs to be able to mobilize what is called “pre-
paratory attention.” This is when he stops, clears his mental
space, and imagines a few seconds ahead to a desired outcome.
Likewise, in everyday life we need to learn how to put aside a
previous task and psychologically prepare for a new one.
A good athlete is able to turn his level of arousal up or
down as required. He can recognize when he needs max-
imum arousal and when he can mentally cruise (if the ball
is far away). High arousal sustained for too long will make
him brittle and jumpy. This is when athletes choke. Low
arousal, on the other hand, leads to boredom and distraction.
Similarly, we need to recognize the signs of mind-numbing
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anxiety (high arousal) or a severe lack of interest in what we are doing (low arousal).
All of these attentional skills are essential for the conser-
vation of physical energy. With poor self-monitoring, an ath-
lete will run out of juice before the end of the game, and so
will parents and office workers. Athletes are frequently taught
attentional skills to help them avoid this. Nonspecialists like
the rest of us tend to haphazardly learn them as required over
a much greater range of activities, but the process is similar.
Sati, the Buddhist word for “mindfulness,” literally means
“memory.” If we do something on automatic pilot we forget it
immediately. If, however, we pay good attention to a task for
just a few seconds, it gets a foothold in what is called “working
memory.” If we do that task particularly well or badly it then
gets stored for future reference.
The next time that we do that task, a faint functional
trace of that memory returns. It reminds us how to do the
task better or how to avoid the same mistake again. This is
how the sportsman gradually improves a maneuver and how
we improve our performance in a vast range of social and
practical skills. We learn to do things well by recognizing,
acknowledging, and remembering our mistakes. Educators
call this “error-based learning.” Mindfulness as a kind of
self-monitoring, or metacognition—that is, thinking about
thinking—enhances these positive outcomes.
Because meditation emphasizes stillness, “just watching,”
and nonreactivity, we can easily forget that it is a skill like
any other. It is training in not reacting. We have said before
that the four foundations of mindfulness are more accurately
translated as “training disciplines.” The Sutta itself contains
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thirteen exercises, each of which is designed to be practiced individually until they are all well consolidated in memory.
Learning any skill requires intelligent self-criticism, but we
tend to assume this doesn’t apply to meditation. A medita-
tion model of passivity and nonjudgmental acceptance, an
attitude of “just being, not doing” and “nothing to achieve,”
is now far more dominant in meditation than it was in the
Buddha’s time.
HOW TO BE MINDFUL IN ACTION
To be mindful of something means to consciously perceive
and evaluate it. We can train ourselves to be mindful of our
actions by asking two simple questions: “What am I doing?”
and “How well am I doing it?” These few seconds of percep-
tion and evaluation have the potential to improve an action or
ameliorate any bad outcomes on the spot.
It is good to check what we are doing as we do it—psy-
chologists call this “supervisory attention.” It is even better
if we look back over what we’ve just done—called “retrospec-
tive attention.” For example, we can ask: “What did I just do?
How well did I answer that question or drive through that
intersection or process the emails? Was it adequate?” This
metacognitive monitoring helps to remember good and bad
performances for future reference.
To reliably improve our performance, we need to make
these assessments consciously and repeatedly. Top athletes
in training can commonly describe what they have just done
with great accuracy and in the appropriate technical lan-
guage. As the Buddha said, you are mindful if you know what
you are doing and can describe it to yourself.
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Let’s now be more systematic. If we want to, we can
become mindful in a flash. We simply have to ask, “What I
am I doing?” and “name” that action. The next question is “Is
this worth doing? Yes or no?” When we consider the matter, it
is usually perfectly obvious either way. This evaluation leads
to the response. If the answer is “no,” we stop doing it. If the
answer is “yes,” a new question arises, namely, “Can I do this
more efficiently?” Let’s now streamline all the above into the
following mindfulness exercises.
NAME THE ACTION
One way to improve your actions at any moment is to just ask
yourself: “What am I doing?” Then “name” it: it could be driv-
ing, shopping, reading a magazine, eating breakfast, surfing
the web, or whatever.
Then ask: “Is this worth doing at all?”
If it isn’t, you drop it. If you judge it to be worthwhile, you
ask: “How well am I doing this? Could I do it better?”
Let’s now go a step further. It is useful to regard thinking as a
kind of virtual, miniaturized action, a mental playacting that
falls just short of observable behavior. Fundamentally, there
is little difference between the questions “What am I doing?”
and “What am I thinking about?” except that the latter is more
subtle. This leads into the next exercise.
NAME THE THOUGHT
This time the sequence goes as follows. When you realize
you are mentally confused, just ask: “What am I thinking
about?”
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Then “name” it: work, money, getting fat, Angelina Jolie, the tennis tournament, what the president just said.<
br />
Next ask: “Is this worth thinking about at all?”
If it is, you ask: “Could I think about this more produc-
tively?”
If it isn’t, you drop it and ask: “What shall I switch
my attention to now?”
Mindfulness of action typically happens on the run. We
crank up our mindfulness levels as required while doing
something. These quick exercises in making conscious
choices about our actions and thoughts take next to no time
at all. I do dozens of these self-monitoring exercises each day.
Of course this doesn’t look anything like a Standard Medi-
tation Practice. I’m not sitting down for twenty minutes focus-
ing on my breath. I’m not even particularly calm or relaxed.
I’m just more focused and present than usual. So does this
mean that mindfulness of action is not “real” mindfulness?
Do you still feel that you have to do formal meditations to
“really” get into the perfect mindful state that psychologists
and popular writers talk about?
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10
A Journey into
Open Monitoring
In 1984 I did a seven-month retreat in a tiny hut high on a moun-
tainside in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. My hut was fif-
teen minutes’ walk above a small retreat center, which was itself
fifteen minutes above a dead-end valley road about twelve miles
from the nearest village. Each Wednesday afternoon I hauled my
week’s supplies up from the road, and I usually spent that eve-
ning with my girlfriend in her hut nearby. Otherwise I enjoyed
six days of total isolation each week—just me, the possums, and
the wild pigs. The panoramic views extended eighty miles to the
east, and I never saw or heard any other human activity.
So what did I do each day? Seven or eight hours of sitting
practice, some yoga, housework, and long walks. I got up
about 2 or 3 am and sat until the first spark of sunlight cut
the eastern horizon. I usually had a late-morning sleep and a
midafternoon sleep, and went to bed about 10 or 11 pm.
For the first month or two, I did various Tibetan practices,
including the first half of the so-called foundation work,
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also known as “training in the preliminaries.” This involved doing 108,000 full-length prostrations complete with mantra, visualization, and philosophical speculations. However,