The Foundations of Mindfulness Practice
~ by: Jon Kabat-Zinn
There are 7 factors that constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.
These attitudes are to be cultivated consciously when you practice. They are not independent of each other. Each one relies and influences the degree to which you are able to cultivate the others. Working on any one will rapidly lead you to the others. Since together they constitute the foundation upon which you will be able to build a strong meditation practice of your own, we are introducing them before you encounter the meditation practices themselves so that you can become familiar with these attitudes from the very beginning. Once you are engaged in the practice itself, this will merit rereading to remind you of ways you might continue to fertilize this attitudinal soil so that your mindfulness practice will flourish.
Mindfulness is cultivated by paying close attention to your moment-to-moment experiences while not getting caught up in your ideas, opinions, likes, and dislikes.
Patience if a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that things must come to fruition in their own time.
Developing a beginner's mind teaches us this truth: No moment is the same as any other, each is unique and contains unlimited possibilities. This process prevents us from getting stuck in our own expectations based on past experiences.
Developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings is an integral part of mindfulness meditation. You can't be someone else, you can only become more fully yourself. The more you cultivate self-trust the easier it will be to see the basic goodness in others.
Almost everything we do in this life is to get something or somewhere. But meditation has no goal other than for you to be present and be yourself. Mindfulness allows us to back off from striving and allows us to accept things as they really are.
Acceptance means seeing things as they actually are in the present. Often acceptance is reached only after we have gone through the emotions of denial and anger. In cultivating acceptance we take each moment as it comes, being with it fully, without imposing our own ideas, feelings, or wishes upon it.
Creating the attitude of letting-go or non-attachment is fundamental in the practice of mindfulness. When we start paying attention to our experiences, we discover that we want to hold on to certain thoughts, feelings, and situations. Letting go is a way of letting things be, of accepting things just the way they are. We just watch, resting in awareness. Letting go is not such a foreign experience. We do it every night when we fall asleep. So now we just need to practice applying this skill with our waking situations as well.
