The Nine Mindful Attitudes
There are many ways to cultivate mindfulness and, teaching and practicing, I’ve learned that truly no two paths are the same. We all have very specific personal challenges to navigate and we have to find our own path. There are some guidelines, however, that could steer all of us in the right direction. Jon Kabat Zinn calls these the nine mindful attitudes. They facilitate practicing mindfulness and they are further reinforced by mindfulness practice.
When you start your mindfulness practice, in order to reinforce it as best as possible, it’s useful to identify your strengths – those attitudes that you already have and that are sufficiently developed. They are your tools, a firm ground to stand on when you experience difficulties in meditation. By reviewing the nine mindful attitudes, you can also see where your next zone of development will be, where to direct your efforts on the meditation cushion, but also in your everyday life. Being more mindful is not a job that’s done in 20 minutes of your daily practice!
Let’s review each of the nine mindful attitudes!
1. Patience
In Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn writes: „It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried.“ To be patient is a superpower. It’s somewhat related to the idea that the Stoics called amor fati, in the words of Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations: „Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.“ Nature operates as a whole and for one thing to begin, another one has to end. We may not understand the rationale behind it, but there always is one. Patience is holding that insight.
All this, of course, sounds well and poetic, but to accept that to which „fate“ binds us is not an easy thing to do. When you sit down to meditate and you sit expecting bliss and calm, and „fate“ binds you to anxiety or difficult memories – what is there to love? The answer is simple: the reality of our present experience, because that is the only experience we could possibly have right now.
2. Letting Go
Letting go is maybe the most used and abused word in our mindful community. We know we’re meant to let go everything and we propose letting go as solution to most of our problems. Difficult thoughts? Oh well, just let go! Anger? Simple – let go! Anxiety? Leg go, what else?!
Letting go is giving up clinging. I propose that we might understand the notion better if we use a different phrase. Instead of letting go, think about letting be. Letting go is not going to make anything magically disappear. Difficult thoughts or anger or anxiety will still be there when you „let go“, you just won’t be as attached to them. Another way to let go in meditation itself is to greet your expriences with „not me, not mine“.
Through careful observation (and some journaling, hopefully!), you can begin to understand how to direct your personal growth by noticing what you cling to. When we become „sticky“, unwilling to let go, it’s good to note the topic: work, relationship, etc. We cling to what scares us.
3. Non-Judging
If you have even 5 minutes of experience on the meditation cushion, you know that judging is pretty much the default activity of our minds. It seems like we evaluate everything we do and a good part of what other people do. Has it ever happened that you get lost in thoughts during meditation, you catch yourself and instead of simply re-directing to your breath, you tell yourself something like: „I’m a failure!“ – as if one can be a failure at being aware!
As Jon Kabat-Zinn points out, „we tend to see things through tinted glasses“. As a constructivist I can acknowledge that he makes a meaningful observation, but I’m highly skeptical that we can see the world in any other way except through glasses of some sort. The great Chilean biologist and philosopher, Humberto Maturana, said: everything said is said by someone. In other words, there is no objective point of view, because every point of view is somehow tinted.
Once we give up the pretense of objectivity, non-judging becomes something else entirely: awareness that our mind tends to label things, but these labels are in no way intrinsic properties of said things but box our mind puts them in, trying to create order in the mess of things. Judging is just that: creating order based on what we know about the world, what our lived experience and cultural conditioning gave us and what we did with what was given to us.
We can approach non-judging through two steps in everyday life:
(a) First deliberation: Is this thing in my control?
(b) If no, then whatever judgement we make about it brings us nothing. If yes, then the next question is: having my intention in mind, what is a useful course of action?
This way, we don’t judge things as either good or bad, we look at our actions and aim to make them wholesome. We stick to our values, but not because they are objectively true, but because they are the best we can do to live a good life right now.
Non-judging in meditation is the process of observing our minds classify things and then understanding that this classification has very little to do with how things actually are.
4. Non-striving
Non striving is detailed in another blog. Here, it’s sufficient to say that in meditation, we sit and aim for nothing but awareness. In a world that constantly tells us that we must be productive, non-striving is a refreshing lesson in just being.
Non-striving sharpens our senses. When don’t have to run anywhere. We don’t just look, but we can really see. We can discern properly because our minds are still.
In a sense, non-striving is the closest thing we can get to being ourselves, when we strip away all the “should” and “musts” and “have tos” that drive us in life.
5. Acceptance
Acceptance is seeing things as they are for us in the present moment. We deconstruct them to their basics, look at things directly without flinching. As Marcus Aurelius writes:
“How important it is to represent to oneself, when it comes to fancy dishes and other such foods: ’This is the corpse of a fish, this other thing the corpse of a bird or a pig.’ Similarly, ’This Falnerian wine is just some grape juice,’ and ’This purple robe is some sheep’s wool dyed in the juices of shellfish.’ When it comes to sexual union, we must say, ’This is the rubbing together of abdomens, accompanied by the spasmodic ejaculation of a sticky liquid.’ How important are these impressions which reach the thing itself and penetrate right through it, so that one can see what it is in reality.”
Acceptance is not about giving up on our values or our goals. Acceptance is looking at the path ahead. If we really want to change something about ourselves, we can’t do it intentionally or sustainably if we don’t accept things as they are for us right now.
6. Beginner’s Mind
Beginner’s mind is approaching the world with fresh, childlike eyes. If acceptance is seeing things as they are for us, beginner’s mind sees beyond that, it looks at things and sees them with curiosity, without the “knowing” that prevents us from knowing differently. A convoluted sentence, I know, but consider this: a religious person might see thunder in an opportune moment as an omen, a scientist as a random discharge of electricity. Both could possibly call each other close-minded.
George Kelly calls this constructive alternativism, the idea that everything can be seen in infinitely many ways, all different, all original, all fresh.
When we cultivate the beginner’s mind, we try to see beyond our conventional, habitual reality. Think of it as looking for shapes in clouds: a cloud can be a face, but it can also be a rabbit, but then, maybe not – it’s actually a potted plant. That’s the nature of reality, always mutable, always in motion. Developing beginner’s mind allows us to be in tune with it.
7. Trust
Trust is a tough one. It means having faith in yourself. Having faith in your ability to discern, in your senses – ultimately, in your body. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it like this:
Trust is a feeling of confidence or conviction that things can unfold within a dependable framework that embodies order and integrity. We may not always understand what is happening to us, or to another, or what is occurring in a particular situation, but if we trust ourselves, or another, or we place our trust in a process or an ideal, e can find a powerful and stabilizing element embracing security, balance, and openness within the trusting which, in some way, if not based on naivete, intuitively guides us and protects us from harm or self-destruction.
To some, this comes easily and they move through life with ease and confidence. Others struggle with trust. They may struggle to trust other people if they’ve been hurt, but they may also struggle to trust themselves. When we experience trauma or struggle with an illness, trusting our bodies can be a long, difficult journey.
8. Gratitude
Gratitude is showing appreciation for what is. Understanding that, for things to be as they are, a billion things had to align in just the right way.
Cultivating gratitude slowly shifts our entire mindset. We can suddenly see both sides of the medal: the good and the bad and do so in a balanced light. Then we can choose: can I use this adversity to grow or treat it as the end of the road? Research, in fact, backs this up: people who show more gratitude also show fewer avoidance tendencies and don’t tend to see the world in either all black or all white.
9. Generosity
Through a psychological lens, generosity is a vehicle for self-observation and not just an exercise in giving. Like all the other mindful attitudes, it’s also a practice, not an intellectual exercise.
Generosity is not only about giving to others, it’s also a practice of giving to ourselves. When we encounter resistance to both, there’s a deeper lesson to be learned: what am I not willing to accept? How do I feel unworthy?
Devoting time to practice mindfulness and doing so with regularity is an act of generosity, it’s a gift of awareness, of being. When you feel the need to skip a meditation session, here’s a chance to practice generosity: what is stopping me from being generous to myself right now?
