AP – To many, New Year’s Day represents the possibility for beginning anew.
Of late, individuals are welcoming the start of another year with a resolution to practice mindfulness, a type of meditation. Many believe mindfulness will help them relax, lessen stress and anxiety, reduce chronic pain and generally improve the quality of their lives – and the research bears this out.
Over the past 40 years, mindfulness has become a popular meditation practice around the world. What began as a practice for relieving suffering has been reframed as a modern science.
Based on the extensive research at universities showing meditation’s benefits, mindfulness is now practiced in schools, government offices, professional sports, prisons, police departments, and the military.
Businesses and corporations have taken note and often advise their workers to practice mindfulness to be more productive. Mindfulness has become so business friendly that it has been called a new “capitalist spirituality”.
I am a scholar of mindfulness, communication and ethics, as well as a longtime meditation teacher. For those who are considering practicing mindfulness this year, I want to return to the roots of mindfulness in order to highlight one aspect of this practice that might be surprising and counterintuitive: Mindfulness means “remembering”.
STAYING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT
According to poet and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, mindfulness is “the heart” of the teaching.
He defines mindfulness as a practice of “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality”. The past is gone, and the future is not yet real. It is only in the present moment that we have any control or freedom.
In the ancient Indian language of Pali, the word now translated into English as “mindfulness” is sati, which is closely related to the verb sarati, “to remember”. But remembering, in this sense, does not mean dwelling on the past or ruminating over bygone events. It means “remembering to come back to the present moment”.
Our culture, which scholar Jenny Odell calls an “attention economy”, has transformed individual attention into a commodity to be bought and sold.
Much of contemporary life is designed to distract us from what is happening right here and right now.
This is especially true of social media, which at its worst is a flood of distracting, disorienting content. Each day presents constant temptations to forget to be present and to lose ourselves in our screens.
Sometimes the hardest thing to remember is to be present. Mindfulness is therefore a practice of remembering to come back home to the now, when there are so many distractions and forces encouraging us to forget.
REMEMBERING WHY YOU PRACTICE
Mindfulness also means remembering why we practice meditation in the first place.
According to practitioners, the reason to practice mindfulness is to overcome suffering in ourselves. The point of mindfulness is not to be more productive at work. The point is not just to relax, either. The point is personal transformation. By cultivating deep, unwavering, honest, openhearted attention, it becomes possible to look deeply at our suffering and to identify its causes.
Once the causes and conditions are identified, then we can work to transform them, so that we suffer less. The less we suffer, the easier it is to meet the present moment – and our lives – with open arms and without adding to the suffering in the world.
Perhaps, if we are sufficiently resolved, we can even relieve some of the world’s suffering. – Jeremy David Engels
