Mindfulness practices are an important for everyone's tool-kit for inner regulation, With mindfulness we grow in emotional awareness, resilience and well being. We humans learn and grow differently. We have evolved to be neurally diverse. So the degree to which we engage with mindfulness, while universally useful, will be unique to each of us.
Mindfulness is not making your mind go blank. Essentially, it is not being distracted. It is being in touch with the vividness of your experience here and now. The here and now of our whole body or somatic body.
This dimension of awareness is wired into each of us but largely derailed by cultural values and ways of being. One of my favorite descriptions of a journey into a vivid experience of the present moment is from Dr. Reggie Ray. He is the founder of Dharma Ocean (dharmaocean.org) and author of wonderful books and courses on meditation/mindfulness.
There are many practices that I experiment with in coaching myself and others. This short and highly edited account is from a very epeience practioner. I hope it will be an inspiration to the reader to join in the journey of caring and playful experimentation. Here Reggie is talking about his teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:
“. . . Rinpoche talked all the time about what he called 'synchronizing mind and body,' I didn't understand it at that time. Nor did I see that synchronizing mind and body was absolutely central to how Rinpoche was teaching us meditation. . . . We would do the same practices over and over and over and over, following the breath, meditating. And there were a lot of insights, and there was a sense of calming down, a sense of being more present in one's life, all of which are very good things. But there wasn't the fundamental transformation that I think in the beginning my generation was really hoping for."
"In 1980 . . . I started doing (a) practice (of) breathing into the body . . . . It totally opened my eyes (to things)…I didn't even suspect were possible in terms of coming into a much more direct experience of the whole journey and understanding the teachings really from a completely different, much more experiential level."
"Subsequently, as my practice evolved and I did some of the more advanced Tibetan practices, I found that these teachings are in our tradition, but they're not given to new people."
"And I went back and studied. I looked more carefully. That was when I came once again and freshly upon this teaching I had been hearing from Rinpoche, which was "synchronizing mind and body,"; it had been under my nose since the beginning. And what does this mean?
"As I’ve been saying, Rinpoche said the 'body-body', our actual somatic experience, already intuitively and instinctively—his terms—reflects exactly how things are. The thinking mind tends to disconnect from that direct experience and go off into its own fabricated, conceptual delusions. When you synchronize mind and body, you bring the conscious, thinking mind back into alignment with “the way things are,” the direct experience of reality. That is what meditation does. . . . It is just so often lost on modern people."
"And what I saw from my own experience was that not only can you give these to new people, you should. Because it helps them catch on much more quickly to what's really involved and what's possible in the path of meditation. From that point onward, I began exploring other traditions and found some very pointed and powerful somatic practices in East Asian traditions such as Ch’an and Zen Buddhism, Qigong and the forest traditions of Theravada that filled in the picture for me of what was possible. And then Indian yoga and finally important Western somatic disciplines including Rolfing, Hakomi, Feldenkreis, and so on. My late friend Malidoma Somé also taught me a lot about the spirituality of the earth and the earth as a realm of awakened energy, although he never called it that."
"For me, all of this was, of course, just shedding light on our present human body and what it means when we are fully present to it: the extraordinary and unique spiritual openings and discoveries...and fundamental transformations that can occur when we 'synchronize mind and body,' as Rinpoche would say.”