The Noble Eightfold Path: Step Seven: Right Mindfulness

Hello, my name is Susan Piver. I'm a writer and long time practitioner and teacher of Buddhism.

I've come to see that many people think of Buddhism and meditation practices associated

with it, like mindfulness, as ways to reduce stress, but I would like to tell you that

the Buddhist path is far more rich than that. It is a way to wake up to become liberated

from suffering. And forget about enlightenment, it's also a way to live your everyday life

more fully and meaningfully. This podcast is to share with you classical Buddhist teachings

that I have found enormously beneficial, and also to tell stories from my own life about

how I applied and misapplied these teachings. And I do want to tell you from my more than

30 years of experience that the Dharma is real, and it provides an extraordinarily nuanced,

profound, and pragmatic guidebook to living a life of wisdom, compassion, and courage.

This episode is about the seventh step on the Noble Eightfold Path, right mindfulness.

These eight steps are what you and I can do not only to stop suffering, which would be

awesome, but to become fully liberated from suffering, aka enlightened, aka qualified

to support others to stop suffering as well. The first six steps on the Noble Eightfold

Path are right view, right intention, right speech, right livelihood, right action,

and right effort. And now we come to the second to last, right mindfulness, as mentioned.

And one of the many interesting things about the Noble Eightfold Path is that none of them

are about fixing yourself, or healing yourself even, or becoming anyone other than who you

already are. These are not necessarily changes that you have to make within yourself, rather

they speak to the way you act in the world. They're a part of a path. They create a journey

that you traverse. In the final two steps, right mindfulness and right meditation, we

return to our inner world. The first two of the Noble Eightfold Path, right view and right

intention, are sort of about the way you rouse yourself, about the way you see the world,

about the foundation of your inner life, which then gives rise to the capacity for the

next four steps, right speech, right livelihood, right action, right effort, when they are rooted

in right view and right intention, the first two, the way you act in the world through your

speech, your livelihood and so forth, become an expression of your path. Now with the final

two on the Eightfold Path, right mindfulness and right samadhi or meditation, we return to

the way we hold our minds within in a very profound way. So I'm sure everybody's familiar

at this point with the word mindfulness. In the last 20 years or so, it has become a part

of our culture to strive for mindfulness, to appreciate the qualities of mindfulness,

to study mindfulness and discover as Western science has that it lowers the stress hormone

cortisol. It helps you get a better night's sleep. It can help you to manage symptoms of depression

and high blood pressure and so on. In other words, it is awesome. It has been scientifically proven.

However, my guess is that the Buddha's explanation of right mindfulness did not include such things.

By the way, I just finished the manuscript of my next book called inexplicable magic meditation

for mystics. It'll be out in the future, not quite sure when yet, but it's self-published so

hopefully soonish. And in the introduction to the book, I was imagining what it must have felt

like for the Buddha to become enlightened, to discover the true nature through the practice of

meditation. And I was trying to further imagine when he went back to his folks to say, hey,

I woke up or whatever he said. He did not lead with, I've discovered a life hack. Let me explain it

to you. I believe he must have said something more like, I've pierced the veil of illusion.

I have seen the true nature. Let me hip you, which is a beatnik way of saying, let me explain it to you.

You could start with the four noble truths. Life is suffering, meaning impermanent.

The cause of suffering is grasping, pretending the first one isn't true. In other words,

the cessation of suffering, because now you know the cause, grasping, to stop doing that. So you

could stop suffering. However, it's not so simple. My friends, perhaps the Buddha said, let me offer

you the fourth noble truth, which is the noble eightfold path. I know a lot of numbers. This is how

you stop suffering, right view, right intention, and so on. And now we come to, as mentioned,

step seven, right mindfulness, which is not about becoming a better leader or achieving any kind

of inner or outer mastery or ceasing to become upset by your sorrows, all of which have somehow

become connected to the word mindfulness in Western culture. So if it's not a life hack,

if it's not a way to solve problems or fix yourself, if it's not a means to an end,

which is almost always how it is presented, what is it? So what I would like to posit is that

the definition of mindfulness, the meaning of mindfulness, the true depth of mindfulness

in all its kaleidoscopic manifestation, is actually contained within the meditation,

practice technique itself. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So in the practice of mindfulness

meditation, which is more accurately called mindfulness awareness meditation, there are three

key aspects. The first is mindfulness of body. You establish a posture. The second is mindfulness of

breath. You let your attention rest on the breath as the object of your attention of your mindfulness.

And the third is mindfulness of mind. You notice the movements of your mind, not to stop them

or change them or perfect them or be all zen about them, but to just enter the stream,

watch it go by, feel it go by, as you station your attention on another object, which in this

case is the breath. Thoughts continue, of course. And within the further definition of mindfulness of

mind is the theory, I would say, of right mindfulness. So when you are meditating, should you be a

meditator, you get your posture, you find your breath, you start thinking about what's for lunch

and what you said 25 years ago. And if only it hadn't happened that way. And my toe itches and all

the things that happen in your discursiveness that are not a problem. And when you get absorbed in

those things instead of your breath, no problem. You notice that you're thinking, you let go of the

thought or thoughts, you gently come back to the breath and begin again. This little formula,

notice, let go, come back, begin again, are the components of right mindfulness. I pause it. I made

this up. So please take it with a grain of salt. Usually in meditation people think, well, I was

supposed to stop thinking, well, yeah, you're supposed to stop thinking one thing. And that is it,

that you're supposed to stop thinking because that's not possible. If you do stop thinking, it's

something that happens on its own, rather than your effort or through your will. In Buddhist

view, mind is considered a sense perception, like eyeballs and earballs and spelling and

casing and so forth. Mind is considered a sense perception as mentioned. And just like eyes and

ears, there's no off switch. You cannot open your eyes, although I invite you to try or hear

through your ears and not see anything. Not hear anything. You can try. Try through your eyes,

or if you're visually impaired, do this through the ears. Open your eyes. Try not to see anything.

You're going to pause here to let you really try. Not possible. Not necessary. Same with your mind.

That is how hard it is to tell your mind to shut up. There's no off switch. And if your meditation

becomes about battle with your mind stream, it's going to be you zero mind stream one all the time

because it just happens and it is no problem. So it is in establishing a different kind of relationship

to our minds that we discover a deeper meaning of mindfulness, not through the more conventional

definitions of mindfulness, which are fine, but include things like focusing, concentrating,

one-pointedness, love those things, really good valuable things. But on the noble eightfold path,

right mindfulness includes, but extends far beyond, the capacity to focus, which is obviously

a really important and great thing. So let's look at the components of meditation in the way we work

with our mind as our definition of right mindfulness. So the first step in your practice is what we

could call precision. It's a very specific technique with room for modifications for your particular

body and so on. But the technique is very simple. Mindfulness of body, mindfulness of breath,

mindfulness of mind, period. If you try to throw anything else in there, like let me think positive

thoughts or go on an inner journey of some kind, it's going to become very confusing and noisy in

there. So I want to keep it very simple, very focused, very precise, which is expressed mainly

through mindfulness of mind and placement of attention on breath. Anything that is not breath

in this practice, which includes thinking and feeling and sensations and anything that is not

breath. In our practice we go, oh, thinking, let me come back to my chosen object, which is the breath.

So very, very focused, one pointed precise. The second quality that is required and

roused through our meditation practice is called openness. We relax with ourselves as we are.

We don't try to stop thinking. We simply notice what we're thinking. And if we are thinking a lot

of scary, horrible, anxiety-provoking thoughts, see that, feel it. Let go of it, come back to the

breath. Happens again, boom, no problem. As many times as you need to let go and come back, you can.

We're also not trying to mandate our experience. Right now, parenthetically, I am just concluding

an 11-week meditation teacher training where my hope is to teach others how to teach

meditation, which is basically my favorite thing to teach. And one of the main points I have to

make over and over again is when you give instruction, you're not inviting anyone into a particular

experience. You're not trying to guide them in a particular way. You're just saying, hey,

mindfulness of body, mindfulness of breath, mindfulness of mind, you know, without the hay,

just in some more elegant way. And the main instruction for teaching is we are not teaching

anyone anything. We are helping them to discover something. That's the seat of the teacher when

it comes to, I pretty much anything, but definitely meditation. I'm not going to teach you anything.

I'm going to help you to discover something. What is that something? I have no idea. What do I want

that something to be? Doesn't matter. What does science say? That something will be? Who cares?

Let's just sit and open and see what happens. That is a very profound skill and undervalued skill

and certainly an under emphasized skill. In all the things we may have been trained to do,

rather we're normally trained to accomplish something, to hit certain markers,

to take these three steps to accomplish those five outcomes. Okay, that's awesome. Those

things certainly have their place. But here we're saying no, X-Nay. By the way, once someone told me,

they thought I made up the word X-Nay, which was so adorable. I did not make that up. X-Nay

on the ambitions and the intentions and the objectives for your meditation practice, which are

vying because they bring you to the cushion. But once you start meditating, it's important to let

go of your ambitions and your objectives and so on to do what? Well, what's left? Open. See what is

happening and be with what is happening. Seeing and being with are the quality of openness that we

cultivate in our practice through allowing ourselves to be as we are and allowing here does not mean

feeling good or bad about who we are. It means simply being ourselves for a moment to moment.

That openness to self, to experience, to the movements of your mind is also called the practice of

gentleness. How often has anyone said, you know, what would really help you, my friend? Why don't

you try this? Cultivate gentleness toward yourself. I don't know about you, but I did not receive

that memo for the great majority of my life. But this practice cultivates that exact dynamic gentleness

towards self that is rooted in the first dynamic, I mentioned, precision. Without the precision, without the

specificity of the technique, mindfulness of body, mindfulness of breath, mindfulness of mind,

the openness has no container. It has no space. It becomes a kind of

parapetetic motions of mind that we don't know how to work with. But this practice says, okay,

here is how to work with all of that. Take a seat, find your breath, allow your mind to be as it is.

So we have precision as the foundational quality of right mindfulness. We have openness as the

heart opening, I would say, quality of right mindfulness. And then we have the third quality

of both our meditation practice itself, the sitting technique and the definition of right mindfulness

as the seventh step on the noble eightfold path, which is called spaciousness. Precise, open, spacious.

And here spaciousness doesn't mean everything's great, I feel completely relaxed, rather through the

qualities of precision, taking your seat in a certain way, applying a technique simply and accurately,

opening to your experience, rolling with it, flowing with it, being with it, with the breath

as a kind of home base or anchor, we see that actually our minds are unbelievably panoramic,

spacious skylight. And what I mean by panoramic spacious skylight isn't chill and relaxed and easy going,

rather the analogy is your thoughts are like clouds in the sky. One by one, they all pass by.

There's no exceptions. There's no thought that has come and not gone. They all arise, abide,

and dissolve. And part of what we're doing in meditation is flowing with that.

Normally, we identify, understandably, with our thoughts, aka the clouds in the sky. There's dark

ones, there's fluffy ones. There's ones that seem very far away. There's ones that feel like they're

about to explode on top of your head. They're all sorts of clouds that go through the sky. And

just like they're all sorts of thoughts that float through our mind. Some are really important,

I'm not saying otherwise. Some are really silly, some are really funny, some are really brutal.

No problem. They all move through the space. And that's the key word, the space. If we are normally

accustomed to identifying with our thoughts, aka the clouds, in our practice, we are encouraged,

instead, to identify with the sky, which can hold it all, has no preference, is clear. And

unending, that's the true nature of your mind. Clear? Unending. So in our practice, just to briefly recap,

three qualities are emphasized precision. That's normally where conventional definitions of mindfulness

stop. You focus. Okay, good. That's great. But that's just the start. Next, we have the quality of

openness, being with yourself, as you are, as a big deal, gentleness. And finally, spaciousness,

seeing that the true nature of your mind is limitless, I guess you could say, caveat, the moment I

think I understand what is meant by spaciousness and unending openness of mind's true nature,

is the moment I have punched my ticket to Paloucaville, because it defies understanding. It is

beyond understanding. It is beyond the dualistic nature of me seeing that. That's all I got for you

on that topic. It's something that is understood through glimpsing, rather than thinking.

Right mindfulness, then, is finding some sort of discipline that enables you to remember,

precise, open, and spacious. Right mindfulness arises in this way. So I hope this is useful, of course,

and now for me is the super fun after party, where I talk about a piece of music that I really love,

that means something to me for whatever reasons personally, or it's just an awesome creation.

And what I wanted to share with you this week is a song called I Won't Cry by the Texas Legend

Doug Somme. I Won't Cry is on a record called jukebox music that we, when I worked at Antones Records,

the record label, released. And I really got to know Doug Somme through that record and other

projects that Antones and Doug did together. Doug was a musical genius. He died about 20 years ago,

probably. Young, I think he wasn't even 60 yet. Anyone who has ever met him, anyone who knows

anything about music, anyone who has ever heard Doug Somme, anyone familiar with the

legend of Doug Somme will tell you he was a musical genius. I started to laugh there because I have

a friend whose nickname for Doug Somme was the abominable shoman, because he could do everything.

He took up a lot of room. He could write songs, play instruments, produce recordings,

create horn arrangements. He started his musical life, he was born in San Antonio, sitting on

Hank Williams' lap, playing, I don't know what, the banjo or the mandolin or something,

but he met Hank Williams when he was a child. And then he went on in the 60s to have a hit

with the song. I'm laughing because the whole Doug Somme story is so funny and wonderful and

amazing. And singular, he's about a mover with his band, the Sir Douglass Quintet. This was at the

time of Beatle Mania. And I know this because he told me, they're like, well, how do we get over?

Let's pretend we're from England. When we're like dudes from San Antonio, let's have chili

bowl haircuts and call ourselves the Sir Douglass Quintet. And it worked. They opened for the

Rolling Stones. They're hit. She's about a mover. You can still hear on Old East Radio and so on.

And it's great. And one of the great things about it is the Farfisa organ played by the great

Oggy Myers who died last week and played with Doug off and on throughout the rest of Doug's life.

That Farfisa sound is very emblematic of that period of the 60s. It's almost like roller skating

rink music, but I love it. And Oggy's great. And may he rest in peace. So this song I won't cry.

Again, is on the jukebox music record. And I love it. He sings the hell out of it.

The horn arrangements are spectacular. I'm going to tell you a story about those horn players

in a moment. But my favorite version of the song is not by Doug. And Doug would probably agree with

me on this. It's by an incredible vocalist named Johnny Adams who died probably in the 90s sometime.

From Louisiana, nicknamed the Tan Canary, a billion octave range. And please do me a favor and

search for I won't cry by Johnny Adams. And then listen to his version of Release Me. And you'll be like,

why isn't everyone in the world listening to this guy? And I share that question.

So I won't cry has a real jukeboxy feel. It almost has a duoppy kind of vibe to me. I'm not a musician,

but that's what it conjures in my mind. After the record was released, Doug played dates.

And I somehow got the great honor slash job of tour managing for a very short tour, like four

dates or something. So okay, it's like, okay, let's all get on a bus. Let's drive to the first gig

was in Sun Valley. Then we're going to go to San Francisco. And then I can't remember where the

third one was. And Doug was very particular. Doug needed his own transport. That's fine. Have

your own transport. That's no problem. And he brought his band three great horn players from

San Antonio. One of whom was named Rocky Morales. And when we got to the first gig, which was in

San Francisco, actually, not Sun Valley, we checked into our hotel, the Phoenix Hotel, which was a

sort of rock and roll motel from back in the day. And I'm, I don't know what unpacking. And there's

a knock on my door. It's Doug. And he says, Rocky needs a draw, meaning the traveling musicians,

they get paid at the end of the tour. But the tour manager, in this case myself, receives the

monies from each gig, keeps them. And then at the end, divvies up what we actually made. But in the

meantime, you can get a draw, like give me an advance, in other words. So I said, but Doug,

we haven't played any gigs. There's no money upon which to draw. He did not like that answer.

He's like, do you not like Rocky? What's your problem? He's hungry. He needs a draw. I'm like, Doug,

I don't have anything to give it. I have no money. I maybe I had 40 bucks in my wallet or something.

He's like getting in my face, getting heated. And I start backing away. My hotel room door was still open.

And we're on the ground floor. There's a swimming pool outside. And I'm like backing up while he's

flaming me. And the last thing he says to me is, what is this? Some kind of chick ego thing?

Yes, my friends. That's what Doug said to me. And at this point, I'm like steps away from

falling into the pool backwards. And then we both just started laughing, which was the perfect end

to that strange moment. And I don't remember how, but I feel pretty sure that Rocky got some food.

Six or so months ago, very recently, I was going through some

box of old things that had been stuck in storage somewhere that I hadn't seen in 25 years.

And I'm looking through, oh, wow, I had a plethora jacket. I think I'm going to try to get rid of that.

I had these all these shoes that I used to wear. I don't wear them anymore. Whatever.

And I pull out this flannel western shirt with snap pockets, snap purl snap buttons,

an embroidery along the yoke in the front and the back. I'm like, I don't remember this shirt.

And I look closely. It's hand embroidered, obviously. And there's armadillos and rainbows and

stars and moons. I mean, it's a very amazing, hippie embroidery of a western flannel shirt.

That's very small. And then I remember where I got it from, Doug gave this to me.

He's like, this doesn't fit me anymore. It'll probably fit you. And he gave me this incredible shirt

that then my husband went and was looking at Doug's son videos on YouTube. And he saw

Doug wore this shirt all the time in the 70s and so on. Thinking, what do I do with this shirt,

this shirt? I don't want to wear it. I don't want to spill coffee on it or anything.

Belongs in a museum. It's epic. And so it is going to be in a museum of sorts at Antones,

Night Club in Austin, Texas, where they have where they are arranging a show on their top floor

of fabulous memorabilia. And I'm very honored that my Doug's song shirt will be in that display.

So please enjoy listening to I Won't Cry. Do yourself a favor. Check out Johnny Adams' version.

And come back next week.

You don't need me anymore. But I'll keep on loving you. Just the same.

Whoa. I won't cry. I won't cry. And I won't shed a tear. I'll keep on loving you.

You haven't had the year. Even though you've met me. Whoa. I won't cry.

Sometimes I get worried. Worry over you. Then again, I don't know what to do.

Darling, you give me heartache and pain. It's just some part of you. You can win some other pain.

I won't cry. And I won't shed a tear. I'll keep on loving you. You haven't had the year.

Even though you've met me. Whoa. I won't cry.

Even though you've hurt me. Whoa. I won't cry.

Sometimes I get worried. Worry over you. Then again, I don't know what to do.

Darling, you give me heartache and pain. It's just some part of you.

You've been winning some other pain. I won't cry. I won't shed a tear.

I'll keep on loving you. You haven't had the year. Even though you've hurt me.

Whoa. I won't cry. I won't cry. I won't shed a tear. I won't cry.

I won't cry baby.

I won't cry. I won't cry. I won't cry.