Sunday, August 31, 2014

Mindfulness is not enough: "Kindfulness" is.

Mindfulness is the hot buzz word nowadays: Huffington Post got into the action with an article about mindfulness, and even Tim Ferriss (of Four Hour Work Week fame) recently had a Random Show episode that mentioned about his twenty-minutes of meditation a day

It's great thing that mindfulness has become the next buzz thing. But it's not enough. 

You need a combination of mindfulness AND kindness. The renowned teacher Ajahn Brahm (who is my teacher, and who is very, very funny) coined this as "kindfulness", which is basically combining the alertness of mindfulness with the gentleness and kindness of compassion.

With the trend of mindfulness, there's a tendency to "just be aware". This is generally benign, with a generation of a certain degree of alertness. But then afterwards, it kinda plateaus, or, worse, creates all sorts of psychic havoc as featured in this article. There is also a potential danger with mindfulness of letting your ego interfere. 

In order to get deeper, it is necessary to cultivate a kind mind. Why?
- Kindness is a form of letting go: by being kind, it is much easier to let things be, which in turn cultivates contentment, which deepens the peace. 
- Kindness with oneself is a form of patience, which is necessary for deeper meditation. 
- Kindness is the diametric opposite of the fault-finding mindset. The latter is constantly finding fault with everything: "why aren't you watching the breath?", "why are you thinking about porn?", "watch the breath!", "I said WATCH THE BREATH!!". Instead, with kindness, it's ok to just be... and after a while, your mind naturally turns its attention towards what you want to. 

If you watch your breath with a certain robotic army-like discipline, you will achieve mindfulness. But often the mindfulness will oscillate between tiredness and restlessness, as this mindfulness is achieved by willpower. 

Instead, with kindfulness, the quality of the mindfulness is much more still and tranquil, and more importantly it comes from a sense of calmness and also joy! This is the sort of joy that should be cultivated, and not just "observe, and let go": it leads to more mindfulness, and eventually even more contentment. 

Loving Kindness meditation
How should one cultivate kindfulness? A good practice is to practice loving kindness meditation. Besides body calmness meditation, loving kindness meditation is also effective as an initial meditation subject, before you focus on breath meditation. 

There are a few ways to do so, but the most effective one I find is Ajahn Brahm's method:
"The way this is achieved can be compared to the way you light a campfire. You start with paper or anything else that is easy to light. Then you add kindling, small twigs, or strips of wood. When the kindling is on fire you add thicker pieces of wood, and after a time the thick logs. Once the fire is roaring and very hot, you can even put on wet and sappy logs and they are soon alight."

Similarly, one starts off with basic present-moment awareness (i.e. just being aware for a couple of minutes about everything in the present moment, and not going off to the past or present). 

Then visualize something that generates a sense of compassion or kindness in you. For me, this tends to be an imaginary cat, which is an amalgam of both my cats and other cats I've met before. If you like dogs, you can imagine a cute dog. If you don't like animals, perhaps other things or objects e.g. plants that require your care. Focus on that object, and you can think of thoughts like "I will open the door of my heart to you", "I will protect and nurture you". 

If you choose the right mental object, you should feel like your heart is warm and fuzzy, and it should grow with time. 

Once it has grown sufficiently, you can then extend the feeling of loving kindness to all beings (visible or invisible) in your immediate surrounding. "To all beings around me in this room, visible and invisible, I open the door of my heart to you...may you be well and happy."

After some time, extend this larger (e.g. all beings in your block... your neighbourhood... your country... and finally the whole world). Once you've extended this feeling to the whole world, come back to yourself, and don't forget to be kind to yourself: "I open the door of my heart to me..."

(For those who are interested, the reason why you don't start off with yourself is that loving-kindness to yourself first could reinforce your ego and will, which isn't the purpose of this exercise.)

Kindfulness in breath meditation
It's also important to be kindful when doing breath meditation: in particular, don't be too harsh on your own mind. It's ok to be distracted. It's ok to have a wandering mind. When these things happen, don't beat yourself up: just acknowledge, forgive yourself, and learn from it (what caused that? Let it go). It's important not to be too tensed or harsh when watching your own breath. 

With kindfulness, it becomes a lot easier to truly let go. That's where the magic lies.