EFFORTLESS MINDFULNESS
The meditator said, “I experience a state which is not created through meditation yet which lasts for a while, by itself.” “Right on!” Jamgön Kongtrül said. “Now spend the rest of your life training in that!”
TULKU URGYEN RINPOCHE1
Mindfulness has become very popular in our culture today. Applications of mindfulness have been found effective in many different contexts: psychotherapy, spirituality, pain reduction, addiction treatment, and improved mental focus. Effortless mindfulness, a next stage in mindfulness training, is very helpful for people who have difficulty concentrating at work or school because it teaches a way to focus from spacious awareness.
One of my student’s teenage son, who was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and struggling in class, came to me specifically to learn effortless mindfulness. When we met, he was having difficulty on tests and completing longer written assignments. Frustrated, he had angry outbursts at school and home. He told me that, paradoxically, he became more distracted the more he tried to concentrate. To this, I said, “It looks like trying hard to pay attention is costly to you.” He joked, “Yeah, I was paying so much attention that I felt like I was going to go broke.”
I asked him what activities he enjoyed, and he told me he loved playing the trumpet in his school band. He also mentioned this was the only time he felt he could stay focused. I taught him to use effortless mindfulness, and he took to it right away. He reported, “I know this way of focusing! It’s what I do when I play music.”
I explained how to intentionally access effortless mindfulness whenever and wherever he needed it, and he was able to master the skills involved in six weeks. He learned to step back into spacious awareness, which gave him the ability to focus from a panoramic view. He was able to observe his emotions of frustration and anger when they first arose, and then to realize he had a choice not to act them out. By the end of the next semester, effortless mindfulness was second nature for him, and he was doing better than ever in school and actually enjoyed learning.
After helping many more people learn this new way of focusing, I now believe that the phenomenon we call “attention deficit” should be renamed “attention overload” because we are trying to overuse a type of attention that has limits. It’s good that we have another option: effortless mindfulness.
Mindfulness is important no matter where you are in the process of awakening because ultimately mindfulness is the connection to what is happening in the relative world. Mindfulness is the ability to remain connected and related from any level of mind. However, what you can be mindful of depends on what level of mind you’re mindful from.
In his book Rainbow Painting, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche says that in Dzogchen there are six kinds of mindfulness, and then he talks about the two main categories: “There are two types of mindfulness: deliberate and effortless.”2 You can use deliberate mindfulness as an initial practice leading to effortless mindfulness, or you can begin meditation training with effortless mindfulness. When you start with effortless mindfulness, you still get all the benefits of deliberate mindfulness.
Deliberate mindfulness is the basic form of mindfulness most of us have encountered. The Theravada Buddhist word for mindfulness (in the Pali language) is sati, often translated as “remembering.” But it does not mean remembering in the sense of recalling past events. When used in the context of deliberate mindfulness, sati means remembering to return to the object of your focus when your attention wanders. Deliberate mindfulness requires us to continuously return—re-remembering and re-attending.
Lack of willpower is not the reason we lose focus. The reason we cannot stay focused is that the everyday mind we’re looking from is always moving and changing. In deliberate mindfulness, we must continuously reapply ourselves to our task by actively re-creating not only the focus but “the focuser” over and over within the everyday mind.
The two most common practices of deliberate mindfulness are one-pointed attention and nonjudgmental witnessing of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Traditionally, deliberate mindfulness refers to both: shamatha (“calm abiding”) and vipassana (“insight”). Researchers have extensively studied both these types of deliberate mindfulness in recent years, and they refer to shamatha as “focused attention” (FA) and vipassana as “open monitoring” (OM).
Some traditions of deliberate mindfulness focus on stilling the chattering mind with disciplined concentration; others encourage a more patient approach based on gently returning every time the mind wanders. The first method of concentration uses practices like breath counting (from Zen) or the Nine Stages of Attentional Development (from Tibetan Buddhism) to sustain concentration until the ability is learned. The second method of deliberate mindfulness begins with the task of trying to sustain attention. Then, when the mind inevitably wanders, you become aware of being distracted and then bring back your attention again and again. This approach emphasizes nonjudgmental awareness over concentration.
Effortless mindfulness—the second type of mindfulness—is also called innate mindfulness. Effortless mindfulness doesn’t mean that we don’t have to make an initial effort. You aren’t being asked to “do nothing” or to “try to be effortless.” (Trying to be effortless can be quite an effort!) The adjective “effortless” refers to the discovery that awake awareness is spontaneously aware without our help or effort. Effortless awareness is a description of the way we naturally experience life when operating from awake awareness.
One way to begin effortless mindfulness is to have local awareness look back toward the mindful meditator. When the meditator is looked for, none can be found. Instead, spacious awareness is discovered to be effortlessly aware. Living from awake awareness, we are supported by that which is already aware. With this support, we are able to effortlessly focus from spacious awareness. There is no need to willfully concentrate from effortless mindfulness. Spacious awareness is the foundation of the awake-aware mind—which, unlike the everyday mind, is not made of moving thoughts—this is why you can focus and attend to things effortlessly. When awake awareness moves from the background to the foreground, our way of knowing is no longer located in or bounded by the contents of our consciousness.
We can be mindful from any of the five levels of mind I mentioned before: everyday mind, subtle mind, awake-aware mind, simultaneous mind, or heart-mind. Deliberate mindfulness is practiced from the first two levels of mind: everyday mind and subtle mind. Effortless mindfulness occurs from the next three levels of mind. Most importantly, we can’t practice effortless mindfulness from everyday mind or subtle mind.
One famous modernizer of mindfulness meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn, defines deliberate mindfulness like this: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”3 This definition can apply to deliberate mindfulness from both the everyday mind and subtle mind. Everyday mind has to intentionally try to be nonjudgmental because it is located in dualistic thought, which is always comparing and judging. However, one sign that you are mindful from the subtle mind is that you’re naturally nonjudgmental. Deliberate mindfulness without an object, sometimes called “objectless shamatha,” or choiceless awareness, is still viewing from the subtle-mind point of view.
Consider the difference between effortless breathing and deliberate breathing. Imagine having to remember every time you needed to take a breath. Noticing effortless mindfulness is like noticing that our breathing happens by itself. When looking from awake awareness, we need no effort to be effortlessly mindful. From effortless mindfulness, we have the ability to use local awareness for intentional focus while awake awareness remains wide open. Effortless mindfulness empowers us with the natural capability to be with our thoughts and emotions, without constant monitoring. We find effortless mindfulness by shifting to spacious awareness and then focusing from there.
There are two additional types of effortless mindfulness. When we shift to awake awareness embodied, we can utilize nondual mindfulness. The next type of effortless mindfulness is called heart mindfulness, which is being aware, not from transcendent spacious awareness or from embodied presence, but from open-hearted awareness.
In the gradual path many meditative approaches offer, effortless mindfulness is considered an advanced practice, but it can be just as easy for beginners to learn as deliberate mindfulness. Effortless mindfulness is somewhat like riding a bicycle on a gradual, downward-sloping road: once we learn to balance, we can coast without deliberately pedaling.
The Dzogchen tradition says, “Sustain primordially free awareness with innate mindfulness.”4 This saying is both a description of what happens on the level of awake awareness and an instruction for operating from awake-aware mind. Here, the first difference from deliberate mindfulness is that awake awareness is both the subject and the object. The second difference is that you’re aware from within your body and mind rather than observing from outside. It is like saying: “Sustain your love for the person with whom you’re totally in love.” There is a quality of devotion, willingness, interest, focus, and also surrender. The sustaining is not done from any effort made by your current ego-identification or by the ego’s will. Yet sustaining is an important instruction for stabilization, abiding, and expression that also avoids taking a too-passive attitude. Effortless mindfulness makes the transition from initial realization to the ability to live from primordial, free awareness. From open-hearted awareness, heart mindfulness is the connection from the infinite to the finite, and from each human being to other people and to the world.
In the Mahamudra tradition, the deliberate mindfulness way of focusing is called the “event perspective” because we’re looking at events or the contents of our mind. Effortless mindfulness uses a method of focusing called the “mind perspective” because we change the direction of our focus to look back at the nature of our own mind. Effortless mindfulness often begins with the practice of awareness of awareness. This turning around of awareness is called an “orientation instruction.” The effortless mindfulness practice of looking from spacious awareness is called “king of samadhi” and is described as a soaring eagle looking back at its nest.
Though used in Tibetan Buddhism, effortless mindfulness can be found in other meditation traditions as well. In his book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, writes that although most of the focus in Theravada Buddhism is on deliberate mindfulness, effortless mindfulness is nevertheless acknowledged as “unprompted mindfulness.” Goldstein writes that unprompted mindfulness “arises spontaneously through the force of its own momentum. No particular effort is required. It’s just happening by itself. In this state of effortless awareness, we can further discern the presence or absence of a reference point of observation, a sense of someone observing or being mindful.”5
With effortless mindfulness, we have shifted to viewing from spacious awareness. We are in a different level of mind that is stable, calm, and able to remain naturally undistracted. Spacious awareness has the ability to effortlessly observe the arising of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and even subpersonalities—without needing to identify with them; to judge them; or to deny, oppose, or project them onto others. Like space itself, spacious awareness can be neither increased nor diminished by any forms arising within its field; there is only a natural acceptance of everything. Effortless mindfulness is like a mirror that reflects without judgment.
Deliberate mindfulness can be reached either by pulling back from the contents of the mind or by resting until the contents of the mind are separate from the mindful meditator. Effortless mindfulness is not a matter of progressively stepping back farther and farther, like an infinite regression to a bigger and bigger witness. It begins with turning awareness around to look through the observing ego. When we do so, the location of the observer opens or dissolves. The goal is to discover the absence of ego-identification and realize spacious awake awareness as our new foundation.
Although the ultimate goal of awakening is the same, deliberate mindfulness and effortless mindfulness each approach calm abiding and insight differently. In effortless mindfulness, instead of trying to calm the contents of the mind, we step out of the everyday mind and into an already calm, alert, awake-aware mind. Deliberate mindfulness approaches calm abiding by using one-pointed concentration and loving-kindness meditation. One-pointed concentration means focusing on an object such as your breath, noticing nonjudgmentally when your attention wanders, and continually coming back to focus on the object. Loving-kindness meditation uses simple, positive phrases to generate feelings of emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing. Loving-kindness meditation creates calm abiding and reduces fear, hatred, and anger by affirming and feeling love toward yourself, loved ones, acquaintances, and even difficult people in your life.
One-pointed concentration represses the everyday mind and the default mode network. While it gives you a rest, it also represses some creativity, emotions, and higher functioning. The calm abiding of effortless mindfulness balances the default mode network rather than repressing it. Therefore self-referential mind wandering does not take us away, and we still have our creative abilities available. When using deliberate mindfulness, we look at our thoughts as if they were possessions or pieces on a chessboard that we can move around. Mingyur Rinpoche describes the effortless mindfulness approach:
We access the mind of calm abiding through recognition. What do we recognize? Awareness: the ever-present knowing quality of mind, from which we are never separated for an instant. Even though normally we do not recognize awareness, we can no more live without it than we can live without breathing. For this reason, I often use the terms shamatha and awareness meditation interchangeably. Discovering our own awareness allows us to access the natural steadiness and clarity of the mind, which exist independent of conditions and circumstances, and independent of our emotions and moods.6
In heart mindfulness we learn how to shift into the loving consciousness—ultimate bodhicitta—that always permeates the field with pervasive, compassionate wisdom. Rather than beginning with calm abiding, we start with the direct recognition of awake awareness and the profound discovery that awake-aware mind is already present, naturally calm, insightful, and loving.
When we’re using effortless mindfulness and heart mindfulness, we start to relate to our thoughts and feelings more intimately. We can listen to the voices and needs of subpersonalities, with whom we used to be identified, but we no longer believe these parts are the center of who we are. Now we easily recognize these parts as mere ego functions—roles we could play—but not who we are. When we discover open-hearted awareness, we don’t have to go back to ego-identification because nonconceptual awareness has shifted us out of our previous thought-based operating system. As we become free of ego-identification, we are no longer at the mercy of our moods, our fears for the future, or our regrets about the past.
Over the years, I have tested the effectiveness of effortless mindfulness in meditation workshops in many different settings. The thirty-four different groups of people I tested have ranged in size from 12 to 150 participants. Their levels of experience varied from beginner to longtime meditator.
For the experiment, the groups tried to maintain continuous focus while using two distinct styles of meditation: deliberate mindfulness and effortless mindfulness. I gave participants the following instruction: “Focus on the sensation of your breath, either at your nostrils or your belly, and to try to maintain continuous focus.” As a means of measuring whether they were maintaining continuous focus, I asked participants to label their in-breaths with a number, counting from one to fifty. During the out-breath, I asked them not to use a number, but to “remain aware of the felt sense of the out-breath.” I also instructed: “Try to continuously maintain focus on your breath without losing your count or letting your mind wander. If your mind wanders or you lose count, notice that. You can begin to count again from one or pick up where you left off.”
In a recent group of eighty-five men and women, I started by asking people to use deliberate mindfulness first. Only two students out of eighty-five reported being able to maintain continuous focus without losing count. Then, after I spent fifteen minutes teaching the same group effortless mindfulness, eighty participants reported they were able to count to fifty without losing track.
I often conduct this experiment at the beginning of workshops without telling participants the purpose, so as not to influence their outcomes. I have alternated between giving the effortless and deliberate mindfulness exercises first. I’ve also had people act as a control group, asking them only to try counting fifty breaths without any other instructions. The results are always similar: in every group, an average of five percent of people counted to fifty breaths without any instructions, and about ten percent were successful using deliberate mindfulness. In contrast, eighty-five percent of meditators in my groups were able to count to fifty without losing track of their breaths when using effortless mindfulness.
In deliberate mindfulness, we deconstruct ego-identification without providing an alternative foundation. When we step out of ego-identification, related ego defenses are also deconstructed, and a flood of unconscious material and repressed emotions may arise. The intensity of this flood can be difficult to bear when you don’t have your old identity or a new foundation—a condition that’s sometimes called the “gap of egolessness.” Brown University neuroscience researcher Willoughby Britton, who has studied some of the potentially negative side effects of mindfulness meditation, says, “A lot of psychological material is going to come up and be processed. Old resentments, wounds, that kind of thing.”7
Alternatively, I have found it a great advantage to start with the direct recognition of awake awareness so that we can avoid becoming trapped in the gap of egolessness. One important reason for beginning with effortless mindfulness is that you’re immediately introduced to awake awareness, an infinite resource capable of coping with all difficult emotions. Beyond that, awake awareness is a much more powerful and compelling foundation for functioning in the world than ego-identification. Dealing with the gap of egolessness is difficult enough, but it’s compounded when our ego defense mechanisms keep pulling us back to ego-identification. Many people get scared back to ego-identification. From awake-awareness, we can feel the fears, hear the doubts—and welcome them.
To practice deliberate mindfulness insight, you usually need a special place—a meditation hall, retreat center, or quiet room—to observe your internal experience. Conversely, effortless mindfulness insight can be done with your eyes open, in the middle of your day. It’s crucial to realize that the type of attention used in deliberate mindfulness cannot be used to transition into effortless mindfulness.
Deliberate mindfulness approaches insight by using the four foundations of mindfulness found in the Satipatthana Sutta: the practice of observing four different types of internal objects. These four are body sensations, feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness, consciousness, and mind objects. Practicing the four foundations of deliberate mindfulness deconstructs the mini-me by observing the parts of consciousness that create a sense of separation. Deliberate mindfulness leads to insight into who we are not. In contrast, effortless mindfulness insight allows us to realize the foundation of who we are by leading us to directly recognize awake awareness.
As a way of organizing effortless mindfulness practice in a style similar to deliberate mindfulness, I am offering the five foundations of effortless mindfulness: awareness of awareness is mindful of awareness; awareness is aware of itself as nature of mind; awareness from spacious awareness is aware from awake-aware mind; awake awareness embodied is aware from the simultaneous mind; and open-hearted awareness uses heart mindfulness to create and relate.
1. Awareness of awareness is mindfulness of awareness. The mindful attention that was used in deliberate mindfulness to focus on your breath and thoughts cannot be used to find awake awareness. Therefore, we need to find a way to rest in the nature of mind or to use local awareness to become aware of spacious awareness. In deliberate mindfulness meditation, we’re located in subtle mind, looking at the contents of our consciousness. However, this first foundation of effortless mindfulness is a You-turn, moving away from looking out through our eyes at the contents of our mind and body. Awareness of awareness is not an endless progression of pulling back of awareness, but a turning around of awareness to look through the meditator to discover that awake awareness is already aware as both subject and object.
2. Awareness is aware of itself as the nature of mind. When local awareness becomes aware of spacious awareness, it begins to recognize itself. When local awareness and spacious awareness unite, they realize they have always been united. The experience is like air escaping from a balloon and mixing with the rest of the air in the room. Similarly, subject and object merge; there is no longer a subject knowing an object—from this perspective, there is just awareness. Awareness knows itself by being itself. We discover that awareness is already awake without our help. Awareness of awareness takes us beyond ego-identification and knows, without referring to thoughts or our senses. In this second foundation of effortless mindfulness, we go beyond spacious awareness as the object of meditation. One way to check this is to inquire: “Am I aware of spacious awareness, or is spacious awareness aware of itself?” Please don’t skip past the experience of awareness resting as itself, and go prematurely to the next foundation of witnessing awareness. If you can abide as awareness of itself—contentless, timeless, boundless, knowing—for even three to five seconds, that experience can shift you into the ground of Being.
3. Awareness from spacious awareness is aware from awake-aware mind. This is the experience of turning back toward your body and mind and witnessing from an open-sky, panoramic view. A radical shift of perspective, this principle can move you out of ego-identification and into spacious awareness as the witnessing self. Who we are, from the nature of mind, is not a single point in a field. We can remain effortlessly focused from awake-aware mind because its foundation is spacious awareness rather than changing thoughts and perceptions. We learn to trust that knowing is happening from spacious awareness, then we no longer need to return to thinking for a second opinion. As the witnessing self is established in spacious awareness, it’s able to use effortless mindfulness to focus and function in the world. Local awareness, the vehicle that helped us discover spacious awareness, now becomes a tool the witnessing self uses as needed to focus on particular tasks.
4. Awake awareness embodied is aware from simultaneous mind. It is an alive, embodied awareness similar to being in a “flow state” or “being in the zone.” We began by only experiencing ourselves as separate, solid selves who then realized we were formless awareness. Now formless awareness is realizing that it’s also inherent in form. Awake awareness takes a second You-turn and steps back within to include the mind’s contents and the energies of the body, but with a new perspective this time. We are now observing whatever arises not only from outside, but also from within our body. We are not a detached witness, but we feel our thoughts, emotions, and sensations from within—without needing to re-create an ego-manager. From effortless mindfulness, we can openly monitor internal levels of consciousness that are not available to deliberate mindfulness. Effortless mindfulness can clearly see the process of self-awareness, subpersonalities, long-held assumptions, shadow parts, self-representations, and self-images. Awake awareness embodied is often called “unity consciousness” or the stage of “one taste” in the Mahamudra tradition. The shift of location is from the witnessing sky to the ocean of awareness in which waves of experience arise, crest, and return, without ever separating from the sea. Simultaneous mind experiences all levels of reality from nondual awareness: emptiness and fullness, absolute awareness and the relative world, infinite and finite—as well as being nowhere, everywhere, and here. From this fourth foundation of effortless mindfulness, we can be aware, from spacious awareness, of our reality within and outside simultaneously. This brings the default mode network into balance, and we can learn to remain connected and effortlessly undistracted. People who learn this foundation of nondual mindfulness are astounded that they can immediately shift into embodied awake awareness while doing everyday activities in a stress-free flow—with their eyes open.
5. Open-hearted awareness uses heart mindfulness to create and relate. We now discover heart-mind and the nonconceptual awareness that’s the important source of our new way of knowing. From open-hearted awareness, we welcome all thoughts and emotions, and we recognize the same awake awareness in others. We move from witnessing self to no-self to seeing from Being, where you feel nothing is missing, and “you”—as open-hearted awareness—cannot be harmed. We are aware of our emotions, patterns of ego-identification, and our subpersonalities arising within us, yet we don’t become identified with any of them. This ability to remain connected to everything gives us more space and wisdom, more capacity to choose how to respond when emotions, opinions, and thoughts continually arise. From the support of open-hearted awareness, we can begin to detox repressed emotions and rewire our brain for the better. Feeling part of the field of life, we can focus with local awareness. Compassionate activity becomes the natural expression.
GLIMPSE Effortless Mindfulness
The effortless mindfulness practice that I used in the experiment (discussed earlier in this chapter) can be done using the two practices of Effortless Focus or Panoramic Awareness in chapter 3. These two practices are being done from the third foundation, which is awareness from spacious awareness.
To practice all five foundations of effortless mindfulness, try any of these full practices from earlier chapters: Unhook, Drop, Open, See, Include, Know, Let Be in chapter 4; the Four Fields of the Ground of Being in chapter 9; or the Open-Hearted Connection in chapter 10.
One of the most important, unique, and sometimes tricky parts of the five foundations of effortless mindfulness is the two You-Turns. The first You-Turn, called recognition, is turning from looking outward using our ego-identified mind to have local awareness look back to awake awareness. Many people who attend my groups or see me in individual sessions are able to have this initial glimpse. However, awake awareness is not just a temporary experience happening to you but can be realized as the foundation of who we are.
The second You-Turn, called realization, is shifting into and abiding as awake awareness, which then looks and feels back to include our body from within and looks out to experience the connection with others. I have found that just taking even a minute or two to completely let go and feel awareness aware of itself before looking back from spacious awareness is the foundation of this shift into freedom.