Mindfulness without the Bells and Beads

Chapter 6The Fundamentals of Cultivating Mindfulness

The first step in understanding how to cultivate mindfulness requires knowing what exercises genuinely lead to the improvement of this skill. Unfortunately, due to mindfulness's current status as something all purveyors of self-development training want to highlight their program develops, this, too, is a cloudy notion when trying to find ground truth. Let's start with a fundamental distinction: the relationship between mindfulness and meditation. These two terms are so often conflated and used interchangeably that many people, including “teachers” who purport to be teaching mindfulness, do not know they are different, albeit related concepts.

The relationship between mindfulness and meditation is similar to the relationship between fitness and exercise. When you go to the gym and exercise, you are not working out so that you will be more fit at the gym but instead so you have a higher level of fitness when you are outside the gym. It is the same with meditation. You do formal meditation practices not so that you are more mindful during the exercises but so you are more mindful in your everyday life. Meditation is a mental exercise that affects your baseline level of mindfulness just like physical exercise affects your baseline level of fitness. However, not all meditations are created equal.

The comparison of physical exercise to meditation is relevant for several reasons. When you think of the term “exercise,” what comes ...