The Path, Step Two: Wise Mindfulness

Now that everyone and everything is mindful (except the federal government), is mindfulness diluted? I was starting to wonder so I’m digging into the question, starting with, “What is mindfulness, or ‘wise mindfulness’?” which is the next step on the path. 

From 10,000 feet, to me mindfulness is looking in and looking up. Looking in, by practicing stillness, examining our fabulous minds and hearts, and then training them to focus and be loving and connect. 

And it’s also looking in and up, by (1) stopping throughout the day, (2) taking a breath, (3) noticing our thoughts & feelings plus what we, and everyone else, seems to need, (4) considering how to get those needs met without causing harm, and then (5) changing our minds, if necessary, to do that. 

Does that make sense? Of course mindfulness is much more, too. Join me on the Wake Up Call….

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #507. Let’s keep talking about the Eightfold Path. 

To review, the first three Noble Truths are the truths of suffering, which is that this being human is difficult, the truth of the cause of suffering, which is not the difficulties but the grasping and clinging, and the truth that there’s an end to suffering, which is to let go and simply be present in the muck and the mud and the glory and grace of each moment. The Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold (or eight step) Path to liberation, which gets organized into three buckets: training, ethics, and wisdom. Starting with training, which has three steps, Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration, Wise Effort is the effort required to practice. Quantity and quality both matter. In terms of quantity, Wise Effort is diligent but neither over the top – not mindfulness as an extreme sport or trial prep or a closing – nor negligent – meaning, not not-practice and telling ourselves we are. In terms of quality, the effort wants to be joyful, loving effort. So that’s step one in the training bucket.

Step two in the training bucket is Wise Mindfulness. The teachings on Wise Mindfulness go back 2,600 years, to the beginnings of this tradition, asking and answering questions like what is Wise Mindfulness, whether or not it’s different from “ordinary” mindfulness, and how to practice. Here is Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of our great modern Western scholars and a devoted social justice activist, and I’m paraphrasing: 

The…ultimate truth of things is directly visible, timeless, calling out to be approached and seen…[and] always available. [T]he place where it is to be realized is within oneself. [It is] not something mysterious and remote, but the truth of our own experience. It can be reached only by understanding our experience…. It is not enough…to accept it on faith, to believe it on the authority of books or a teacher, or to think it out through deductions and inferences. It has to be known by insight…. [And] what brings the field of experience into focus and makes it accessible to insight is…mindfulness. Mindfulness is presence of mind…deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right [or wise] mindfulness the mind is trained to remain…open, quiet, and alert…. Judgments and interpretations [are] suspended…. The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea[,] …standing in the here and now without slipping away [or] …getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

There are many other wonderful, interesting, and even controversial explanations of Wise Mindfulness. Before exploring those, though, today I want step back and share my own experience of how I think about Wise Mindfulness, especially for legal professionals.

I think of Wise Mindfulness as a set of practices of looking in and looking up. In formal practice, like breath and sound awareness, lovingkindness, compassion, and concentration, we “look in” in the sense that we’re in stillness, on our own or in community like this one, examining our heart/mind. If I’m looking in as I’m practicing, I include contemplative movement practices as well, like yoga and Qi Gong. 

As we look in, we’re gaining the insight that Bhikkhu Bodhi is talking about, plus we’re training the heart/mind. For most of us, initially we’re training to pay attention, using an anchor like the breath, the body, or sound. When distraction happens and we notice, we come back to the anchor. As we do this over and over, the anchor begins to feel more powerful or even sacred, like a refuge where thinking, analyzing, ruminating, and worry aren’t present, and to which we can always return. Sharon Salzberg says it like this: The heart of skillful meditation is the ability to let go and begin again, over and over again. Even if you have to do that thousands of times during a session, it does not matter. There is no distance to traverse in recollecting our attention; as soon as we realize we have been lost in discursive thought, or have lost touch with our chosen contemplation, right in that very moment we can begin again.  Nothing has been ruined and there is no such thing as failing.  There is nowhere the attention can wander to, and no duration of distraction, from which we cannot completely let go, in a moment, and begin again.

Other practices train the heart/mind, too. With metta, we learn to offer wellbeing to all beings. With compassion, we learn to care for ourselves and others and to find equanimity in the two understandings that our work is tikkun olam, to heal the world, and, we’re just here for a minute and therefore can’t ultimately succeed. We also tap into something larger than our “self” – secular yet interconnected, inclusive yet empty. While these practices are not technically “mindfulness,” I’ll keep them in this space for now.  

One of the tremendous benefits of formal practice is that we’re in a setting that’s private and safe from external harm. This is important because looking in requires courage: when we look in, we notice our reactivity, greed, hatred, and confusion – or I do! – and we can only heal these when we feel safe.  It’s helpful to work with a teacher who can bear loving witness to our practice, remind us not to judge, and help us to lift up what we notice, so that we can examine it with love ourselves. The formal practice of looking in is not for the faint of heart, as every one of us probably knows. 

In addition to formal mindfulness practices, Wise Mindfulness also includes portable practices during which we’re both looking in and looking up. Throughout the day, moment by moment, portable practices like STOP, WAIT, Three-Second Kindness, and others, invite us to look in, see what’s happening in the heart/mind, course-correct if necessary, and then look up to determine, before we speak or act, how to impact others and society, even in an adversarial situation, in a loving way that causes no harm. Kaira Jewel Lingo, who’ll be joining us as a guest teacher in the 2026 Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training, once put it this way: “If we’re anxious, if we’re afraid, we can be mindful of being upset, anxious and afraid, and then we’re still safe. As long as mindfulness…is there with whatever is arising, it’s like there’s…adult supervision.” 

Adult supervision - I love that. And there’s more about Wise Mindfulness, so we’ll keep talking about it. For now, let’s sit.