The Four Foundations of Mindfulness

Episode 55 of the Secular Buddhism Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 55. I'm your host, Noah Rasheta, and today I'm talking about the four foundations of mindfulness.

As you may know, mindfulness is one of the most basic practices of Buddhism. It's one of the spokes of the Eightfold Path. I talked about the Eightfold Path a little bit in episode number 41, and mindfulness in general is just a really hot topic right now. I believe it was Time magazine not long ago that had a cover that said mindfulness has gone mainstream. A lot of people are interested in mindfulness, and although many of them may not be interested at all in any of the other aspects of Buddhist practice, mindfulness practice is starting to overlap a lot with practices that you see in psychology.

While many people associate mindfulness with meditation, there's really a lot more to it than just meditation. In fact, the Buddha taught that we should practice mindfulness at all times, not just while meditating. The reason mindfulness is such a skillful practice is because through mindfulness, through awareness, we can learn to perceive the nature of reality—the nature of things being interdependent and impermanent. To see reality in this proper perspective helps us to cut through delusions and unhealthy attachments or clinging.

So mindfulness as a practice goes beyond just paying close attention to things. It's a form of pure awareness of reality just as it is—awareness without judgments or concepts. To see reality through this mindful lens takes practice, resolve, and effort, and it involves all of the other spokes of the Eightfold Path.

The Four Foundations

The four foundations I want to discuss in this episode are frames of reference that are usually looked at one at a time or practiced one foundation at a time. You start with mindfulness of the breath and you eventually reach what is essentially mindfulness of all things. These four foundations are taught in the context of meditation, but they can help with other practices too.

Foundation One: Mindfulness of Body

The first foundation is mindfulness of the body. This foundation centers on the experience of the body. It's an awareness of the body as body—something experienced as breath, as flesh and bone. In other words, it's not my body.

Think about the aspects of the body that you don't control. If this really were my body and I'm at the helm, so to speak, then why can't I will myself to just sleep or to wake up? I sleep when I'm tired and I wake up when I'm not tired. Why can't I control my heart rate? Why can't I speed up my metabolism just out of sheer will? Why can't I control my body temperature?

This reminds me of what Alan Watts used to say: that we are a "do" happening. I think I've talked about this before. We no longer view the body as a form that we are inhabiting. We just view it as an experience we're having. The body is just the body. In the same way that my hand is just my hand, and yet there's a lot going on in the inner workings of my hand—blood flowing, oxygen going to the tissues, and all of those things. That's how we start to see the body. We start to have mindfulness of the body as just the body.

Most mindfulness exercises focus on the breath as the foundation of body awareness. This is learning to experience breathing and observe the breathing as a thing that's just happening, not as a thing I control. It's not about thinking about the breath or coming up with ideas or concepts about the breath. We just observe and we watch this process that's happening to us.

The idea is that as our ability to maintain awareness of our breathing gets stronger, we become more aware of the whole body as a thing that's just happening. Think about it right now. There are incredible processes happening with your body, and they are outside of our sphere of awareness. Hair is growing. Cells are dying and being replaced by new cells. Blood is flowing. Oxygen is being carried into muscles and tissue. Carbon dioxide is being removed from the tissues. Electrical signals right now are firing off in your brain, causing you to think certain things. Chemicals are being released that cause you to feel certain ways.

There's a lot happening, and it gives us the impression of doing. But there's no doing without the happening first. This is kind of what Alan Watts was referring to. There's no doing without the happening, and there's no happening without the doing. It's absolutely incredible when you sit and you observe what is happening in your body right now, what is happening with your body.

In some schools of Buddhism, this form of awareness includes movement—walking meditation, chanting, even rituals. These are all opportunities to be mindful of the body as it moves, as it makes sounds. This practice helps us to be more mindful even when we're not meditating. I think many schools of martial arts emerged from this kind of thinking, this practice of bringing meditative focus to body movement. So many of our day-to-day activities can be used as body awareness practice.

That's the first foundation: mindfulness of the body. We learn to just observe. What is this body doing? What is happening? Is the doing influenced by the happening, and is the happening influencing the doing? It's a really neat way to think about it.

Foundation Two: Mindfulness of Feelings

The second foundation is mindfulness of feelings. This includes both physical and mental experiences or sensations. In meditation, we learn to become observers of the feelings and sensations as they arise. They come and go. They arise, they linger, they go away, or they get replaced by other thoughts or feelings. We learn to just observe them without any judgments and without identifying with them.

This is why we often say "I'm feeling tired" as opposed to "I am tired." Now, I get that in our society and in our way of speaking English, we do say things like "I'm tired." But tired isn't something you can be—it's something that you feel, right? It's more appropriate to say "I'm feeling tired" because these are not my feelings. They're just feelings—feelings I'm having, feelings I'm experiencing.

For example, when I feel an itch, I don't say "my itch." I think, "Oh, my nose has an itch," and I can either scratch it or I don't. But there's no identifying with the itch. With other feelings, though—feelings that we have—we tend to make that mistake of identifying with them. We say, "I'm angry" or "I'm sad," but remember, there are just feelings. Learning to observe our feelings can sometimes be uncomfortable. I get that. The feelings that come up when we're just observing can surprise us.

We seem to have this incredible ability as humans to ignore our own feelings, especially negative ones. Feelings like anxiety or anger can be there, almost dormant, and we're not aware of them until we sit and we start looking. It's like they jump out at us and say, "Surprise! I'm here. I've been here this whole time. Didn't you know?"

Ignoring the feelings or sensations that we don't like is unhealthy. We don't want to do that. So this second foundation of mindfulness is about learning to observe and fully acknowledge our feelings. We also see how feelings dissipate because feelings, like all other things, are impermanent.

Through mindfulness of feelings, we become aware of the feeling tones that we experience—the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feelings that we associate with everything. Notice how our mental and physical sensory experiences all have this tone. We either experience these things to be pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. Through observation, you can become really skilled at identifying these tones in your ongoing experiences. This will make more sense in the third foundation.

Foundation Three: Mindfulness of Mind

The third foundation is mindfulness of mind, or consciousness. This foundation focuses on observing the state of our mind. Are we having thoughts of desire or aversion? Are we experiencing greed or hatred? Are we caught up in delusion? Are we feeling calm or agitated?

The point is not to change the state of mind but to observe what's happening in there. What kind of mental formations are present? What's going on? This might sound a bit redundant with mindfulness of feelings, but there's a distinction. Mindfulness of feelings is about the feeling tones—the pleasantness or unpleasantness of our experience. Mindfulness of mind is more about the quality of the mind itself and the mental formations that are present.

This is also where we begin to notice something really important. Because we all live in our own worlds. My world is influenced by the ideas I have, the beliefs or non-beliefs, the memories, and many, many more things. These are all unique to me. This creates my world. So it's in this foundation of mindfulness that we open ourselves to the whole world—at least the world that we experience.

This is where we begin to see and experience things as they are. Things are what they are because of how we recognize them. In other words, the observer and the object being observed cannot be separated. What I observe, I observe because of the observer, which is me—influenced by all of these things like my ideas, beliefs, and so forth.

Foundation Four: Mindfulness of All Things

It's in this foundation of mindfulness that we learn to see things in a deeper sense as interconnected. This is because that is. I no longer see the separation of "this" and "that." We start to see and understand the interdependent and impermanent nature of all things. We start to become more mindful of the fact that there really is no independent self.

You are because everything else is. There's no separation. The very world that I perceive as my own—my ideas, my opinions, my concepts, my beliefs—these are all conditioned by everything else. I get them from either my society or my family or religion. But it doesn't stop there. They all have causes and conditions, and the causes and conditions also have causes and conditions. That goes on and on and on.

By developing the four foundations of mindfulness, we start to remove the conceptual constructs until eventually the goal is to just see things as they are. This is the very liberation that we talk about with the term enlightenment—the ability to see things as they really are, meaning interdependent and impermanent.

Practicing the Foundations

What I love about this is there's nothing mystical or woo-woo about any of this stuff. These are all concepts that we can apply and practice to have a much more skillful way of interacting with reality. I think we spend so much of our lives arguing against reality, wanting the world to be the way we think it should be, rather than spending time observing it and learning to see it as it is.

These exercises—these foundations of mindfulness—allow us to see clearly. They give us a direct way of seeing. They free us from our conceptual conditioning. It's an incredible way of being with reality. Imagine no longer being caught up in the mental games that cause us so much of our unnecessary suffering. That's the goal of practicing the four foundations of mindfulness: to be able to start to see clearly, to see reality as it really is.

Your Challenge for This Week

I would invite you, as a challenge for this week, to try to practice the four foundations of mindfulness: mindfulness of body, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of mind or your state of mind, and then mindfulness of the physical and mental processes—in other words, the totality of everything that's happening, mindfulness of my world, the way I am experiencing my world.

You can do this in parts. One day, try practicing just observing your breath. See if you can notice that slight shift between "I'm controlling the breathing" and "the breathing is something that's happening." It's happening whether I do anything or not. We experience this when we sleep—we're not controlling it. That's one way to practice mindfulness of body, or just sit and think about all the processes taking place.

With mindfulness of feelings, try to observe your feelings and notice what you feel. See if you can notice what's behind them—the causes and conditions. But don't make judgments about the feelings: this one's a good one, that one's a bad one. Just observe them. It's just what's there. A feeling is just a feeling.

Then do this with your overall mental state. How am I right now? What kind of mental state am I experiencing? Don't identify with it. Don't say "I am scatterbrained" or "I am whatever it is." Just recognize, "Oh, my mind is scattered right now. I've got a lot of thoughts." Or "My mind is really focused." Whatever it is, just observe the mental state that you're in.

By understanding the mental state that you're in, then you kind of connect all three of these, and you start to observe the totality of all the physical and mental processes—the mindfulness of all things as I relate them to the experience of here and now. Here I am. This is my world. This is what I'm perceiving. What is the mindfulness that I can experience with that? When I observe all of that in connection with the other three, hopefully that makes some sense.

Going Deeper

Keep in mind that, like all these topics, these are typically ideas or concepts that can be explored and looked at very deeply, or practiced for years and years and years before there can be a really powerful breakthrough. Now, that's not to say there couldn't be a breakthrough that happens just in the shift of understanding of these things. But these are things that we work with. These are things that we practice.

If you want to learn more about these specific ideas and teachings, they come from the Satipatthana Sutta, which is one of many discourses or teachings that is attributed to the Buddha. The translation that I enjoy reading is a book called In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon by an author named Bhikkhu Bodhi. You can check that out if you want to read or learn more about these ideas. If you want to delve into them a little bit deeper, there's so much to explore. This is kind of the condensed, explained version for secular-minded or Western-minded people like me and probably like you, if you're listening to this.

Looking Ahead

I think I'd like to address some of the things discussed here in a little more detail in a future podcast episode. Specifically, I want to explore the concept of our perceptions and the way that we perceive. In Buddhism, there's a teaching of the five skandhas—these are the five things that make up the individual. In other words, you are who you are because of all these things. That understanding affects the way that I understand how I perceive things too. So I think that would be a really helpful topic, and maybe I'll make that the topic of the next podcast episode. You could kind of view this as part one and the next one as part two, and then we'll see where we go from there. I'll have that one ready for you next week.

Closing

That's all I have for this specific topic. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please feel free to share it with others, write a review, and give it a rating on iTunes.

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Thank you for listening, and until next time.

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