This is mindfulness

By Jason Lim

Recently, there has been a spateful of articles in The New York Times and other mainstream American press about how ''mindfulness" has become the latest spiritual, self-help de jour, coopted by trendy spiritual gurus and executive coaches alike to promise everything from personal happiness and wellbeing to better corporate decision-making and higher bottom-lines.

"Mindfulness has reached such a level of hipness that it is now suggested as a cure for essentially every ailment. Anxious? Broke? Sneezing? Definitely try meditating," quips Anna North writing in The New York Times about mindfulness being used to denote everything and anything.

Along similar vein, Tomas Rocha in The Atlantic quotes Dr. Willoughby Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior who works at the Brown University Medical School. Britton explains mindfulness in the context of the Theravadin Buddhist tradition: "mindfulness is about vipassana, a specific type of insight … into the three characteristics of experience."

These are also known as the three marks of existence: anicca, or impermanence; dukkha, or dissatisfaction; and anatta, or no-self. In this context, mindfulness is not about being able to stare comfortably at your computer for hours on end, or get ''in the zone" to climb the corporate ladder … it's about the often painstaking process of realizing and processing those three specific insights."

But what Britton doesn't mention is the "how" of mindfulness. If mindfulness is a process, then what are the steps to the process and how do you measure whether you are achieving the intended outcome of the process? By not being specific enough about the process of mindfulness ― except perhaps to teach that it can be achieved through meditation ― mindfulness traditionalists are just as guilty as mindfulness marketers in contributing to the vagueness of what mindfulness is.

Luckily, the Buddha was more process oriented than his students and had specifically laid out what mindfulness was in the context of his teaching about the nature of dependent origination.

Dependent origination is the essence of Buddha's teaching. It's more often encapsulated by the phrase, "This happens because of that. If this doesn't happen, then that doesn't happen." In another word, there is a chain of cause and effect for everything.

But he doesn't stop there. Since Buddha was mainly interested in how human beings could escape from suffering, he mapped out the twelve specific steps of dependent origination as continuous cycle of cause and effect that result in suffering. They can be summarized as follows:

In the beginning, there was ignorance. Ignorance in the Buddhist sense is not a lack of knowledge only but also a lack of recognition or appreciation of the deeper consequences of one's actions, speech, or thought. Ignorance then leads to an action. Action creates a self-reinforcing cognitive pattern of unconscious biases that leads to more of the same action.

For example, you take up smoking because you are ignorant of the harmful effects of smoking. This creates an addiction that leads you to smoke more. The next time you see a cigarette, your senses will perceive the cigarette. Once perception happens, your existing cognitive bias for the cigarette will automatically compel you to desire the cigarette.

This is the transition between the unconscious and the conscious. You will then act on your desire and smoke the cigarette. The act of smoking the cigarette will then create an even deeper addiction to smoking that will make it more difficult for you to resist the desire to smoke the next time around. This self-reinforcing cycle then will lead you to social rejection and deteriorating health, resulting in pain and death: in another word, suffering.

Mindfulness, in Buddhist terms, is the awareness that you have to cultivate in order to catch yourself between the transition from the unconscious to the conscious. Buddha teaches that once you shine an intentional, deliberate mental light on the automatic cognitive bias as it seeks to trigger desire, then desire extinguishes itself. In a way, it's a matter of training your mind to bring your unconscious more into the conscious realm so that you have granular control over how your unconscious cognitive reactions drive behavior.

For example, if you can catch yourself in the very moment that a whiff of a cigarette smoke triggers your own craving for the same, then that craving will wither before it becomes strong enough to trigger the destructive behavior of lighting up. However, if you don't catch yourself and light up, then that unconscious bias will strengthen and drive your future behavior even more powerfully.

Of course, there is a huge caveat. Just because you achieve this mindfulness doesn't mean that your unconscious bias for cigarettes goes away. Since that's the result of prior actions, it will still be there for a long time until it erodes away slowly. However, at least you won't be creating any additional layer of the unconscious bias.

Since that transition between the unconscious and the conscious is so subtle, your mind needs to be relaxed, calm, and sharply focused to catch the jump before it balloons into a full craving that's difficult to control. This is mindfulness.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.

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