Mindfulness: Awareness Informed by an Embodied Ethic

Western psychology, psychotherapy and medicine have recently embraced practices aimed at cultivating a particular kind of awareness called mindfulness. Decontextualized from its Buddhist psychological, philosophical and religious origins, definitions of mindfulness in Western science have commonly emphasized phenomena of attention and cognition. Here, mindfulness is described as an act of embodied ethics, inherently woven into the fabric of the Buddhist epistemological and ethical system, a system aimed toward understanding experience and relief of suffering. The type of moment-to-moment awareness of perceptible experience, characterized by mindfulness, requires fostering attitudinal qualities of kindness, patience, tolerance, generosity, compassion and courage: otherwise one becomes lost in analysis, judgment and/or rumination. Together, these and similar benevolent attitudes constitute a system of ethical values fully congruent with Buddhist ethics. Achieving such attitudes during mindfulness practice is frequently associated with a felt sense of mental and physical wellbeing (i.e. embodiment), possible even under unpleasant circumstances. Thus, mindfulness, itself, is a practice to nurture development of openhearted ethical values and, relatedly, the understanding of experience. Within this framework, mindfulness can be defined as an act of unbiased, openhearted, equanimous experience of all perceptible events and processes as they unfold from moment to moment.