Hey everyone,
It's Judy Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 507.
So let's keep talking about the Eightfold Path.
Let's see,
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 just be present in the muck and the mud and the glory and the grace of each moment.
And then the fourth noble truth is the Eightfold or Eight-Step Path to Liberation,
Which gets organized into three buckets,
Training,
Ethics,
And wisdom.
And starting with training,
That bucket has three steps,
Which are wise effort,
Wise mindfulness,
And wise concentration.
And wise effort is simply the effort required to practice,
And quantity and quality both matter.
In terms of quantity,
We want wise effort,
We want to think about wise effort as being diligent but neither over the top.
So mindfulness not as an extreme sport or as trial prep or as,
You know,
A two-day closing,
But also not negligent,
Meaning not practice and tell ourselves we are,
Okay?
And in terms of quality,
The effort wants to be joyful and loving effort.
So that's step one in the training bucket.
Step two in the training bucket is wise mindfulness,
Right?
And so,
I mean,
The teachings on all of this go back 2,
600 years to the beginnings of this tradition,
You know,
Asking and answering questions about wise mindfulness,
Like what is wise mindfulness and is it different from ordinary mindfulness and how do we practice?
So here is Bhikkhu Bodhi,
One of our great modern Western scholars and also 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.
The 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,
He calls it right mindfulness,
We're calling it 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.
So we could be done right now,
But I'll say a little bit more,
But that's pretty beautiful.
So there are many other wonderful,
Interesting,
And some even controversial explanations of wise mindfulness.
But before exploring those,
And we'll do that on some more wake up calls,
I just want to step back today and share a kind of a view that I have that comes from my own experience of how I think about or practice wise mindfulness.
And it's especially for legal professionals,
But maybe it's for everyone,
I don't know.
So I think of wise mindfulness as a set of practices of looking in and looking up.
So in formal practice,
Like breath and sound awareness,
Loving kindness,
Compassion,
Concentration,
We look in,
In the sense that we're in stillness on our own or in community like this one.
And we're examining our heart mind.
Or if I'm looking in as I'm practicing,
I also include contemplative movement practices like yoga and Qigong.
And 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,
And certainly for me,
Initially,
It's training to pay attention,
Right?
Using an anchor like the breath,
The body,
Sound.
When distraction happens and we notice,
We come back to the anchor.
And as we do this over and over,
The anchor begins to feel more powerful or even sacred,
Like a refuge where thinking and analyzing and ruminating and worry aren't present.
And also where we can always return.
Sharon Salzberg says it like this.
The heart of skillful mindfulness 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've 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.
So practices that train the heart-mind.
There are others as well as mindfulness.
For example,
With metta,
We learn to offer well-being to everyone,
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 to kunalam,
To heal the world.
And we're just here for a minute,
So therefore we can't possibly succeed.
And we also learn to tap into something larger than ourself.
Secular but interconnected and inclusive but also empty.
And while these practices are not technically mindfulness,
I'm going to 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.
I hope everyone is right now,
For example.
And I think that this is really important because looking in requires courage,
Right?
When we look in,
Or when I look in,
I notice reactivity and greed and hatred and confusion.
And I can only heal those when I feel safe.
It's really helpful to work with a teacher.
My teacher is here,
James.
He's been supporting me for a million years.
That actually could be true.
And,
You know,
What a teacher does is to bear loving witness to our practice and remind us not to judge and help us to lift up what we notice so that we ourselves can examine it with love.
So the formal practice of looking in,
It's not for the faint of heart,
As every single one of us probably knows.
And then in addition to formal mindfulness practices,
Wise mindfulness,
To the way that I think about it,
Also includes portable practices during which we're both looking in and looking up.
Right.
So throughout the day,
Moment by moment,
Portable practices like stop and wait and three second kindness and other things that I've talked about on the wake up call.
And we'll talk about again,
Invite us to look in.
Right.
See what's happening in this mind heart.
Right.
Ooh,
What's going on here?
Course correct,
If necessary.
In other words,
Course correct to to a wholesome state,
A skillful state,
And then look up to determine before we speak,
Before we act,
How to impact others and society,
How to influence others and society,
Even in an adversarial situation in a loving way.
That causes no harm.
Right.
So this is mindfulness,
The insight of mindfulness,
Looking up,
Giving us kind of some guardrails.
And Chiara Julingo,
Who is going to be joining us as a guest teacher in the 2026 Mindfulness in Life teacher training,
Put it this way once.
I love this.
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.
So I love that.
I'm thinking about mindfulness now as adult supervision.
And,
Yeah,
There's much more about wise mindfulness.
So keep talking about it.
But for now,
Let's,
Let's sit.
So finding your,
Your version of stillness.
Right here,
Right now,
Whatever that is.
Maybe you're sitting Maybe you're standing,
Maybe you're lying down.
Maybe you're in Tadasana or Savasana or some other pose.
Pose.
And first thing is just to,
To come to your anchor,
Your,
Your home base,
Your refuge.
Is that,
Is that the breath?
Or is that sound?
Choosing and then letting the whole mind body just settle and attend at that place of refuge.
And then just beginning to look in and see,
Well,
How am I right now?
What's happening right now?
How's my heart?
What's going on in the mind?
Are there lots of thoughts?
Is there emotion?
Is there anything I can let go of?
Can I let go of everything?
Can we just be loving witnesses to whatever is happening without getting entangled?
Can we let our awareness be that loving adult supervision in a room full of,
You know,
Unruly thoughts and overworked and over-worried hearts?
Let this,
Let this beautiful practice of mindfulness just provide the insight that can help us to understand and to be the loving humans that we already are.
