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The Buddhist Roots of Mindfulness
Lectures from the Buddhist Roots of Mindfulness Retreat, November 2015
In November, 2015, Mindfulness Northwest director and lead teacher Tim Burnett co-led a 7-day silent mindfulness retreat with our colleague Jonas Batt of Cascadia Mindfulness Institute on the topic of "Buddhist Roots of Mindfulness." Tim and Jonas explored the early Buddhist text called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutta in the Pali language is was recorded in).
In this text the Buddha is quoted as suggesting that mindfulness is a powerful practice towards freedom and ease when we focus our mindfulness attentively and in a way that's free of grasping and desire at each of four general areas:
- The body and the breath
- The tendency of mind to generate a positive/negative "valence" about all experience tending us toward a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral "feeling tone" (vedanā in Pali, no simple English equivalent)
- The contents of mind - thoughts and emotions - and understanding how one thing leads to another in our thinking/feeling mind
- The larger patterns of consciousness, belief, and habit-pattern that emerge from the mind's thinking and feeling and constellating a sense of self.
The Wikipedia articles about the Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra and these Four Foundations are helpful background information.