So What Is Zen Meditation and Mindfulness?

There is no doubt the subject of mindfulness and meditation has been catapulted into the global spotlight in recent years. The vast array of physical, emotional and even spiritual benefits have been widely subject to thousands of scientific studies across the globe. Dr Yvette Sheline, a professor of psychiatry behavioural research at the University of Pennsylvania states that mindfulness training is now offered in over six hundred companies globally and 79% of U.S medical schools, according to a new study. Here in the UK, the NHS website now lists mindfulness as a means of helping our mental wellbeing.

Research continues to show how a regular mindfulness and meditation practice can lower blood pressure, improve the symptoms of anxiety and depression, improve our attention and cognitive function, increase grey matter and its density in the brain, as well as increase our levels of compassion, empathy and kindness towards ourselves and others. But most significantly for many, it is shown to improve our overall quality of life and ultimately our happiness.

You can now sign up to part-take in ‘mindful anything’ it seems. From mindful writing to mindful yoga, mindful dog-walking to mindful cooking.  There are many podcasts, books and magazines dedicated to the subject.  Each one an invitation to explore what these ancient eastern practices are all about.

After reading that renowned Buddhist teacher and mindfulness expert Sharon Salzberg has a Google alert on the word mindfulness, I decided to sign up for my own. Every day I now receive daily alerts about the current news, research and scientific studies around mindfulness practices. It’s insightful to say the least. Mindfulness meditation seems to be impacting all areas of society, across all corners of the world.

But what is mindfulness and meditation really?

Mindfulness has been around for a very long time. The first evidence of such practices can be dated back 2500 years. The Zen tradition has roots in India at that time, and from there it travelled to China and onward to Japan. Mindfulness meditation is deeply rooted in Buddhist philosophy, but you do not need to be a Buddhist in order to practice the art of mindfulness. All practices come from the Zen tradition. The Japanese word “Zen” comes from the Sanskrit dhyana which means literally means meditation.

There was an 8th century Chinese Zen master called Keiho Shumitsu, who classified Zen (or meditation in general) into five types.  He described Type one as Bompu zen. Bompu Zen is a practice that was used to teach meditation purely for the benefit of the overall health and wellbeing of the practitioner, rather than any form of spiritual attainment.

So let’s look a bit more deeply into these practices.

The definition of mindfulness in the Oxford dictionary states.

1.      the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.

"their mindfulness of the wider cinematic tradition"

2. a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging  and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.

I think this is a pretty good summary of mindfulness, but what exactly does ‘focusing one’s awareness on the present moment’ truly mean?  Mindfulness can be described as ‘paying attention’ and this is a really good place to start. But when we look a little more deeply into the practice of mindfulness, how we pay attention is key.  

The Buddha taught four foundations of mindfulness – mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of sensations, mindfulness of the mind and mindfulness of mind objects. Now the important thing about these four foundations of mindfulness is that any one of them will do the job for us.

When we practice mindfulness we can have an internal focus, mindfulness of the body for example; or an external focus on an activity, something like the Japanese tea ceremony.

But mindfulness isn’t just about paying attention to how your first morning coffee tastes or how you are aware there is a dog barking in a nearby garden on a Sunday afternoon. That of course is part of what mindfulness is about, but it isn’t just about knowing you are hearing, seeing or experiencing something. And we could go as far as saying it isn’t even about observing your feelings.  Mindfulness is about doing all of these things in a particular way. Ultimately mindfulness is about being able to meet our experiences with greater awareness, but we need to do so with complete balance, no judgement and with a skilful gentleness towards ourselves. Mindfulness is the practice of paying greater attention to our lives in a way that creates a space for insight, insight about ourselves and others.

Let me ask you this, how often do you make space to complete regular daily tasks, without paying attention to other things?  For example, eat a meal whilst doing nothing but eating that meal?  Or are you someone that will sit down to enjoy your dinner, but with an array of other distractions around you? Your smart phone, the television, a magazine?  The truth is, we live in a society that has encouraged us to be distracted from almost everything we do. A digital society. Our minds are constantly flitting from one point of focus to the next in rapid succession repeatedly throughout our day.

Throughout life, we have trained in distracting ourselves, so going unconscious (not paying attention) feels like our natural state of being. Our minds, however, have two essential qualities we can always draw on to help be present and know what’s happening, moment by moment. To strengthen these natural qualities of mind, we can use both mindfulness and meditation.

So what is meditation?

Meditation consists of two broad types, the first is concentration. We introduce a focus that narrows the minds attention onto something such as a mantra, our breath or even an image. In Sanskrit this is known as shamatha, which translates to ‘calm abiding’. The second type is Insight, in this type of meditation practice there is a wider, more investigative focus, which can lead to greater clarity or insight into how things are. This practice is known as prajna.

The key skill we are cultivating in mindfulness and meditation practices is to teach our mind to stay where we want it to stay, instead of constantly flitting from one point focus (thoughts or feelings) to the next uncontrollably.  We can also begin to train the mind to pay more attention to daily tasks we perform, bringing a mindful focus to our life experiences.

One of the most common ways of helping us to initially develop this skill is to use a concentration meditation practice, we give our attention or awareness an anchor. This is something we can give the mind to focus on and keep coming back to when it starts to wander (which it naturally wants to do). In Zen, this may often be our breath, or a sensation within the body. We simply sit in a space of quiet contemplation and repeatedly bring our attention or awareness to this anchor, and each time we become aware that our mind has become distracted, we gently bring our attention back to the anchor once again.  We keep doing this once, twice, ten times, hundred times during the entire duration of our meditation. We just keep repeating this as a practice again and again and again. It's absolutely normal for the mind to get lost, because it’s habituated to escaping the present moment.

The more we learn to strengthen the skill of ‘paying attention’ during our meditation practices, over time, this skill enables us to start paying attention to the deeper aspects of our lives. If we are able to do so with the same balance, non-judgement and gentleness that we bring to our meditation cushion, we can also cultivate a deeper awareness of being more present with and aware of our feelings and emotions off of our meditation cushion. 

Salzberg says  “it may seem bizarre that something as clinical sounding as ‘paying attention’ is essential for creating the space in ourselves for real, sustainable happiness. But the difference between our suffering and our happiness all depends on what we do with our attention.”

It’s human nature to want to be distracted from uncomfortable, painful feelings such as boredom, restlessness, or bitterness. And now that we have such a multitude of ways to distract ourselves, from social media to television, it’s even more challenging to be awake and fully present.

Haven’t we all experienced a beautiful meal in a restaurant or witnessed a glorious sunset, but it’s suddenly lost it’s charm when we feel stressed or anxious? The quality of our lives is greatly dependant on the quality of our state of mind.  

So over time, our daily meditation practice can become the quiet and safe space we can use to begin to notice the more complex aspects of our humanness, our emotions and feelings. To help us do this, we can explore another one of the four pillars of mindfulness, mindfulness of sensations. As we sit, lay or walk, we can bring our awareness to any areas of the body that may feel tight, sore or uncomfortable. We simply cultivate the ability to allow our minds to rest gently on these bodily sensations. Over time, this enables us to have more embodiment and we begin to recognise that our minds and our bodies aren’t separate, they are instinctually linked.  The fields of science and medicine are also now beginning to explore how the body stores our emotional traumas or past experiences.

Dr Gabor Mate is a world renowned addiction and trauma expert. He catapulted into the global media over recent years due to his ‘Compassionate Inquiry’ work, a psychotherapeutic method developed by Mate that gently uncovers and releases layers of childhood trauma, constriction and suppressed emotion embedded in the body, which he believes is the root of illness and addiction. He taps into much of what we teach in Zen Meditation and Mindfulness. How only when we feel connected to our bodies, breath, the present moment and one another, can we truly begin to heal.  He has written many books on the subject, probably his most famous being ‘In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts’. I think it’s wonderful that key players in the medical world, like Mate are truly helping the world wake up.

Mindfulness and meditation are what help us gain better understanding of ourselves and who we truly are. It is what can permit us to no longer feel victims of our negative emotions or past experiences, instead, it allows us to understand our patterns, triggers and our intentions.  This helps us to gain a greater awareness of our emotions as they arise. Eventually, as they arise, we pivot, we continue to pay attention without being gripped or dragged off by them, and progressively our world continues to open up.

Our meditation practice doesn’t just have to be restricted to sitting on our meditation cushion either, the Buddha taught that all things can in fact be our meditation practice. Meditation doesn’t just equate to stillness, we can still bring this same awareness and anchored focus to movement, to literally anything we do.  In fact, on my eight week Zen Meditation and Mindfulness for Health and Wellbeing Courses, I encourage my students to take their practice off of the cushion as part of their day-to-day experience. We can cultivate the same mindful awareness when we walk the dog, when we clean our teeth, when we eat our lunch, when we queue in the supermarket. Each is an opportunity to become more connected to the experiences of our life, to notice, to sense and to see more clearly. 

Another key player in the media, who is a strong advocate of the neurological and physical benefits of a regular mindfulness and meditation practice is Dr D Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at Stamford University. He recently released a two and a half hour podcast where he discusses the key principles of meditation and breathwork to adjust perception to specific areas of the brain relating to interoception, exteroception and dissociation. As well as how meditation practices lead to long-term trait changes and neuroplascity with the brain, including changing our default mood, reducing baseline anxiety and depression, increasing our ability to focus, as well as enhancing relaxation, sleep and our overall happiness.  His podcast is called Huberman Lab, one that is consistently ranked in the top 10 podcasts on Spotify and has over 3.5 million subscribers on Youtube.

As the world has developed to be more and more interconnected in terms of global digital technology, it appears that sadly as a human race we are becoming more disconnected from ourselves. Forbes recently reported that between 2020 and 2023 global statistics show that depressive symptoms grew from a base of about 193 million people worldwide to 246 million, which is about 28% increase. Anxiety disorders grew from about 298 million people affected to 374 million, which is approximately a 25% increase.

Staggering statistics that show the world is crying out for inexpensive tools that develop a greater ability to navigate day-to-day challenges with more resilience, ease and flexibility. Practices and techniques that we can weave into our lives that give us the space to get to know ourselves deeply.  It isn’t about trying to cultivate a life that is different to the one we have, it’s about meeting the one we have with more acceptance, more gratitude and more openness. Even the uncomfortable or painful aspects of our lives can be met with less resistance and therefore less discomfort. Mindfulness is a process of getting smarter about what helps us and what hurts us. What de-escalates suffering and what escalates it. What increases our happiness and what obscures it. A mindfulness and meditation journey can be a journey that has slowly enables you to love yourself so much, that you don’t want to cause yourself to suffer anymore.   

If you are thinking of exploring a mindfulness meditation practice in order to see if it could benefit you and your life, I offer you this advice; The mindfulness path is a gradual and gentle one, I always tell my students to take one baby step at a time. Even if you feel as if you have taken four steps forward and two back, it doesn’t matter. We just need to allow it to be like that. We just need to have the courage to start from where we are. There are no good meditation days or bad meditation days, busy mind or quiet mind, each meditation we experience has the same value as the previous or the next.

You don’t need to be a Buddhist monk to experience all the profound and wonderful benefits that a regular meditation practice can bring, all you need is some time, a place to walk or sit, and a willingness to finally meet yourself exactly where you are, with nothing more than a gentle curiosity and a deep and open tenderness towards yourself.    

You can learn more about Elizabeth’s Zen Meditation and Mindfulness Courses here.