Reflections on mindfulness

Picture by Michel Le Photographe from Morlaix Ballet Camp - when dancing together in the corps de ballet, you also need continued mindfulness of the body to ensure you move together as one team.

 It is the end of the year, and naturally a time to reflect, so I decided to take up blogging again, also to process how much happened this past year. Meanwhile, I still have a few slogans to go with the #lojongchallege, so let's see how far I will get. I certainly won't finish before the end of the year, but maybe I can make some headway in the first week, when things are still a bit more slow.

The next slogan on the list is slogan 47, which says "keep the three inseparable". With "the three", the slogan refers to body, speech, and mind, which are the three components of a person with which they can act in the world. According to Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche in his book Intelligent Heart, the idea is that we should keep these three--body, speech and mind--inseparable from mindfulness. It is an invitation to remain mindful of whatever actions we commit with our body, speech and mind. I think in the West, a kind of simplistic notion of mindfulness has emerged which is only about paying attention. In that notion very often mindfulness is also equated with doing things very slowly. Surely slowing down is good, especially for a busy person like me, but sometimes this is not practical. Here, instead, mindfulness refers to the ethical dimension: remain vigilant of the effects of your body, speech and mind. This sense of mindfulness is therefore not so much self-focused, and instead focuses on awareness of the impact of your actions on others. Funnily enough, I think this often can be quite liberating, because if you only focus on yourself, it can lead to so much hope and fear.

As I was running today, I was thinking about what I accomplished in the past year, and whether that was what I set out to do. I honestly could not really remember specific goals I set myself at the beginning of the year, short of possibly achieving promotion so associate professor. I sadly failed at that one. Nevertheless, I am actually quite happy at things I achieved, but mostly those things involve making an impact on those around me. I was happy with having been nominated for teacher of the year in our AI programme because of my concern for mental health of the students. I was happy that some of my students' papers were published, PhDs were finished, or almost-finished, students got jobs, and I was able to share my knowledge in a series of workshops for students in India. I think for me those mean more than titles or prestige, because they are the things that someone in the end may remember. Of course I still do my best to get grants, and to publish and all those things, but this is not the most important. The most important to me is being aware of the impact of all small actions of my body, speech and mind on others. For related ideas, see the preprint my colleagues and I recently put out in which we call for more kindness in academia: preprint