Why is mindfulness important for individual lives? How does mindfulness help you behave more morally?
In Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright explains that mindfulness meditation is a practice from the Vipassana tradition of Theravada Buddhism. It involves observing your inner experience with greater objectivity.
Continue reading to learn how mindfulness benefits you as an individual.
Mindfulness Can Change Your Life
While you can practice observing thoughts, feelings, and much more, Wright argues that it’s at the level of feeling that we most need to become mindful. This is because feelings propel our thoughts and actions—not the other way around. Science supports the idea that mindfulness is important: For instance, research suggests that paying mindful attention to the feeling of the craving to smoke can be a more effective addiction treatment than medication or nicotine patches.
(Shortform note: While Wright emphasizes mindfulness of feelings, other evidence-based approaches suggest that working with thoughts is also important. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has proven particularly effective for smoking cessation by helping people identify and challenge the thoughts that maintain their addiction. For instance, CBT teaches smokers to examine beliefs like “smoking relieves my stress” or “I can’t cope without cigarettes” and replace these with more accurate, constructive thoughts. Such cognitive work can complement mindfulness practice: While mindfulness helps people observe and sit with their cravings, CBT provides tools to actively restructure the thinking patterns that accompany those cravings.)
Each time you mindfully observe a feeling that would typically drive you to action, you create space between that impulse and your response to it. Over time, you learn to step back from your feelings—to watch them pass by from a newfound vantage point alongside your stream of consciousness. Having stepped out of that stream, you’re less likely to get swept away by its contents. For example, you’ll be less likely to give in to a compulsion to scroll through social media instead of staying focused, or a craving to binge another show rather than getting a good night’s sleep.
In this way, practicing mindfulness teaches you to respond, rather than react, to whatever comes along. And as Wright says, this has many benefits: It can help you change your habits, help you see your life more clearly, promote your happiness, and make you more moral. We’ll detail each of these benefits below.
(Shortform note: In Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana explains why simply observing our minds creates freedom from reactivity. When we’re caught up in our usual patterns, he explains, we tend to identify completely with our thoughts and feelings—they seem to be us, rather than experiences we’re having. But when we observe them mindfully, we naturally start seeing them as passing events in our consciousness. Once we see thoughts and feelings as temporary experiences rather than parts of our identity, they lose their power to automatically drive our behavior. Thus, freedom from reactivity doesn’t come from forcing yourself to resist impulses—rather, the very act of observing them weakens their grip.)
Mindfulness for Habit Change
According to Wright, mindfulness is an effective way to change your habits. He says that mental modules are like muscles—they strengthen in response to repetition or weaken in response to disuse. So, to change your habits, reinforce or deplete modules by simply applying the above practice (step back from, observe, and let pass the feelings that drive an urge). If you want to reinforce a habit, mindfully choose to do so. Likewise, you can mindfully choose not to reinforce unconstructive modules.
For instance, say you mindfully observe and let pass an urge to get angry at someone who insults you. By doing so, you’ll weaken your “anger module” by teaching it that anger isn’t rewarding. At the same time, you’ll strengthen your “self-improvement” module by practicing mindfulness and gaining the reward of releasing an unproductive impulse.
Wright says this approach works better than relying on willpower because resisting impulses doesn’t allow them to pass. And if you’re constantly straining against all sorts of habitual urges, you’ll tire and break before long.
Mindfulness for Clarity, Happiness, and Morality
Wright also contends that mindfulness practice has three key benefits—clarity, happiness, and morality—that reinforce one another. He suggests they interact like this:
- As you practice mindfully observing your inner world, you’ll gain distance from your impulses and reactions, giving you a clearer view of yourself and the world around you.
- As clarity builds, you’ll naturally feel happier and more at ease. Becoming less reactive and seeing things clearly tends to feel good and calming.
- Increased happiness and ease, in turn, motivate you to continue practicing. Seeing that the practice is rewarding, you’ll want to stick to it. And the more you practice, the more clearly you’ll see things.
- More surprising, Wright says, is that a clearer view and the calm it brings also tend to make you behave more morally. He explains that scientists don’t quite know why this is, but expert meditators say it’s typically true.
And the virtuous cycle continues: Behaving morally makes us feel better about ourselves and our place in the world, which encourages more practice, which leads to even clearer perception, and so on. Wright sees this as a happy coincidence—a case where doing what’s good for you as an individual also makes you better for the world.
| Mindfulness, Personal Benefits, and Moral Growth While Wright suggests that becoming calmer and more clear-minded through meditation naturally leads to more ethical behavior, forming a virtuous cycle, Culadasa suggests in The Mind Illuminated that this link isn’t so automatic. In Wright’s view, morality emerges as a natural byproduct of simple mindfulness practice. He considers this more important than pursuing enlightenment—a state of complete freedom from suffering that’s typically the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice. Wright sees achieving enlightenment as an unrealistic goal for most individuals. In contrast, Culadasa says that moral development requires conscious cultivation. He holds that practitioners become more moral through the study and realization of specific Buddhist insights, like no-self, as well as through meditation. Further, he says that enlightenment is the proper aim of Buddhist practice. Which is true? Wright’s view aligns with some research suggesting that meditation increases prosocial behavior. However, Buddhist tradition emphasizes the need for explicit ethical training alongside meditation practice. For instance, some practitioners commit to living by the 5 precepts, which include not stealing, lying, or killing. Both perspectives have merit: while meditation might create favorable conditions for moral development, ethical training can help to guide and stabilize the insights you gain in meditation. |
