Mindfulness and Beingfulness - 1

“Beingfulness” may sound like just another buzzword for “mindfulness,” but the two concepts differ in significant ways. While both approaches ultimately aim to promote our well-being and reduce our suffering, they differ on their ends, ways, means, notions of time, change agency, religious origins, sense of self and the nature of ultimate reality. In fact, the two can be seen as a complementary set of ideas and practices that together can relieve suffering in today’s world.   

These days, the world is awash with mindfulness, thanks to the popularity of the religious practices of Buddhist teachers such as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. Another reason is the secular practices of Jon Kabat-Zinn and others who have de-emphasized the religious aspects of Buddhism to make them more acceptable to a wider audience. 

What is mindfulness? It is a state of awareness associated with our purposeful, open and non-judgmental attention to our experience of our world and our selves in the present moment, in order to enable happiness and other sources of well-being. In effect, mindfulness helps us orient to the present, i.e., be with what is. 

In contrast, beingfulness is the quality of experience associated with a way of life where we seek to anchor in our imperishable higher self or Being while engaging fully with the transient world of our lower self, in order to bring about meaning and other sources of well-being. In effect, beingfulness helps us orient to our whole life and its higher purpose, i.e., become what should be. 

While the purpose of both mindfulness and beingfulness is to reduce suffering and promote the well-being of the individual and other sentient creatures in the world, mindfulness focuses on one key resource in our mental arsenal: our ability to pay attention to what is going on around us, in particular to our experience of ourselves and our world in the moment. Once we become more aware of how we experience the world and ourselves in the moment, we will build the foundation for self-understanding, equanimity and happiness that promote well-being and reduce our suffering.

While beingfulness recognizes the importance of awareness for happiness, it goes one step farther by seeking meaning in our experiences. New research suggests that the direct pursuit of happiness actually leads to unhappier lives, so what we should really pursue is a meaningful life. Our life acquires meaning when it is part of something larger than us, and when it has a sense of purpose to it. But if this pursuit of meaning lacks joy, it could also lead to unhappiness, and a life filled with anxiety and ill health. Beingfulness therefore seeks to promote joy while creating meaning.

Here’s another difference. Mindfulness emphasizes that detachment from our mind-conditioned experience – our feelings, emotions, attitudes, thoughts, images and other mental aspects – will make us calm and impartial witnesses to the unremitting churning of our minds. Mindfulness says: “For my well-being, I should see myself as separate from my mind’s representation of my present-moment experience.”

Beingfulness seeks to attain well-being by extending its scope beyond our mind and our present-moment experience to our way of life itself, which includes both the internal world of our being as well as our externally observable world. In doing so, we must align our life to our whole being, which is much more than our body and our mind. It includes not just our lower self that is mainly about our separation from others but also our higher self that is about our interconnection to them. How do we align with our whole being? We seek to anchor in our higher self while engaging fully with the transient world of the lower self. Our higher self is our spirit or soul and has also been called our pure being (or Being). Beingfulness says: “For my well-being, I should try and anchor in my Being while engaging fully with this transient world.”