Mindfulness and Beingfulness - 2

How do we know that we are on the right path to reducing our suffering and increasing our well-being?

Mindfulness says we can achieve the right state of awareness by letting go of our judgments, entanglements and history. Over time, we can then experience the world and ourselves through a pure, unsullied mind. The means test is therefore our dispassionate and non-judgmental attention to our mind that just lets things be.

For beingfulness, the means test is that of truth – is our way of life true to our being? Knowing this truth is indeed difficult, but we need to at least try this means test if we are to find meaning, happiness and other sources of well-being in our life. Fortunately, there is considerable room for subjectivity - since we are the ones subjected to our lived experience, we have the capability to evaluate if something is true to us. To do so, we need to think in terms of our whole being, which goes beyond our body and mind. 

There is ample evidence that our whole being tells us if something promotes its overall well-being or not. While our body is on the front lines of this truth-telling, our energy, mental, social, environmental, moral and pure beings are not far behind. We need to develop the means for noticing, remembering and acting on this larger telling of the truth of our whole being. Beingfulness calls us to be truth-telling participants in our ways of living, while mindfulness calls us to be non-judgmental witnesses of our minds and experiences.     

What role does Time play in mindfulness and beingfulness?

At the heart of mindfulness is the present moment – it is claimed to be the only real portion of time we have access to, since the past is dusted and gone and the future is yet to be. Mindfulness is a powerful vision of living and being that promises to get rid of our regrets of the past, our anxiety about the future and our distractedness in the present. 

But no present is ever immaculate – it is always touched by a spark of the future and an afterglow of the past. Beingfulness acknowledges this blurring of temporal boundaries and seeks joyful meaning in our ways of living and being across time, whether it is to anticipate the future, make sense of the past or live in the current moment. Beingfulness also acknowledges that we are homo prospectus, looking always to the future, as well as homo historicus, looking to make sense of our past.

Most of all, we are storytellers of our lives beyond the present, a capability that gives us profound meaning and purpose. This meaning and purpose is the thread (Sanskrit sutra) on which the beads of mindfulness’s present moments are strung.

Finally, what stance does each approach take about being a change agent?

While mindfulness is alert to the present experience, it does not question the contextual foundations that led to the experience. In fact, it could potentially dull the senses to the inequities of the system in which the person is embedded.

In contrast, beingfulness is continually questioning and seeking to improve the alignment between our ways of life and our whole being. After all, our ways of life are products of the economic, social, cultural and other systems in which we are embedded. 

Beingfulness is therefore directly suited to questioning and addressing the systemic drivers of inequality, climate change, technology disruption and other sources of suffering in the world. Our whole being comprises not just the material dimension, but also the higher dimensions such as the intellectual, freedom-related, interpersonal, moral and spiritual that are often overlooked or subverted by these systems. To examine this alignment and try to improve it is to examine the foundations of our all-encompassing systems. 

If mindfulness is the balm that soothes the stressed-out worker, then beingfulness is the fly in the ointment that questions our whole system of work, relationships and community.