There is a lot of chat amongst Mindfulness coaches about the importance of teaching ethics. There is ethical clothing, ethical
farming etc. What about ethical Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is mental attention training but with a very profound goal: greater clarity, creativity, strength, resilience
decisiveness, happiness and joy. But here’s the crunch. Not just for marvellous Me, but for all living beings.
Undoubtedly, there is such a thing as right thought, right speech and right action. If in doubt, do my litmus test. Does it make
you or someone else uncomfortable? If you are squirming and re-playing a scene endlessly, wishing you’d acted differently,
then probably your words or actions need some investigation.
Human relationships are the messy, derelict no man’s land that provide the richness and the suffering. This is the ground of
Mindfulness.
A Mindfulness banner at demo might read: Stop the Stress, Stop the Pain, Stop the Suffering. Or Feel the Bliss of
Blamelessness.
Knee-jerk unconscious reactivity causes a great deal of our unnecessary human suffering. Pain is inevitable but suffering if
often optional.
But here’s where I differ from some Mindfulness coaches. The question is not: where should your moral compass be? It is
simply about being present, intimate with your own mind and body, which gives you access to wisdom, clarity and intuition to
act and speak wisely with conscious choice. Not every time. Of course. We are all human.
But awareness is a mirror to your behaviour. You become instantly aware that you are out of line, when your behaviour is
questionable, ungenerous, unkind to yourself, to others, to your community, to the environment. As you become more
mindful, you instinctively simplify not only the way you live, but your behaviour and actions. Moral choices are easier, clearer
and more decisive, more important.
As American philosopher Henry David Thoreau said, ‘Our life is frittered away by detail…simplify,
simplify.’
