The Unified Mindfulness (aka UM) system, created by American meditation teacher Shinzen Young, is a complete meditation system. Unlike many other systems, which specify a single style of practice and a single meditation object (such as the breath), UM includes a wide variety of techniques, and is designed to help people find their own style of practice. In fact, the system does not even recommend or favor any particular object of focus. Instead, it offers many different ways to train the attention. To do this, UM does something revolutionary – it defines the precise set of skills that together comprise mindfulness (or mindful awareness). Once defined, the UM system offers many ways to build these skills in practice. It even goes so far as to categorize many of the most popular forms of meditation, in order to identify what skills are being developed and to include them in a larger framework of attention training practices, otherwise known as Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPS). The three skills, despite being called different things and taught differently in various traditions, tend to be developed, in varying degrees, within all forms of meditation. When present together, these three key capabilities are, as Shinzen likes to say, the “magic sauce” of mindfulness. And the more skillful the meditator, the more these skills are present. Teasing the skills out and defining them clearly, in my view, is an absolutely amazing accomplishment, because it both helps us understand why meditation works, and it informs our training efforts. Let’s introduce and explore these skills a bit.
Three Crucial Skills
To be clear, these are purely internal behaviors and not external skills. They pertain to how we process our sensory experience, so they are cognitive skills. The three skills are concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity.
Concentration Power – The ability to focus on what you consider to be relevant
Concentration is at once simple to understand yet deceptively difficult to do, and it may not be what you think. When many people think of concentration, they liken it to intense thought, such as when taking an important test or writing a paper. And while there is an element of concentration in those activities, the definition of concentration in UM refers to something much more specific. First, as defined in the UM system, concentration has nothing to do with thought. It refers to how well one can place their mind on something very specific, and leave it there, just observing. Surprisingly, we can’t control when our mind wanders away. It naturally wanders as soon as it identifies something more compelling. For example, we might stare at a pretty flower and attempt to concentrate on it, but we will soon be carried away by thoughts. We may end up in our to do list, or we may start ruminating about what we told a friend earlier today. What’s more, there are levels to concentration that you can’t understand until you start training your attention. Even when a person thinks they are maintaining steady focus, the mind is usually oscillating between a number of things at all times. Believe it or not, the untrained mind can rarely stay for more than a few seconds on a single “sensory event,” and it usually stays a much shorter time than that.
…concentration has nothing to do with thought.
The skill of concentration is the ability to keep the focus exactly where you place it, without being pulled away by thoughts or by other sensations. We teach ourselves the skill by watching the mind wander, and then by gently bringing the attention back to where we placed it. In time, the mind learns what we want it to do. In reality, the only tool we have for training is holding an intention, and then repeatedly making gentle corrections. With training, a meditator can eventually learn to have nearly absolute control over the attention, and the mind’s power coalesces around the object of focus, providing a deep, penetrating kind of lock on an object, sometimes called single-pointedness. This is a laser-sharp, effortless, unwavering focus. The productivity benefits from developing concentration can be huge and wide-ranging.
Sensory Clarity – The ability to detect and untangle the strands of your sensory experience
This refers to the ability to fully appreciate the input of our senses – the content of our experience. By paying very close attention, we discover more and more detail and richness in our sensory world, that we didn’t notice before. In time, all of our senses actually seem to come into much higher resolution. The world seems to bloom, becoming more vibrant and alive. At first it is noticed while meditating, but like all aspects of this practice, it spills into daily experience more and more through practice. This isn’t because our eyes, ears, nose, or bodies perceive more data (though it seems that way). It happens because we normally ignore much of the data we receive via the senses. We pay only enough attention to not fall off the curb, so to speak. Meditation teaches us to do better. We pay attention to finer and finer details, and in doing so our minds learn that the subtle details are important. The result is like turning the volume of your entire life up to eleven. The sights, sounds, smells, taste, body sensations, intuition, thoughts, feelings, and understanding – all of it goes through the roof. My description doesn’t do it any justice. It needs to be experienced to be understood.
Equanimity – The ability to allow sensory experience to come and go without push and pull
This skill sounds like what a project manager might call a “nice to have” as opposed to a requirement, but it is absolutely critical. Some people define equanimity as acceptance, but the problem with that definition is that it sounds like apathy or acceptance of events in your life. It’s not that at all. What equanimity points to is the acceptance of the body sensations, thoughts, sights, sounds, and feelings that you are experiencing at this instant. It is a vital component of mindfulness because we normally spend so much energy resisting what we don’t like and gravitating toward what we do like, that we miss most of our experience. We tighten around pain so much that we amplify it, and we are drawn so intently toward things that we desire that we don’t see clearly either. Equanimity is a cool dispassion toward our sensations and thought formations in real time, which allows us to fully experience and investigate the good along with the bad, while keeping a clear head and not being pulled into stories. Think of it as riding the waves of experience instead of getting swept away or pulled under.
These three core skills work together, support and reinforce each other. They are all required to achieve true mindful awareness, and the more you have, the more mindful you are.
Want to get started learning these? One great way is to check out the free Unified Mindfulness core training at https://unifiedmindfulness.com/core.
