Meditation advice: Keep your eyes on what you're cultivating

A few days ago I was listening to a talk by Vinny Ferraro, a San Francisco-based Insight meditation teacher. In the talk, Vinny reflects on the practice of mindfulness and its often-forgotten component of kindness. I found his words beautiful, inspiring, and relevant, not just to meditation, but to every aspect of life. Speaking about mindfulness, Vinny says:

This practice, it involves two components: kind awareness... And if you have to let one of them go, let it be awareness. I know enough JERKS that can meditate really good. I don’t really care how long you can sit for – I want to know how you treat the people in your life, I want to know how gentle you are when you fuck up. Just keep your eyes on what you’re cultivating...

What’s most important in mindfulness, as Vinny so beautifully reminds us here, is how we’re relating to our experience. It’s not about how concentrated we can become, or how long we’re able to sit without moving.

What truly matters in this practice is that we nurture qualities of the heart and mind that lead to more joy, happiness, compassion, and understanding.

When we practice mindfulness, we can ask ourselves in every moment, are we being kind? Are we being patient? Or are we simply cultivating more aversion, greed, or delusion? As Vinny reminds us, “Just keep your eyes on what you’re cultivating...”

And if you're wondering why we should be kind, Vinny has an answer for that as well. He shares what he calls an “amazing secret” that took him 35 years to figure out:

It turns out… being nice, feels really fucking cool. That’s like, super profound for me…

The next time you mess up, check to see how you’re relating to the experience, how you're treating yourself. Are you being kind, as you would to a friend? Or are you treating yourself harshly, with judgement and self-criticism? Think about experimenting with kindness toward yourself, even if for no other reason than the fact that it simply feels better than being judgemental.

Or, in the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

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If you're looking to get started with a meditation practice, check out my new online course, Mindfulness Made Easy! | A Practical Guide to Mindfulness.