Mindfulness, as I understand it, is to be mindful of what is important when all of those things are stripped away, as they will be throughout life. Eastern and animistic cultures the world over emphasize this, and our Western iteration of the great traditions couldn't be farther from what its original source material said.
Our culture is one that is driven, targeted, and satisfaction-based. Much of the content online is made for that audience. Its method is a tit-for-tat rubric that draws your attention to enjoyable feelings. Once you feel all good inside, the video conditions you to associate that feeling with all of the things you did, got, or accomplished (or are going to in the future).
There is no future.
You then take that attitude of competence out into your relationships so as to empower others. In short, it’s as if someone was holding the book upside down when they did the transcribing.
In the eastern traditions, the method is this: one uses the breath to stop the chatter, that is to say, the thinker of thoughts from getting in the way of what is in right front of them: life. The breath is not merely the anchor, the breath is it. The breath is the life that innervates life. It does not feed it though. Life does not feed life. Death feeds life.
Everything in the ground beneath your feet is everything else that didn't make it through the night. And when the thoughts of what I am going to do in the declarative are pushed aside, and you open your eyes or your heart (whichever comes first) to all the life in front of you… the ants and the breeze and the breath become benchmarks and barometers of life itself, which includes the life that you innervate, expressed through the bag of skin you occupy. Now that you are engaged with the present moment, what comes up next might instead be a question... something like this: What am I going to do now?
I suspect that is what the Yogis, Buddhists, and Vedics meant when they said “mindfulness.” That kind of mindfulness isn’t mindful of the stuff you’re going to get in the future. There is no future! There never was! No, in the present you see things as they are. Sometimes flowing, but also ebbing. Mostly ebbing. That’s what time does.
So then you are mindful of what you don't have control over. And in that way, time winnows your attachments to everything that was never going to last. And if you avail yourself to others in those times of ebbing, perhaps every one else can take a breath. Competence feeds on success. Life is not a success story for the individual, not for the ego.
I have heard it said that life indeed carries quite an unsettling prognosis. You see, it lingers on and on and then ultimately leads to death!
You avail yourself to others through a deep love of the life you innervate, not the body you occupy. The body fails. The body expires. Life remains. Love is still present at the same time the body fails. But how do you innervate it? Well, I would suggest one of the ways is in the demonstration of your ebbing, whatever that looks like. It’s why it innervates and inspires, but it is for the witnesses of your example to decide and interpret. That is in the nature of inspiration. (Does it make more sense now how death feeds life?)
It looks something like this: we innervate life through our individual actions, we feed and give way to life through our deaths, and the space in between is filled with a lifetime of choices to go left or right, action or inaction, to defend or endure what you thought was so important then and now and tomorrow. And that includes all of those truing failures along with the success stories. All the hills you were so willing to die on... and all the pieces of who you thought you were left behind on the battlefield of ideas.
See that’s your problem. You don’t know who I think I am… wait… who’s problem?
And it is through that process of softening the ego that the opportunities for true kindness arise, those which seek no attention.
The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them. (Alan Watts)
Effortless action, which arises mutually out of spontaneity, is what mindfulness is meant to espouse, and can only come from the individual getting out of his or her own way. "Meditation" that pulls the individual to the foreground expressly for the sake of individuation is the low-hanging fruit that misses the point the sages spelled out in their paradoxes and koans.
It was only when the student gave up fumbling over what the words meant and started looking instead at what they pointed to that the teacher finally said to her
This is only the beginning.
As concise a description of mindfulness as I’ve ever read. Keep writing, my friend!